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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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There was an increase in censorship?

I would, if forced to make the decision, prefer our country's violent nutjobs target insurance company CEOs(who can hire private security, spend time behind secured areas instead of in public[eg going out to eat at country clubs rather than the local steakhouse], etc) than schoolchildren. From a utilitarian perspective I hope Luigi has copycats because it will redirect potential mass shooters. I would, of course, rather that our nutjobs be sane, or failing that confine themselves to long, thought out, and incomprehensible youtube comments, and if they must act out in public it's best they be institutionalized. But none of those things are going to happen.

I haven't noted any wave of censorship, either.

Is there a nutjob substitution effect?

I've heard (but not confirmed) that removing one suicide method (eg. putting fences on a bridge) reduces the total number of suicides by the marginal amount blocked by that intervention. In other words, there are bridge-jumping-suicidal people and pill-taking-suicidal people, but not suicidal-by-any-method people that would substitute one method for another.

Are there school-shooting-nutjobs and CEO-assassinating-nutjobs, or else are there mass-shooting-on-any-target-nutjobs?

Are there school-shooting-nutjobs and CEO-assassinating-nutjobs, or else are there mass-shooting-on-any-target-nutjobs?

I think there are murder-suicide oriented nutjobs, across all cultures and all time periods, and the particular expression their death-urge takes is socially mediated.

A man with the overactive murder-suicide gene born in the Arab world has an obvious path for it: he joins a jihadist group. In medieval Norway, he would go a-viking, while in Russia he would go off and become a Cossack, in the old west he would go off and fight injuns. In virtually every European country for virtually every male before 1945, at some point in his youth he'd have the opportunity to join an army and fight in a war, and if he went off to war with much desire to kill and little desire to return, he probably wouldn't make it back.

The school shooter is one of Tyler Durden's "middle children of history," with no great war or great depression he lashes out at random. He is offered no socially acceptable way to get himself killed and noticed, and picks the worst one possible. I'm a big believer that the best way to prevent school shootings is to give them another way to get themselves killed.