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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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In a "what the fuck even is this timeline" update: Anderson lee Aldrich, the Q Club shooter, is apparently non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, and already had an Encyclopedia Dramatica article detailing his career as a 15 year old "professional hacker", calling him a pedophile, and describing his absent father as an MMA fighter and porn star.

I'm feeling very vindicated in my impulse to hold off conclusions... but I would think that, given my biases, wouldn't it? The real test would be a tragedy that looks at first glance to fit my biases perfectly and allows me to cathartically Boo Outgroup. I suspect that differences in media ecosystems have that less likely... but I would think that too, wouldn't I?

Plus obvious, audacious narrative updates in real time.

And our first echo shooting, as usually happens in the immediate wake of a highly publicized mass shooting. No apparent political/CW element, disgruntled employee.

It seems to me that his identity is more aligned with a progressive identity than a conservative one. He is the product of a progressive lax culture, not a conservative one. He’s the child of a drug addicted porn star father and a felon mother. His father was addicted to meth, a commonly abused drug in the gay nightclub scene. His parents’ lifestyle was the opposite of conservative.

The fact that he was previously charged for threatening to blow up his mother’s house strongly suggests that he targeted the sexually promiscuous nightclub because of its similarity to his father (in his mind). Clearly he had an interest in violence against his parents before.

If you want less of these kinds of attacks, what is the best course of action?

  • Well, there’s absolutely no association between anti-gay belief and attacks on gays. Many millions of Americans are heavily invested in being anti-LGBT, but they don’t attack gays. Muslims and Orthodox Jews hardly have any interest in attacking gays, despite being anti-LGBT.
  • There’s a stronger relationship between shooters and broken families / traumatic childhoods, in particular absent fathers.

To best prevent future cases of this sort of violence, producing even more lgbt propaganda will accomplish nothing (it’s already omnipresent after all), but fixing society and keening families together would probably help. It would be more advantageous to actually extol the value of a stable mother-father marriage, versus continually talking about gays

Well, there’s absolutely no association between anti-gay belief and attacks on gays. Many millions of Americans are heavily invested in being anti-LGBT, but they don’t attack gays. Muslims and Orthodox Jews hardly have any interest in attacking gays, despite being anti-LGBT.

I'm not sure this is a valid argument. Just because anti-gay belief usually doesn't lead to attacks on gays, that doesn't imply that attacks on gays aren't caused in part by anti-gay sentiment. This ties into your second point. Definitely, shooters are going to mostly be people with other psychological issues, brought on in some cases by a traumatic upbringing, but that doesn't mean anti-gay sentiment didn't contribute.

Which is to say, it takes a confluence of factors to produce a shooter. The importance of upbringing does not imply that anti-gay sentiment cannot have contributed.

fixing society

Not a terribly useful contribution. 'Fix society'. How? Or how would you try to reduce rates of single motherhood?

Teaching the virtues in school with stories and examples, teaching young women how to pick mates in teen years, teaching women to be homemakers which reduces total societal stress, banning degenerative media, publicly executing drug dealers. There’s a lot you can do to reduce the terrible behavior that leads to a kid being born from a felon mom and meth addicted pornstar father. After he’s born, better male role models would also help quite a lot.

If the rate of anti-gay believers who become violent against gays is 1 in 60 million per year, or 1 in 6 million, I do not feel comfortable calling this anything but statistical noise. I do not believe his anti-gay beliefs (if they exist) are causal whatsoever.

Franco’s Spain might have been capable of doing these things with any amount of success. Biden’s(or Trump’s or Desantis’) America is not- either capable of doing these things or capable of being successful in them.

I mean, part of the reason Franco's Spain fell apart the second he died is it turned out there was a whole generation of younger people, including the King who actually didn't agree with Franco all that much.