FtttG
User ID: 1175
As for transgenderism being biologically innate, the shooter admitted that he was tired of being trans, but felt that if he cut his hair short and detransitioned, he'd lose face in front of the (presumably numerous) people who'd earlier advised him that coming out as trans was probably a bad idea. This whole pointless massacre came about because of a misguided sunk-cost fallacy, an arrogant nutcase who was too proud to publicly admit he'd made an error as an adolescent (also known as "the period of your life when making mistakes is most understandable and forgivable").
I suppose next you'll tell me that the shooter's transgenderism really was biologically innate, but years of exposure to toxic Catholic propaganda left him confused and suffering from internalised transphobia. It's so easy to claim that trans is something fixed and unchangeable as long as you dismiss all the counter-examples that suggest it might not be.
Your link doesn't work.
We know what radicalized them and it wasn't trans related rhetoric, it was online psuedo religious terrorist slop.
I like the implication that the belief that everyone has a gender identity wholly distinct from their biological sex and knowable only to themselves isn't pseudo-religious. I will also point out that the shooter's uploads to YouTube seem to point to a mish-mash of conflicting motives. Put simply, por que no los dos? Why does the fact that the shooter was active on Nazi fora automatically exculpate the trans community? Why am I required to believe that the Nazi fora was what done the radicalisation, and participating in online trans communities was incidental? Why exactly is that the null hypothesis?
Isn't it possible that this profoundly disturbed young man may have been driven over the edge as a consequence of participating in multiple scary online communities in which violence is glamorised and encouraged? Perhaps if you participated in one community which was full of sentiments like "the Great Replacement is underway, we must make preemptive strikes against our ZOG oppressors" and also participated in a moderate community of peaceful trans people saying things like "violence is never the answer, peaceful protest and civil disobedience are the way forward", it might come out in the wash and you decide not to do anything stupid.
But if you spend half your time in an online community in which everyone's talking about the Great Replacement, and the other half in an online community in which everyone's saying that Trump is going to round up all the trans people and put them in concentration camps - it would be hardly surprising if you ended up with tunnel vision, convinced that violence is the only way out. (Horseshoe theory strikes again: "Israel Must Fall" and "6 Million Wasn't Enough" are the kinds of sentiments which would sound equally at home in the mouths of a neo-Nazi and a Free Palestine dickhead wearing a keffiyeh.)
but we would expect to see way more if there is, not .0001% (and that's the highest of estimates) of the population doing them
Why, exactly, would we expect to see that? I very much doubt that as many as 1% of devout Muslims have been involved in a terrorist attack, yet surely no one disputes that radical Islam is a pressing matter. Ever since Elliot Rodger eleven years ago I've heard a nonstop deluge of handwringing about incel terror attacks, but Wikipedia (who are clearly trying to make the concept sound as scary as possible) can only dredge up 12 incidents over the course of 40 years, one every three years. Meanwhile, we've now had three consecutive years in which there's been at least one violent crime spree by a trans person (or group of trans people) in which they explicitly cited their trans identity as a motivating factor in the crime. Granted, maybe we're in a modus ponens/modus tollens scenario where you think that too much attention is also being paid to Islamist terrorism or incel terrorism. But if you believe that either of these is a real issue, it follows that the question of whether trans radicalisation is a real issue is worth investigating.
There's also the obvious "better an ounce of prevention than a pound of cure" angle. Sure, maybe radical trans rhetoric hasn't yet caused a comparable number of violent deaths per capita when compared to Islamist terrorism or incel terrorism. But that doesn't mean that it won't. If a particular community is displaying obvious red flags for radicalisation or cult-like behaviour, surely it's better to proactively get ahead of the problem rather than sitting on our hands waiting for the members of that community to do something really heinous?
FtttG
1d ago
Girlfriend read the second draft and rated it either 6.5 or 7 out of 10. I took @jake up on his kind offer to read the second draft, which he's in the middle of as we speak. I'm using both of their feedback to compose a "polish" draft.
Last night I read Ted Chiang's short story/novelette "Liking What You See: A Documentary", whose premise is the invention of a reversible brain procedure which induces a condition called "calliagnosia" (or "calli" for short), which renders the subject unable to identify beauty in other people's faces. They are still able to identify faces and recognise familiar ones: they just have no special attraction to beautiful faces nor any special revulsion towards ugly faces or people with facial deformities, and are hence immune to the "halo effect". This invention is hailed as a powerful means of combatting "lookism", unwarranted societal discrimination against ugly people.
