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Notes -
UK, are you OK?
Labour councillor calls for people to 'cut the throats' of 'Nazis and fascists'
Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’
Probably anyone reading this is familiar with the story so far: three gradeschool children in Southport were knifed to death, and ten others injured, on July 29th at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club. The alleged perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana, is reportedly the son of Rwandan immigrants and was 17 years old at the time of the incident, but has apparently since passed his 18th birthday. The events, allegedly in part as the result of some false reporting concerning Axel's identity, led to a number of protests, which led to a number of counterprotests.
Why would you counterprotest a protest against the knifing of schoolgirls? Well, apparently the original protests were racist. It's pretty important to not be racist. Sufficiently important, I suppose, that people would rather talk about that, than about the dead schoolchildren who, but for recent immigration from Africa, would likely still be alive. Not that Axel is an immigrant, of course. He was born on the magic soil of the UK, so it's apparently racist to notice that his parents weren't. I saw one article suggesting he might be autistic? Good sources are hard to find.
That brings us to the current events! Labour councillor Ricky Jones apparently found some inspiration in Axel's extracurricular activities, as he is very clearly articulating additional knife violence as the proper response to people protesting the murder of little girls. I actually had a surprisingly difficult time finding the original video; most of the articles throwing around the word "alleged" did not judge me fit to judge for myself. I assume Ricky was born tone deaf because throat cutting seems like an especially poor choice of words given the circumstances--though I guess I don't know for certain that Axel managed any literal throat cutting in the process of (EDIT: ALLEGEDLY) butchering schoolchildren. The UK does not have any particularly meaningful or toothy Free Speech legislation, either, though in this particular case I can imagine Mr. Jones facing consequences even here in the United States. Remind me, is it still okay to call for the punching of U.S. Nazis? Was it ever? I seem to have lost track.
Axel's knifework is not being treated as a terrorist attack (yet?), but here's where things get weird.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:
Taylor Swift shows in Vienna canceled over alleged planned terrorist attack
Suspects in foiled attack on Taylor Swift shows were inspired by Islamic State group, officials say
Will we hear more about Axel's motivations? I suppose Taylor Swift is just so famous that at this point any plot to kill large numbers of people would, statistically, run into Taylor Swift events eventually. But now I'm wondering if Axel was just, you know, reading the same weird terrorist handbook as the Austrian terrorists. They were even the same age--the two arrested in Vienna are 19 years old and 17 years old. If I had a nickel for every time a 17 year old boy tried to murder Swifties en masse, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice!
I'm sure much smarter and well-connected analysts out there are way ahead of me on this one. And probably it's nothing! And it wouldn't really matter if it was something, beyond maybe bankrupting a handful of Taylor Swift event ticket scalpers in the near future. But it's all very weird.
Especially the part where counterprotesters started literally calling for and cheering on more knifings.
It seems unlikely Axel was an Islamist, Rwanda is only something like 2% Muslim and he’d likely have an Islamic name if he was born to a Muslim family. I suppose he could be a convert, but again that would likely have come out by now.
All the reporting I've seen that mentions it says his dad, at least, was nominally Christian. (I've also seen a number of people on reddit gloating about it, as if it proved anything. "The child of African immigrants who murdered these little girls was a Christian, you bigots!" is not the W they seem to think it is.)
If he was radicalized by anyone other than right-wing Christian nationalists, I cannot imagine a world in which the UK government would allow that to come out under the current circumstances (though if sufficient evidence existed, of course, they may not be able to stop it)--but maybe I am too accustomed to the American approach to reporting such events.
Of course there's no need for him to have been radicalized by anyone, sometimes people do just go totally off the rails without provocation or even any evidence of motive at all.
I just found the Taylor Swift connection to be an interesting coincidence.
I'm sorry but the idea that some dude lugged around a bunch of guns he didn't use without raising any suspicion and picked a specific venue with more security than average when he didn't have a discernable motive beyond killing people is still goofy.
The assassination attempt theory seems most parsimonious given the nuclear glow the whole thing is coated in. Few things look more suspicious than the Las Vegas shooting. JFK is an open and shut case in comparison. So using it as evidence for anything else is just a bad argument.
A much simpler explanation is that Paddock was simply a psychopath who relished the idea of killing people. Getting the guns into the hotel room was trivial, they do not inspect people's bags. As for whatever security was present at the venue, it did nothing to stop Paddock, so was it really more security than average in any meaningful way? The large number of guns that he brought is a bit weird, but can be explained simply by him having a gun fetish or him overestimating how long he might be able to hold out against police forces.
The idea that there are actual psychopaths who hurt people simply because they enjoy it is disturbing, but it is obviously true. I do not see why it would be so unlikely that Paddock was simply one such person, whether he had always been that way or whether something turned him into one.
This is a possibility, but people like that don't tend to be effete accountants whose most prominent vice is gambling. He self evidently didn't have the low inhibitions that type of person typically displays.
There's various theories of how his increasingly erratic or depressed behavior could explain or motivate the shooting, but I haven't seen one that doesn't have a big hole in it.
The sheer amount doesn't square with either of those explanations. Or the fact that he killed himself.
A gun nut fantasizing about using his collection so badly that he feels the need to bring that much stuff around just shoots himself without actually using much of the hardware? How does that add up?
Crazy people do things that make no apparent sense to outsiders.
This isn't the general purpose argument you're making it out to be.
It's like he's a badly written movie villain who's somehow both extremely competent when the plot needs him to be and insanely disordered when that's required.
There's no pattern of behavior, which, in the real world, would lead one to think that more than one person is involved.
Now it is possible that he was insane in the specific way that makes this whole thing happen the way it does, but how likely is that versus another explanation is all a reasonable person should care about. You can explain away any crime with convenient bouts of madness.
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