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School shooting in Turkïye claims ten lives.
By this point, you know the drill. Teenaged male, terminally online, obsessed with anime (to the point of preferring to be addressed by the name of his favourite anime character), idolises Elliot Rodger and the Columbine shooters, in a polyamorous LDR with two people he'd never met in person. According to his manifesto (because these fuckers always have manifestos – the second you create a Google Doc with the word "manifesto" in the title, Google should automatically red-flag your Google account), he thinks he's the intellectual superior of everyone around him, and decides to prove it by shooting up his local secondary school. Nine students killed, along with a teacher who died heroically shielding them. Shooter is pronounced dead at the scene.
And, in what by now has become a trope just as tiresomely predictable as any of the foregoing, the perpetrator likes to be referred to with the pronouns "she/they/it", making it at least the third mass shooting by a trans-identified male so far this year (and this one, like Tumbler Ridge, occurred outside the US, so we can't just blame it on the NRA and call it a day). Boy, that sure is an awful lot of
heresymisinformation, isn't it Wikipedia? As I said recently, it infuriates me that the threat of incel-motivated mass violence is so relentlessly hyped up while trans-motivated violence is denied outright, even though the latter has surely claimed more lives this century than the former.People often talk about the demise of the monoculture, how we've splintered into a hundred niche echo chambers and no new true household names have been minted since 2014. This is true up to a point, and yet untrue in another sense: being autistic and terminally online is its own monoculture. It's not like there's one culture for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in the US and another for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in Turkïye: from San Diego to Shanghai, this demographic has just the one culture, with its own argot, cultural practices and set of values. If you're depressed, have a hard time fitting in at school and your parents buy you a smartphone, sooner or later you'll end up speaking in the same voice and with the exact same set of fixations (anime, gender ideology, Columbine) as everyone else meeting that description. I'm so grateful not to have been born a decade later.
The Turkish language doesn't even have gendered pronouns.
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Related, a recent Finnish paper studied youth mental health after gender reassignment surgery, they found that psychiatric morbidity worsens significantly post-surgery. This comes to the surprise of absolutely no one. I'm sure even many LGBT affirming liberals are extremely skeptical of the 1% regret rate claim, but quietly nod along fearing political exile. Transsexuals are earmarked the most social capital out of any grievance group in the woke hierarchy. Incels rank at the bottom, they're socially acceptable targets, completely toothless, you can go nuclear on their sense of self-worth (or lack thereof) without consequence because they won't leave their basements. Simultaneously, they're the biggest threat facing society (women) in 2026. Schrodinger them away!
Slightly less related: China is apparently cracking down its LGBT scene even in Chengdu.
Unfortunately like basically every pro and anti trans study, it wasn't really a good one. Their model for psychiatric health is, I'm not even kidding, how much you see a mental health professional. It might be a decent proxy in some ways, but it has very obvious issues. A schizophrenic living on the streets untouched is considered more mentally sound than a middle class student going to a therapist because of "anxiety".
This doesn't necessarily show how mentally healthy you are, it shows how willing you are to engage with the healthcare industry.
That we've selected for a group that seeks out, uses medical care and sticks to it (this is way less common than you might expect, tons of people won't even stick to life saving meds) should suggest a rather heightened rate of psychiatric medical care as well by default, they're the people who actually go use medical care to begin with! No treatment/after treatment comparisons can't get away from this selection effect, people who stick with treatments are the types of people who stick with treatments and use medical care. Even before and after comparisons are flawed. You could see reasons increased rates both from negative results (more problems) and positive results (more trust in healthcare).
Social science sucks. At best this obvious flaw in study design not being cared about is lazy, at worst it's because they're retarded and didn't even think about possible selection effects like most social scientists don't.
This would be a reasonable-ish criticism in the US (and even there "yeah, I know it's not perfect, but it's not bad enough to dismiss the findings"), but in a country with a robust public healthcare and welfare system, the dynamics are completely different. The homeless schizophrenic is far more likely to get treatment than the middle class student trying to get treatment for "anxiety", because the state doesn't have unlimited money, and will triage people.
It definitely lowers it. You can't claim they don't engage with the healthcare system, if they already signed up for gender dysphoria treatment, and are just waiting for it.
