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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   34053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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We have two instances of the trans-identifying carrying out mass shootings against Christian schoolchildren. Saying "one is too many" is smug; two is too many, two is pattern. The idea has been seeded, people are considering it. It will not be allowed to keep happening.

There is something intriguing from civilization's standpoint, how there aren't examples of men murdering their ex-wives and judges in instances where those men have been prohibited from interfering in hormonal treatments their child is receiving. I wonder if it's that there's something inherent to the men, both in what led them to pairing with the mothers of their children, and to their children undergoing such hormonal therapies. Meaning, that there are plenty of men who would kill their ex-wives and/or judges in those situations, but such men never find themselves in those situations.

The segue here is Tyler Robinson, it's loosely relevant for Luigi Mangione, and then relevant again for the past two trans-identifying school shooters, and for any other perpetrators of that sort of random violence. I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence. This does not absolve, it reinforces the culpability on that rhetoric, because it takes such people and gives them a target, a target who often throws gasoline on the fire of politics.

I recall someone wondering about something like this with people who would have been serial killers instead carrying out mass shootings. So maybe it is worth contemplating that Tyler Robinson maybe wasn't twisted out of normalcy by the internet but rather by some event, perhaps some trauma in his life, and that he would have murdered someone else, or multiple people, or tried to, if not Charlie Kirk. But equally, that a murderer chose Charlie Kirk because of leftist rhetoric.

I'm only aware of one such case (the very recent one); could you name them both, please? I remember multiple cases where it was suspected the shooter was trans-identifying but it turned out to be bad early intel.

The Annunciation shooting in Minneapolis last month and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in 2023.

Ah, I'd mentally filed away the latter as an unrelated case because it was an FTM and most of the concern is about MTFs.

I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).

I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence.

This is basically Calvinism if you squint at it, which is basically self-selection when you scrub away all the fluff. People tune into signals that fit their cognitive state, and tune out signals that do not. People who like math naturally tune into math channels. People who have an urge to violence naturally seek out a signal to justify why committing violence is akshually okay.

I don't think this is quite what happened to either Luigi or Tyler, though. Especially in Luigi's case, in which I'm a bit more confident in my analysis, I think it's clear his own personal experience with The System convinced him that yes, the system really is full of shit and angered him to violence. I don't think it was tuning into any sort of external rhetorical signal at all. The underlying impetus is actually justice, although obviously external observers do not perceive it this way. When you see something that doesn't work because people are stupid or misguided or confused or lazy, none of that really motivates you to violence; but when you see something not working because you outright believe someone is lying to benefit themselves, well... I do think that arouses an urge to violence in any sensible man.

I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).

I know people have harped on this already, but being that the Westside Elementary Massacre happened in the school district next to mine before Columbine, and family and friends were there at the time, I feel the need to contradict the point. How much people get away with terroristic threats always feels similar to all the people getting away with larceny to me, because immediately after Westside, we got authority figures drilling home that terroristic threats would no longer be tolerated, period.

Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).

This is, of course, plainly false. Here’s a list of school shootings in Europe, another list from Canada, and one from Brazil. Russia alone has had a number of notable school shootings, including the Kerch Polytechnic shooting and the Kazan school shooting/bombing.

It isn't, though. Just look at the content of those lists instead of Googling for gotchas and pasting them. Most of the incidents are just accidents or personal beefs that happened to take place at a school.

The "bring a gun to school to shoot as many people as possible" thing was rare pre-Columbine, precisely because it did not exist in the popular memeplex.

I did read the contents. There are many of the Columbine-style mass shootings nestled in there among the personal beefs. Again, do you acknowledge that things like Kerch Polytechnic, Kazan, and Izhevsk (just to name three from Russia alone) are Columbine-style school shootings?

How about the École Polytechnic shooting in Montreal, which happened before Columbine? Or the Dawson College shooting, also in Montreal? Or the La Loche shootings in Saskatchewan?

Bro, what are you even trying to say? Do you think Scott was actually saying there were literally 0 people in the continent of Africa with depression until whites brought the concept there? Obviously not. Obviously the contention is the prevalence skyrocketed once the concept became a "thing" in the collective mindscape.

Come on, man, what are we even doing here.

You made an over-broad claim, I countered it with actual evidence, and now you’re acting flabbergasted that I took your claim seriously enough to refute it, instead of treating it like the empty bluster it apparently was.

I said it directly adjacent to the Scott reference on depression in Africa. Come on man, stop conflating pedantry for insight. I don't care about gotchas; I care about understanding stuff.

If you want a zingers and gotchas, there's... well, Charlie Kirk's TikToks.

I’m not trying to do a gotcha. I’m pointing out that a specific claim you made was wildly overblown. I’m not trying to be insightful or even attack the edifice of your post in any holistic way. I’m literally just focused on that specific claim, which I think was inaccurate.

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