Among the handful of male Asian-American writers whose work I've read (Tony Tulathimutte, Adrian Tomine), sexual frustration and romantic rejection are recurrent themes. At the outset of the story, I was expecting it to be Chiang's mask-off moment where he permits himself an opportunity to air his grievances about being discriminated against for something outside of his capacity to change. But of course I'd underestimated him, and this story is just as rigorous and even-handed as anything else in his oeuvre. In the story, at least a dozen characters offer their opinions on the pros and cons of the technology, and it's to Chiang's credit that absolutely none of them come off like strawmen or stock characters being held up for our derision. It's also subtly prescient for 2002, describing a mobile phone on which you can make video calls and apply effects to your face to make it look like you're wearing makeup - he predicted Snapchat filters! Thought-provoking stuff, although not quite as good as some of my favourites (especially "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" and "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate").
FtttG
1d ago
[immediately does a Ctrl-F on his NaNoWriMo project looking for errant "themselves"]
FtttG
1d ago
I also recall seeing a scene from some CW Batman show where a cop berates another cop for misgendering the suspect they're interrogating and kicks him out of the interrogation room, followed by him telling the suspect something like how they might be on different sides, but that doesn't mean he has to be an asshole to him, or something.
Lmao thanks for the heads-up, I'm never going to watch this shit.
FtttG
1d ago
Of course it's understandable, and also why it's no coincidence that the demographic now most likely to come out as "trans men" is the same demographic which a generation ago would have been most likely to be diagnosed with anorexia. In many regards, the practical end result is identical.
School shooters are narcissistic megalomaniacs who crave, more than anything, personal infamy. They notice that there are few crimes in our society seen as more heinous than murdering children (made particularly evident by the ghoulish amount of attention the most recent school shooting received). They conclude that murdering a bunch of children is the easiest way to achieve personal infamy. They look to places where large numbers of children congregate, and unsurprisingly find that schools meet this description. The nearest school is probably the one they are currently attending, or the one they attended (if they are a recent graduate or still live in the town they grew up). I'm not sure anything more needs to be explained beyond that.
On the TV Tropes page for the movie JFK, it's noted that one reason a lot of people didn't accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission was because they simply couldn't fathom the idea of a frustrated, unemployable, socially awkward loser murdering someone for no better reason than wanting to be famous for something, even something heinous. "Modern audiences, however, more than a generation after the Columbine massacre when such self-aggrandizing slayings have become almost mundane, might be more accepting that Oswald could indeed have acted alone." (Incidentally, there's something uniquely chilling about that phrase "self-aggrandizing slayings".) If Lee Harvey Oswald was around today, he would've been a school shooter: if all you're after is fame for yourself, it's much easier to gun down a bunch of minimally protected developing youths than a politician with a Secret Service detail. It also says something about how heinous a crime murdering children is that, for doing so, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are almost as famous as the man who committed the only one of the two successful assassinations of a POTUS in the twentieth century. Innumerable books analysing their psychology? Check, check. An Oscar-winning movie about their exploits? Check (bonus points for going out of its way to attempt to whitewash and exculpate Oswald), check (and there are several other movies about both which didn't win Oscars). A video game about them? Check, check.
FtttG
1d ago
I will politely point out that "the people who forced those values on them" emphatically does not include "small children mercilessly gunned down who weren't even born at the time the shooters attended the schools in question".
Over the past two decades and change, a great deal of energy and public resources have been invested into trying to prevent young people (especially young male people) from being sucked into internet echo chambers and radicalised into violence by the content they find therein. Government bodies such as the UK's Prevent were set up for this explicit purpose. These efforts have mostly been focused on the potential for violent radicalisation by three distinct ideologies/communities: radical Islam, far-right white nationalism/neo-Nazism, and incel/blackpill*. The latter, in particular, is considered such a pressing societal issue that the prime minister of the UK wants every secondary school student to watch a miniseries (which, tellingly, he erroneously referred to as a "documentary") about a white teenager who gets radicalised by incel communities and stabs a female classmate to death - in spite of the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a single case of a UK citizen or resident murdering someone because of the incel worldview.