We've been allowing an exponential increase in transgender medical interventions, including for children, on the basis of even poorer quality studies claiming they improve mental health outcomes. This study, at the very least, serves as evidence against the pro-trans studies who use similarly flawed methods, except they have no controls, and use way smaller sample sizes. If you want to reject it, there's no reason to take any pro-trans study seriously, and we'd have to admit we're performing massive, dangerous, interventions on children, with absolutely no evidence they help at all.
Robust public healthcare still doesn't mean that people engage in it equally. Especially because you can't make the comparison with the US like that when healthcare in the US for the poor is essentially free for them too! The poor schizo is gonna get all their costs covered by Medicare. So the US is not actually as different as you think.
And the schizo example is just a more obvious way it fails. Again like I said there's an issue in healthcare about how many people won't even take prescribed medicine that they literally have covered by insurance. Tons of people just don't use the resources available to them.
This is just a reading problem, I said that they are selected for being the types to use healthcare. People who engage in voluntary healthcare for years are the types of people who engage in voluntary healthcare.
Yep, that's why I said "unfortunately like basically every pro and anti trans study, it wasn't really a good one.". Social science being low quality is basically the default.
This makes the assumption that the default should be that government bans people's choices unless it's "proven" to help. Why can't the default be that government stays out of what people, including children and their parents, want to do with their lives?
But the comparison in the study takes two groups who, by your argument, are likely to engage in voluntary healthcare. The only difference you can potentially point to is how likely they are to stick to a treatment. Also keep in mind that the effect size you're trying to explain away this way is pretty big. Big enough that I'd think the idea should be backed by evidence itself
This isn't a social science paper, and these issues are pretty common in other fields as well.
It's an extremely unpopular idea. There's a reason why trans activists don't even bring it up.
Not nearly the same rate. It's also not the only issue. Because the Finnish youth on treatment were also being monitored every 3-6 months during checkups, there's also going to be a higher rate of any possible flags being noticed and referred compared to a group who doesn't get monitored by doctors 4x a year. So it's not even just measuring willingness to use healthcare, but also measuring "do people who see doctors regularly get referred to other doctors more?" This is a known issue called surveillance bias.
So yeah, I assume all things equal that a group seeing psychiatric checkups 4x a week, especially voluntarily doing so, are going to have more psychiatric treatments elsewhere.
The effect size is pretty massive sure, but that doesn't mean much. Why should I assume the selection effect of "people likely to utilize healthcare are likely to utilize healthcare" is itself small?
It's actually pretty popular that parents, not government, makes the choices about parenting. Parents can even do things like get their children permanently circumcised, there's a growing movement against requiring childhood vaccines, and in general parents can refuse medical care for their children unless it's directly and immediately endangering the life of the child for US laws. While that might not be the case for some other western nations, I believe the US way is superior to more restrictive and less free countries.
Where are you getting the 3-6 month number from? I see no indication of it in the paper. I can imagine this being a problem if the relevant comparison was to the controls only, but you're comparing two subgroups of people already interacting with the medical system due to gender dysphoria.
Because both groups are already utilizing healthcare, for one. Also, when you criticize a study as "lazy or retarded" the possible bias should be big enough to wipe away or invert the finding, and I think it's reasonable to ask for some backing on how likely that is given the numbers at hand.
Not really. Even on the trans issue itself, the very same people who defend these treatments as being "between the child, parents, and their doctor" will routinely defend institutions hiding a child's transition from their parents.
The US has medical licensing bodies, that take away licences from doctors that prescribe or carry out unproven treatments. It also has a system in place that prevents people (adults!) from voluntarily buying the drugs for themselves that they want. I'm not sure about what the US laws say on the matter, but I don't think they would take kindly for parents getting a hold of prescription drugs, and giving them to their children, on the basis of nothing more than their personal belief it will make them better. I'm not proposing anything different here.
The implication of your idea would be that we'd get rid of this system, or at least make it entirely voluntary, which would be hugely controversial. I'm pretty sure it would be only popular with hardcore libertarians.
Unless they're 'for your dog'. Or a doctor takes the word of your chiropractor that he heard you say you needed them. Or you have money. Or...
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Medical checkups for the hormone treatments and getting new prescriptions.
The controls here are not people actively engaging with the healthcare system over several years, as you can tell by the fact that they are controls not receiving ongoing treatment.
