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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35161 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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I think it’s a lot like the spree shooting phenomenon in the USA, which doesn’t seem to have any sort of ideological Origen that I’ve been able to find. What it has is a thought that this will get attention and thus the grievances will be known and get attention. This seems to point to twin solutions of making targets harder to hit (schools are no longer the easy targets they were in the 1990s) by limiting access and slowing movement, and limiting the reach and saturation of the story; not giving the shooter notarity, not speculating on the motive, avoiding sensationalized reports of the carnage, focusing on the victims and their stories.

It’s always seemed to me that when a person reaches a point of dispair and rage at the society he believes is the cause, he tends to use the methods that the current system talks about the most. In the USA, it’s guns and sometimes vehicles. In Europe, it seems to be knives, bombs, and vehicles. You don’t see random bombings in the USA, even though they’d probably work to some effect. You don’t see guns in Europe.

I think it’s a lot like the spree shooting phenomenon in the USA, which doesn’t seem to have any sort of ideological Origen that I’ve been able to find.

"Every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice."

Now this...this is the kind of content that keeps me here.

focusing on the victims and their stories.

Doesn't that inevitably engender talking about the carnage, the shooters, and their motive?

It feels like wishful thinking to believe you can control a story so meticulously that the most titillating, sensational and puzzling parts of a story - i.e. the components most people want to know more about - could be left out in favour of someone talking about how hard it is to lose their son or friend in such a violent manner (the one component of the entire story that we can already imagine and know intuitively without needing it reported to us)?

Also, I feel like school shootings (in the media sense of the term, not the usual gang related shootouts that make up the vast majority of cases) have been somewhat decreasing compared to the past decade - maybe we have become a bit numb to it through over-saturation and that's dissuaded potential school shooters? 30 years ago shooting up a school could make your name and face legendary, you could become a kind of patron saint for outcasts and losers overnight. Today it's a crowded space, much more difficult to become part of the school shooter Pantheon like those Columbine kids.

and limiting the reach and saturation of the story; not giving the shooter notarity, not speculating on the motive, avoiding sensationalized reports of the carnage, focusing on the victims and their stories.

This has failed since Herostratus, and isn't likely to start working any time soon.

Notably, while we know herostratus’s name, nobody else seems to have copied him for a good long while.

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