Spend enough time looking at trans activism and you can't fail to notice how much of the messaging carries a distinctly aggressive bent which revels in the glorification of violence. Trans activists routinely call on their supporters to assault, punch* or decapitate TERFs ("TERF" here meaning not "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" but "anyone who doesn't unquestioningly validate trans people's claimed identities", a category which doubtless included most of the worshippers in that church). There's a literal "holiday" called the "Trans Day of Vengeance". There are subreddits which encourage trans people to take up arms against their oppressors. (I mean seriously, look at this shit.) The impression I get is that, among the alphabet people, the trans community is really something of an outlier in this regard: if there's a parallel movement of gay men urging each other to take up arms to fight back against their homophobic oppressors, I'm not aware of it.
A few years ago, progressives had a term for this: stochastic terrorism. The idea is, if you flood information pathways with enough messaging which covertly encourages people to commit violence ("dog whistles" optional), sooner or later a dangerously unhinged person will encounter it, take it to heart, and attack the people you want to see attacked. But because it's impossible to predict where and when such a person will strike, you have enough plausible deniability to escape accusations of incitement to violence. Well, just so.
I don't know for a fact that this specific shooter (or the one in Nashville) was radicalised by exposure to extremist trans rhetoric, but it seems a reasonable assumption given the extremely online bent of many of his declarations (seriously, would "I'm the Woker Baby/Why So Queerious" even mean anything to someone who doesn't spend at least four hours of every day staring at a screen?). Every trans mass shooter to date has explicitly couched their crimes in political identitarian terms.
Suffice it to say that I believe the question of whether participation in radical trans communities is a risk factor for violent radicalisation is one which warrants serious consideration and ought not to be just dismissed out of hand. I'm not even being funny, but one of the core tenets of gender ideology ("anyone who doesn't see you the way you wish to be seen is oppressing you") seems practically tailor-made to promote the narcissism and megalomania common to all school shooters (likewise a secondary tenet, "any lesbian who doesn't want to fuck you is a hateful bigot"). There's the even more obvious point that female people taking testosterone causes increased aggression which might make FtMs more prone to violence.
*Also worth mentioning that, if participating in incel communities is a red flag for violent radicalisation, many trans people fit the bill by default. At this point I find the existence of an incel-to-trans pipeline flat out impossible to deny (something a handful of posters on /r/MTF are self-aware enough to recognise). Spend some time in that sub, take a shot every time you see a post which boils down to "why won't cis lesbians fuck me even though I identify as a woman?" and you'll have alcohol poisoning before the day is out (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Incel and MtF online spaces are alike in that they largely consist of male people who are attracted to female people complaining about being sexually frustrated. See also the rivers of digital ink spilled about the so-called "cotton ceiling".
**This one was actually said by a man who's spent more than half of his life in prison for assorted violent crimes, including false imprisonment, torture and attempted murder. Suffice it to say that, when he encouraged people to assault others, I do not believe he was speaking figuratively or engaging in harmless hyperbole.
FtttG
1d ago
Do you have even the slightest shred of evidence to suggest that a disproportionate number of school shootings take place at private religious schools by students who attended private religious schools?
FtttG
1d ago
It's actually quite remarkable how much less sensitive than Jews Christians are to this kind of thing.
I speculate it might be down to the size of the two groups. There must be at least an order of magnitude more Catholics in the US than Jews. It's entirely possible that every Jew in America is no more than three degrees of separation away from the couple gunned down outside the embassy, whereas in this case there are probably many American Catholics who are six degrees of separation removed from the children shot in the church.
FtttG
2d ago
One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million.
Who is it?
According to the Not the Bee, the shooter had also emblazoned "Israel Must Fall" and "6 Million Wasn't Enough" on their firearm.
Obama-Trump transition of power.
You mean the transition of power where, upon Trump's election, Obama immediately directed the federal government to investigate bullshit claims that Trump was secretly a Russian asset, with the explicit goal of having him impeached on that basis? "We go high", indeed.
FtttG
2d ago
thank you for accepting the claim
I don't accept the claim.
The genocide in Gaza would be impossible for the Israelis to carry out without extensive western support and American taxpayer dollars.
