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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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in the current year it is more memetically badass than shooting up a school

Crooks, Luigi and Robinson don't really fit the profile of school shooters very well. School shooters are usually extremely narcissistic, blame everyone around them for keeping them down, have a long history of lashing out and anti-social behavior, and either high IQ (Adam Lanza, James Holmes) or borderline rarted (Nikolas Cruz, Elliot Rodger). They usually aren't hooked in to meme culture since they despise their peers and think of themselves as outsiders. Crooks, Luigi and Robinson all seemed fairly normal and capable of getting along in society. Maybe they all have an extreme and rigid understanding of right and wrong, and are more susceptible to taking propaganda literally. But I suspect these assassin shooters are being drawn from a different pool and would never have been tempted to become spree killers.

Was Elliot Rodger borderline retarded? His Wikipedia article says he had top grades.

In any case, you have an interesting point. I'm not quire sure I agree with you about two separate groups though. Crooks, Robinson and Rodger all seem very similar profiles to me - they all got high grades in high school with a satisfactory disciplinary record but a reputation for spergy weirdness, and then went to universities for which they were grossly overqualified. All three were employable, but none of them were on track to get a traditional "graduate job" that would keep them in their parents' social class. Lanza looks like he was on the same path until he developed schizophrenia on top of his other problems.

Holmes looks very different - notably he is the only killer on the list to have had a girlfriend. (A not-yet-transitioned MtF doesn't count). It looks like he stayed on the PMC cursus honorum despite his issues until he cracked up in grad school. Possibly more like the stereotypical disgruntled postal worker than the stereotypical school shooter.

Divorced parents and excessive video gaming appear in some but not all of the stories - my guess is that both are less common among these guys than the general population of male losers.

Luigi breaking bad makes no sense whatsoever to me.

Overstretching the metaphor, perhaps, but maybe there's a single pool and they're being pulled from another end of it?