Ok let's look at this specific topic, here's a poll from South Carolina which asked
~71% responded should not! Even the republican respondents were a large majority opposing state intervention against parental decision making. This makes sense, the left leaning side are pro trans and the right leaning side is typically in favor of small government. Traditional conservatives typically say "get the fuck away government regulators"
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So you're in favour of legalising female genital mutilation for teenaged girls of African descent?
I've noticed pro-medical transition people making this argument more and more often lately. "Even if it doesn't work, people should free to do with their own bodies as they please." Okay, sure – but can you* at least acknowledge that you were mistaken** all these years you spent browbeating us about how medical transition is "safe and effective", conservative lawmakers trying to ban it are banning lifesaving treatment (no matter different from taking insulin away from diabetics) and "would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son"? If you've now come out as a principled libertarian who thinks people should be free to do with their bodies as they please while remaining agnostic on whether medical transition is an effective treatment for teenagers' psychic distress (in other words, whether it even qualifies as medical treatment at all) – can you at least be honest enough to admit that you spent quite a long time claiming or pretending otherwise?
Basically what I said here.
*Every instance of "you" in this paragraph is directed towards pro-medical transition people collectively, not towards you in particular.
**To be charitable. Uncharitably: lying.
Why not? We already allow childhood mutilation of genitals for males! In fact teenagers are probably more ethical to do on than babies cause the teenagers could always push back while the baby can not.
I get you mean the unspecified you, but that makes the rest of it kinda unfair right? My argument is that I'm a libertarian who believes in pretty maximal individual rights. But a lot of those pro transition people don't make that argument to begin with! A lot of them are fine with restricting freedoms, they just believe that transition is overall effective.
They don't need to admit something over my personal beliefs.
I'm going to push back on this- circumcision is yes bad but not as bad as FGM, and and one meets the threshold for child abuse while the other one doesn't.
My son isn't circumcised, my future ones won't be either, you don't need to convince me it's bad. But, as a circumcised guy, it's nowhere near as bad as FGM is supposed to be. There's a major difference in severity.
The most commonly practiced forms of FGM are at most as bad as circumcision (removal of the clitoral hood) and often significantly less (eg. ceremonial pin-prick on the clitoral hood), but remain illegal and condemned. If it is true that circumcision should be permitted because it is not as severe, then these types of FGM should be as well. Instead we use the existence of more severe forms to condemn all forms. For men, we have a separate category for the more severe form--castration.
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Below are a list of things that Western societies generally believe that minor children are too immature to engage in with informed consent:
Obviously there is enormous heterogeneity between jurisdictions (in some jurisdictions it's illegal for anyone to smoke weed regardless of age) and the age of consent varies a great deal just within Europe. Nonetheless, you will be hard-pressed to find an example of a Western jurisdiction in which prepubescent children are legally free to practise all or most of the above.
I'm legitimately curious which of the above you think minor children (esp. prepubescent children) should be legally permitted to practise.
A lot of those are actually false. Plenty of states have laws allowing underage drinking with parental consent for example. And various forms of child marriage (and yes, sex in those marriages often) with parental consent is still legal in the majority of states.
Yes in most of the US, you as a parent can consent to your child marrying and having sex with an adult.
Some of your examples are also "X not allowed without parental consent" which yeah, parents right to parent means they get to make choices. Some of them also follow into your "applies to everyone" category, no one of any age can make and spread porn of young minors for instance.
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Not just surgery, hormonal treatment as well:
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Have there been any studies on if transwomen/trans-identifying-males who are into women vs men vs both are statistically more violent? I have encountered many trans people in my life. I've even seen an african american male chad have a harem of white transwomen he kept as his 'slaves'. Anecdotally, it seems transwomen who are into women are more interested in violence, as well as traditionally masculine activities, in general. I bet it's an even smaller subset of transwomen where the group of school shooters are drawn.
A potential proxy would be to compare homicide rates for heterosexual vs. homosexual men, assuming that there's a significant amount of neurological overlap between cis men who are attracted to men and trans-identified men who are attracted to men.
Hell, one prominent theory for how homosexuality comes about is that male babies are exposed to more prenatal oestrogen. If so, you would logically expect them to be less aggressive in consequence.
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Did you read the "manifesto"? There was clearly much wrong with this person beyond anything to do with being trans. Do trans communities generally tell people they're "the ultimate human" and "better than everyone around me intelligence wise"?