I don't believe so. Per @ymeskhout, formerly of these parts:
Yes, the $3.8 billion sent to Israel every year is a lot of money, but it’s nothing compared America’s $850 billion military budget. And Israel on its own remains an extremely wealthy country that enthusiastically prioritizes its military capabilities, with a $24 billion budget and an advanced domestic industry that is a major weapons exporter. If you really believe Israel is committing a genocide, vanishing all American financial assistance would barely leave dent in their efforts.
From another article:
Israel has been receiving around $3.8 billion per year in military aid from the US since the 2000s, constituting roughly 15% of Israeli military funding.
US military aid has since increased to $17.9 billion total in emergency military aid since Hamas initiated the current war. Israel’s military budget on its own has surged 65% to $46.5 billion in 2024. This now constitutes 8.8% of Israel’s GDP, the second highest in the world, right after Ukraine’s current 34.5% (for context the US spends 3.4%). This remains a significant decline from 1975, when Israel was willing to allocate a record 30% of its GDP towards its military.
Obviously, America’s military aid to Israel is significant. But let’s say Uncommitted got what they wanted and the US stopped all aid and imposed a total arms embargo on Israel. Given the significant chunk involved, we should reasonably expect Israel’s military capabilities to be hobbled. At least, temporarily.
The problem that few protesters seem to consider is that while Israel started out scrimping and scrounging for whatever military equipment they could get their hands on (including Soviet hand-me-downs via Czechoslovakia in their 1948 independence war), it now has a robust and healthy military industry that is both iconic and prolific. Israel designs and manufactures a wide range of its own advanced military equipment, including the Uzi submachine gun, the IMI Galil rifle, the Merkava main battle tank, and precision-guided munitions like the Iron Sting 120mm mortar and the SPICE family of guided bombs.
Major manufacturing sites include Israel Military Industries (IMI) for small arms and ammunition, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for precision-guided bombs and missiles, and Elbit Systems in Haifa. Elbit recently secured contracts to supply thousands of heavy air munitions and establish new raw materials plants, with the explicit aim of reaching “full independence” in bomb and munitions manufacturing.
It is particularly relevant to note that Israel has already been subjected to arms embargoes several times before: France in 1967, the US in 1971, and the UK in 1973. Israel’s world-class military industry was developed in response, and it would not have reached its level of sophistication were it not for the embargoes. Now, this tiny country barely the size of New Jersey, is the 8th largest weapons exporter in the world, comprising 3.1% of global arms exports.
What the US gives that Israel cannot readily make itself are advanced fighter jets (F-15, F-35), and certain precision ordinance (JDAM kits, GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs). Were that supply source suddenly vanish, there is no universe where the IDF just shrugs and says “ah we don’t have GBUs, let’s pack it up and go home guys.”
Making things go boom is very easy. It takes little technical sophistication to drop an unguided bomb from a plane when gravity does all the work. The eye-watering invoices of modern munitions come from the integration of guidance systems, sensors, and networked targeting computers — features that reduce collateral damage but are harder to replace quickly if US supplies are cut off.
If you’re genuinely and earnestly concerned about the civilian death toll in Gaza, there is a serious risk that an arms embargo would make that worse! Both by further entrenching Israel’s domestic military industry, or by encouraging a reduced reliance on precision munitions.
There's also the fact that, as noted by many commentators, Israel has nukes. If they wanted to exterminate the entire population of Gaza, they could have just dropped a nuke on it in October 2023 and called it a day, no US military aid required.
Moving on:
I do not think that you have a very good picture of the average left-winger's thought process
We were talking about the liberal Overton window, not the left-wing one. Some people use the two terms interchangeably, but I am not one of them. I will reiterate that "blowing up brown people in the Middle East" is a policy proposal that does very much reside within the liberal Overton window in a way that "wiping out large chunks of American citizenry, or people residing within the US" does not.
for white settlers
45% of Israeli citizens are Mizrahi Jews, while 20% are Arabs. Even if your use of the scary term "white settlers" was meant to gussy up your accusation, it's just false on its face. The majority of Israelis are not "white" by any conventional definition of the term.
FtttG
3d ago
Yes, that was my takeaway from the OP as well. My question is who might Fuentes endorse instead of Vance?
FtttG
3d ago
I suppose I should have said a credible candidate seeking the Republican nomination.
