FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
2d ago
Meta: feature request
Is there a quick and easy way to type an em-dash here? If there isn't, might I suggest implementing Google Docs' solution, wherein two consecutive hyphens will produce an em-dash?
FtttG
2d ago
About to start Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, having previously enjoyed adored his novel Never Let Me Go.
In between reading full-length books I've been reading some of the Father Brown stories. So far I've read "The Blue Cross", "The Secret Garden" and "The Queer Feet". They're okay.
Sounds like my cup of tea, wishlisted.
Last night I gave Prey from 2017 a try, playing it for a few hours. It wasn't bad, but I agree with some people who argued it's so beholden to its immediate influences (System Shock 2 and BioShock) that it maybe doesn't really have much of an identity of its own. I like immersive sims, but the very fact of their relative open-endedness sometimes makes me feel a bit overwhelmed: I feel anxious that I'm playing them "wrong" unless I meticulously search every single drawer and container.
Just to emphasise that school shootings were very much a "thing" prior to Columbine and not limited to the US:
- Dunblane massacre (Scotland, 1996; 18 killed incl. perpetrator)
- Aarhus University shooting (Denmark, 1994; 3 killed incl. perpetrator)
- Eppstein (Germany, 1983; 6 killed incl. perpetrator)
- Dormers Wells (England, 1987; 3 killed)
- Sofia University (Bulgaria, 1974; 8 killed)
There were plenty I omitted because of low body counts, and the majority in that article took place post-Columbine (it's plausible that some, but far from all, were copycat massacres directly inspired by Columbine itself). I found your claim that "nobody" commits school shootings outside of the US particularly galling in light of the Dunblane massacre, easily one of the most notorious British crimes of the twentieth century (ranking up there with Rosemary & Fred West, Ian Brady & Myra Hindley, and the Yorkshire Ripper) and which was the direct impetus for sweeping gun legislation.
No one disputes that the Columbine massacre is the most infamous school shooting since the concept came into existence (in spite of its paltry body count, less than half of the Virginia Tech shooting), that it inspired numerous copycat crimes, or that it created a "script" for such massacres that many copycats have been following (consciously or unconsciously) to this day. But the concept of a school shooting did exist prior to Columbine. As to the question of their relative frequency within the US vs. without, they're so rare in absolute terms that the difference between the US and other industrialised regions is nowhere near as dramatic as the availability heuristic would have you believe. For example, there have only been two school shootings in the US so far this year, from a population of 330m, which gives us a per capita rate of 0.00061/100k. The total population of Europe is more than double the population of the US at 751 million. With exactly the same rate of school shootings in the US as in Europe, we would expect 5 school shootings to take place in Europe this year. Instead, there have been two school shootings with a combined body count of 21, along with a third in which one person was wounded but no one killed (and a fourth which Wikipedia classifies as a school shooting but really looks more like a political assassination which incidentally happened to take place at a school). Only counting the first two incidents, Europe's school shooting rate this year is 0.000266/100k; including the third, 0.000399/100k. Ergo, the US's school shooting is anywhere from 1.5 to 2.3 times more frequent than Europe's: a significant difference, but the idea that school shootings are some crazy phenomenon completely unique to the US and unheard of elsewhere is not borne out by the evidence.
FtttG
3d ago
Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot.
As Brendan O'Neill pointed out, Robinson was 200 yards from Kirk. It's profoundly unlikely he was able to hear what Kirk was saying.
FtttG
4d ago
Occasionally I'll see a comedy bit which I don't agree with, but which is executed so well I can't help but crack a smile: https://instagram.com/reel/DM0ZSGfu6dk/
FtttG
4d ago
My colleague voiced the false flag theory a couple of hours ago. He jumped to the same conclusion after Crooks shot Trump.
FtttG
4d ago
On Substack, someone shared a clip where Charlie Kirk is on a campus and a person approaches him asking him in a rather hostile tone of voice why he's there, and claims that his presence on the campus constitutes "emotional violence".