And if the shooter had these beliefs not caused by being trans/hanging around in trans spaces, then could their other beliefs – such as that shooting up a school is a good idea – also have come from elsewhere?
(I will also say that it's amusing seeing them write how they're intellectually superior to everyone else because they are "fluent at [sic] English".)
This has always been the case, as with all other shooters. But this rhetorical charity is never extended to incels as a group. Just look at the hysteria "Adolescence" kicked off. A fictional 13yo boy fictionally killed his fictional classmate and everyone was acting like there was an actual irl pandemic of manosphere incels murdering your daughters, but statistically violence against women has been trending down over the years.
That was pure oppression pornography perpetrated by those who know in their hearts they deserve to get stabbed to death by spurned teenagers, though.
Or perhaps more charitably, they're rationally afraid of the only force that could actually hold them to account for what they have done at that group's expense.
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And the demographic to which the protagonist of Adolescence belongs is one of those least likely to commit it.
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Do you have a link?
A screenshot is in the first link in the top-level comment. Not the whole thing, but it does have the bit I was talking about.
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This is always the case with shooters. It is also always the case with trans people.
Whether trans is an extra violent subset of the persons who are very delusional and crazy is for researchers. Meanwhile, treating them akin to paranoid skitzophrenics is mostly appropriate via the precautionary principle. It is just as likely that a man is truly a woman as it is that a man's dog is satan and ordering him to kill people. Perhaps the latter is even more likely, many prominent philosophers of the ages have thought demons were real.
On the contrary, empirically, treating them as crazy and trying to make them not-trans makes them miserable and doesn't stop them from thinking they're trans, while treating them as their preferred gender and allowing them to medically transition lets most of them lead happy, fulfilling lives. The question of whether they are their preferred gender or should merely be treated as if they were is academic.
I've yet to see any rigorous studies showing that transition is helpful in reducing objective measurements like suicide, criminality, etc .
In any case the happiness of the trans is orthogonal to whether they are delusional, and the appropriate measures society takes to limiting the delusional population from committing acts of violence.
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That is not true, see elsewhere in this very thread that transition increases psychiatric morbidity. See also the 41% suicide rate of transitioners, which is not a sign of a mentally healthy population on average(after all, most depressives manage not to kill themselves).
I will have to push back on this one. My understanding is that this figure originated in an informal survey in which they asked trans people if they had ever attempted suicide (a heterogeneous category which includes hanging oneself and being interrupted, to overdosing on sleeping pills but fully expecting to be found i.e. "cries for help"). I don't think the survey separated out people who had medically transitioned from those who had not.
My understanding is that the suicide rate among trans people is not hugely different from the general population.
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Reading the study now. I'll respond to the original post later.
Well, on this one, you're blatantly wrong. First of all, it's a suicide attempt rate. Secondly, it's for all trans people, not just transitioners – including those who weren't able or allowed to transition, due to social or other circumstances. Also, the survey this figure comes from was conducted in 2011; a lot has changed in the meantime.
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On the contrary, there seems to be little to no evidence for this claim. Even Chase Strangio had to admit at the Supreme Court that there was no evidence that transitioning improved mental health outcomes.
Source?
Here.
Wow, what a cancerous website.
So, there is evidence it does improve mental health (suicidality being a component thereof), just no evidence it reduces the rate of successful suicides. You will note both my comment and yours talked about mental health, not the rate of successful suicides, which, as Strangio noted, are rare.
Can you link one of those studies that isn't hopelessly confounded, such as by taking massive losses to follow-ups?
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Trans communities do seem to pathologically validate, even when they're clearly wrong. That's what 'self ID' is.
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I mean if they were emotionally healthy, connected to real people in the real world, had lots of hobbies and interests outside of anime, online forums, social media, and probably gaming they wouldn’t have thought they were the übermensch and probably wouldn’t have thought the solution to people disagreeing with them was found in shooting up the Turkish equivalent of a junior high school. All of his beliefs are based to my mind in a profound separation from reality— his body, his identity, his overestimated view of his own superiority, his living in Anime to the point of name change is pretty much mentally unstable in itself. This person’s identity was uncoupled by spending so much time online that he had no idea that the real world wasn’t like his fantasy.
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No argument here. I believe the causal pathway looks like "mentally disturbed young man retreats into online spaces -> some of these spaces are trans spaces which contain violent, hateful rhetoric -> young man eventually comes to believe that he has no choice but to commit a mass shooting". The trans and the violent lashing out are ultimately downstream of the mental illness and social awkwardness.