FtttG
3d ago
Now at the tender age of 27, Fuentes won't be eligible to run in 2028, so when you say he's the most important person in the Republican camp to watch (after Trump), I take it to mean you think his endorsement of a politician could swing the primaries. Do you have anyone in mind? That is to say, a credible candidate (perhaps a sitting governor, senator or congressman) who Fuentes might plausibly endorse?
FtttG
3d ago
I think it's fair to say that @netstack was referring to "killing some percentage of the population that resides within one's own country". Even if one accepts your claim that the Palestinians in Palestine are being "genocided", they are neither American citizens nor resident within the US.
FtttG
3d ago
FtttG
3d ago
The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?"
It sounds like you had a stronger emotional reaction to the video than to the AI-generated image.
In my opinion, the belief that "everyone has a gender identity wholly distinct from their biological sex, knowable only to themselves and which can never be questioned by an outside observer" is an unfalsifiable dualist belief, functionally indistinguishable from the belief in an immaterial soul.
Yes, exactly. Which flatly contradicts your previous ironclad confidence that it was his participation in Nazi fora specifically which drove him to violence. But I'm glad we now agree on this point.
I agree with you: people shouldn't be blamed for things they didn't do. They certainly shouldn't experience guilt-by-association just because they belong to the same immutable identity category as someone else who did a bad thing. Absolutely no argument here. I have friends and acquaintances who are trans, and I don't want to see them being stigmatised just because some people who happen to identify the same way they do committed horrific crimes halfway across the planet.
The point I was trying to make in my previous comment wasn't that "being trans should be treated as a red flag for potential violent behaviour" but rather that "radical trans rhetoric may be a potentially concerning memeplex". I don't think it's controversial to assert that people are more likely to commit violence in the name of certain memeplexes than others. If you're looking at a neo-Nazi skinhead and a dude whose entire degree of political engagement boils down to "legalise weed 4/20", you don't get any prizes for guessing which of the two is more likely to go out and beat up a Pakistani teenager minding his own business. Most Muslims are peaceful people, and yet the number of suicide bombers per capita is vastly higher among Muslims than among, say, Buddhists. We could debate until the cows come home why this is: are violent people attracted to ideologies/memeplexes/communities in which violence is encouraged? Most religious people tend to follow the same religion as at least one of their parents, so when a religious person commits an act of violence, it's impossible for us to control for whether it was the religion that "caused" them to do it, or if they had a genetic predisposition towards violence. But in spite of this, nobody thinks it's controversial to assert that certain memeplexes/ideologies/communities are more closely associated with violence than others. If you had a teenaged son and he started spending a lot of time on Stormfront, that would be cause for concern in a way it wouldn't if he started spending a lot of time on a D&D forum. This is true in spite of the fact that I am fairly confident that the overwhelming majority of people who post on Stormfront have never committed a violent crime.
The whole point of my previous comment was that the question "is the radical trans memeplex a potential red flag for violence, in the same way that certain other memeplexes are?" is a question which is worth investigating. I'm emphatically not asserting that it is. I'm emphatically not stating that if your teenaged son starts spending a lot of time in trans communities, that's exactly as concerning as it would be if he started spending a lot of time on Stormfront. I'm emphatically not stating that if your teenaged son came out as trans, you should be concerned about him potentially committing a violent act in the near future, in the same way you would if he started hanging around with skinheads.
But I am saying that there is a particular strain of trans activism which, to an outside observer, looks really scary and seems to actively revel in the glorification of violence, particularly gearing up with assault rifles and attacking unbelievers (and specifically, unbelieving female people). In the past three years, we've seen two acts of indiscriminate Columbine-style violence committed by perpetrators who may well have been active in this community, along with a crime spree committed by people (the Zizians) who were certainly active within it. The law of parsimony demands that we investigate whether or not these perpetrators' participation in these radical communities may have contributed to their decision to commit these horrendous crimes, in the same way it would if there were three unrelated crimes committed over the course of three years by, say, the members of a new religious community. I don't think it's good enough to just throw our hands up in defeat and say "whatever, there will always be mentally ill people and these things are impossible to predict". That, to me, amounts to putting one's head in the sand, intentionally overlooking potentially relevant patterns just because they make us uncomfortable.
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