People often point out when woke people use hyperbolic framings like this, in order to mock them for their perceived emotional fragility: "poor little snowflake, you think words are violence, boo hoo!" I don't think that at all. After all, if you've collapsed the distinction between words and violence (never mind words: if you've declared that a person being physically present on a location without opening his mouth can be an act of "violence"), it logically implies that you are entitled to respond with violence. They've reinvented the concept of fighting words using the idiom of therapy-speak. This is a particularly frightening component of the woke worldview which, in my view, does not get nearly enough attention.
All of this is doubly ironic, of course, because woke people for the most part ridicule the idea of needing a firearm for home defense and mock conservatives who think they're entitled to shoot anyone who trespasses on their property.
My aunt had a friend with a very high-pitched voice, to the point that, when he answered their landline phone, people would often mistakenly think his wife had answered the phone. She mentioned he was planning to undergo this procedure, although I don't know how it panned out for him.
FtttG
4d ago
Mid-2010s Scott would have written up a classic post called like "Beware Proxy Metrics" or some such.
I've many disagreements with trans activists but I really don't think this is like a hormones cause radicalization thing.
Nor do I. I'm confident the radicalisation pathway looks a lot more like "spending a lot of time in online echo chambers in which violent 'resistance' is seen as an urgent necessity" as opposed to anything to do with medical transition itself. That being said, testosterone does increase aggression - I don't know if we know for a fact that the shooter in Nashville had ever taken T, but given the demographic it seems likely, and maybe in the counterfactual world where she hadn't taken it, she doesn't go through with the shooting.
FtttG
5d ago
Sure, the people who get radicalised by online Trantifa fora are a heavily selected bunch, much like the lonely frustrated young men who get radicalised by incel fora or far-right fora. I don't recall ever even suggesting that the pipeline looks like "normal person -> trans -> assassination/mass shooting". While the proportion of people identifying as trans has shot up in recent decades, I'm pretty sure virtually everyone doing so is still "weird" on one axis or another. (I'm not including the NBs here.)
Yeah, that's the argument I've made whenever the topic comes up: defendants can use any ridiculous defense they want to. Pretty much everyone agrees that serving as your own defense attorney or taking the stand as a defendant are spectacularly bad ideas, but no one can actually stop you from doing either if you're really determined to. Multiple defendants have used the "Matrix defense": I don't believe anyone has ever used it and been acquitted (the closest they came was a ruling of not guilty by reason of insanity), but if someone really wants to, why stop them?
FtttG
5d ago
I cannot express an opinion on whether or not anyone has been acquitted using the "gay panic" defense, as I have simply haven't investigated it. I have investigated the question of whether anyone accused of murder has been acquitted after using the "trans panic" defense, and have been unable to find even a single example of a case meeting this description. In all of the examples cited on the Wikipedia page, all of the people who used the "trans panic" defense were still convicted. I have searched high and low, and I'm open to correction, but until someone can show me a specific case in which
- a trans person was murdered
- the perpetrator admitted to having killed the victim, but defended themselves by claiming it was a panicked reaction upon learning that the victim was trans
- a jury accepted this defense and acquitted the perpetrator
then I think the only reasonable response is to assume that this is just a myth ginned up from whole cloth.
It's also interesting that the Wikipedia article includes paragraph after paragraph about the various jurisdictions in which the gay and/or trans panic defense is formally banned. How strange to put so much legislative legwork into banning a criminal defense which seems to have a 0% success rate.
But we all know that if James Woods had posed holding an effigy of the severed head of Hillary Clinton he'd be accused of misogyny, inciting violence, stochastic terrorism etc.
Update: this was written before the shooter had been arrested. It now appears he isn't trans. Mea culpa.
This morning I was talking about the Iryna Zarutska case with my girlfriend over breakfast (she knows a lot of Ukrainians so has heard a great deal about it). We were talking about the United States's dysfunctional attitude towards mental illness, and I recycled a lot of Freddie deBoer's points about how deinstitutionalisation has gone too far, to the point that it's now nigh-impossible to get someone involuntarily committed even if they obviously pose a grave danger to themselves and/or others. A common talking point in this conversation is that "mentally ill people aren't dangerous - in fact, they're far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators" which, though likely true, is rather meaningless: such a small number of people commit violent crimes that the observation "X are more likely to be victims than perpetrators" is true of essentially every demographic, and there's persuasive evidence that, ceteris paribus, mentally ill people are more likely to commit violent crimes than sane people.
I'm now revisiting a related thought I had after the Annunciation Catholic shooting. For years, every trans rights activist has assured me that transgender people are one of the most vulnerable, marginalised groups in the world. When I ask what exactly about them makes them vulnerable or marginalised, trans rights activists routinely cite the allegedly high rate at which trans people are murdered (some going so far as to call it a "genocide"), along with claiming that the perpetrators of these murders often go free after citing the "trans panic" defense in their murder trials (I've been looking for evidence of this for years and have not yet been able to identify a single case in which an accused murderer made this defense and was acquitted - as far as I can tell, the entire claim was simply invented from whole cloth). Digging into the "trans people more likely to be murdered" claim invariably demonstrates that it's baseless: in the US, cis men are more likely to be murdered than trans-identified males, and cis women are more likely to be murdered than trans-identified females. As with murders in general, most of the murder victims were killed by someone close to them (in at least one case last year, by a fellow trans person; in another from this year, by a group of LGBT people), and of those that weren't, most were prostitutes killed by a punter. As tragic and regrettable as this is, prostitution is a high-risk endeavour for anyone who practises it, trans and cis alike. Any claims of an epidemic of transphobic hate crimes sweeping the nation are, as far as I can tell, baseless.
If indeed the person who killed Charlie Kirk is a trans person (who was perhaps motivated to assassinate Kirk because of Kirk's transphobic views or whatever such nonsense), by my count that will make 3 premeditated murders committed by trans people in the US so far this year. Before the end of the year, will it be possible that the total number of cis people murdered by trans people in the US will exceed the converse? It seems an eminent possibility. Will we then be permitted to discuss openly the role that trans identification seems to play in political radicalisation?
FtttG
5d ago
Aguilar provided a video of the soldiers shooting into the crowd, then cheering and saying “I think you hit one”. Did you watch it?
Yes. In the segment of the video I watched (in which one of the soldiers says "I think you hit one"), no civilians are visible on camera when the soldiers begin firing. When one of them says "I think you hit one", it isn't even clear what the "one" he's referring to is - certainly the soldier saying this doesn't accompany footage of a civilian being shot. I find this very suspicious. Do you mean to tell me that, of the 2,000+ Palestinian civilians allegedly shot dead at these aid distribution sites, not a single one of these was captured on video? Not by any of the soldiers wearing bodycams, or by any of the Palestinian civilians who presumably have smartphones on their persons?
Of course, but I'm wondering how the two interact. If you've personally witnessed someone being killed right in front of you, does it make you less upset when you watch a violent film, or more (i.e. does it "trigger" you, in the literal, non-ironic sense of the term)? If you've watched countless hours of high-definition footage of people really being killed, would you find it less upsetting to see the real thing right before your eyes, or more?
FtttG
5d ago
I think I remember reading somewhere that, when Oliver Stone's film JFK came out, for many audiences it was the first time they'd seen the Zapruder film which shows the moment Kennedy was shot, and there were audible gasps of horror during screenings. It's hard to imagine a similar reaction nowadays.
It's interesting, because per capita murder rates have steeply declined in the last hundred years. In 1924, the USA's homicide rate was 10.8/100k; in 2023, it was 5.8/100k. On its face, this suggests that the number of people who personally witness a murder in a given calendar year has roughly halved, and likewise that the number of people who would truthfully answer in the affirmative to the question "in your lifetime, have you personally witnessed someone being murdered?" has fallen precipitously. If you expand the question to "personally witnessed someone being killed", the comparison would be even more striking given the fall in military enlistment over the period (in 1980, 18% of American adults were veterans, compared to 6% in 2022).
And yet over the same period, the number of people who have watched graphic, high-definition footage of someone being killed has shot up, when as little as two generations ago the number of people who could accurately claim to have seen footage of this type would have been a rounding error.
This invites the question - are current generations more desensitised to violence than previous generations, or less?
It just looks wrong, like an amputee.
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