As I've argued before:
Spend enough time in trans spaces and you'll see plenty of people arguing that trans women are outright superior to cis women, or that people who don't buy into gender ideology are hateful and backward.
Sure, they could have. I'm just fed up of the double standard. If he was a self-identified incel, that would have been the end of the story: no one would be going full internet forensics trying to find out what else might have radicalised him other than participation in incel communities. "He once liked an Andrew Tate video– case closed!" But no matter how much violent, hateful rhetoric they spew, online trans communities seem to be awarded an inexhaustible benefit of the doubt.
I've spent plenty of time in trans spaces and I haven't seen any of that.
Well, yeah, believing your political opponents are backward is par for the course, is it not? Do you not believe trans activists are backward?
"My political opponents are being uncharitable, so I'll be uncharitable back!" Many such cases. But isn't that against the rules on this website? And, you know, a bad thing in general?
I'm going to reply to @ZeStriderOfDunedain here since this is the same basic idea. He writes:
If the other side is being uncharitable or plain dishonest, point it out and ask them to be charitable and honest. Don't stoop to their level.
Well, lucky you, but I will admit I have a bit of a hard time believing this. "Die Cis Scum" was a meme over a decade ago. Trans Day of Vengeance? The avalanche of death and rape threats directed towards JK Rowling or Kellie-Jay Keen (the latter of whom was actually physically assaulted in public)? Assorted macabre, threatening protest placards like "The only good TERF is a ____ TERF"? SNP members photographed standing next to a placard reading "decapitate TERFs"? None of this ringing a bell?
Sometimes, not always. Communists usually strike me as either resentful or naïve, but not "backward" as such.
This was, ironically, a profoundly uncharitable reading of what I said. All I'm advocating is consistency. If we must trawl through the entire digital footprint of every trans mass shooter to determine exactly what it is that drove them to commit their horrific misdeeds, we should do the same with every mass shooter and resist the urge to buy into a simplistic narrative of their having been radicalised by Andrew Tate or whoever. I'm not advocating for trans criminals to be treated especially uncharitably, but rather for consistency in how criminals are treated regardless of their identity characteristics.
I, for one, am not stooping to their level. The claim that there is an epidemic of incel-motivated violence in the UK is simply untrue. I am unaware of even a single case of a young man in the UK murdering someone after being radicalised by incel/manosphere content. While there has been incel-motivated violence outside of the UK, the scale of it has been greatly exaggerated. Contrary to PM Keir Starmer's claims, Adolescence was not a documentary, nor even based, however loosely, on a true story. I did not describe the content of a fictional Turkish miniseries as if it had anything to say about the real world. I rather resent your implication that there is no moral difference between a) reading too much into a real case that actually happened and b) producing a fictional miniseries about a problem that does not exist and using it as a cudgel with which to beat an entirely blameless demographic.
It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least three mass shootings committed by trans people so far this year. It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least eight mass shootings or killing sprees committed by trans people so far this decade. It hardly seems unreasonable for me to infer that a pattern seems to be emerging here, nor that it might be worth investigating what commonalities the perpetrators might have besides their gender identities.
While trans-motivated violence has claimed more lives this decade (and probably this century) than incel-motivated violence, in the linked post I went out of my way to point out that the former is still small in absolute terms, and a drop in the bucket compared to e.g. Islamist terrorism – this is, to my mind, exactly the opposite of the hysterical scaremongering seen in the incel debate. I am not demanding that Netflix produce an arty miniseries about a trans person who commits a mass shooting, nor that every British teenager be made to watch it. While I have my disagreements with trans activists, I don't recall ever urging people to beat them up or decapitate them. I am not stooping to my opponents' level, and it's repugnant of you to suggest that I am.
I did think of this, but I thought it was obvious that it was a joke. Do you seriously believe trans people want the 99% of the human population who are cis to be exterminated?
Spicy rhetoric, yes, but I don't see any actual calls for violence. The event, which was cancelled, was supposed to be peaceful protest.
This is not about trans people specifically, but in general, I find it odd that people talk about "death and rape threats" as if they were actual, credible threats, and not, you know, just a thing a random anonymous person wrote online. I imagine these are boomers taking these things seriously, people who grew up before the internet. This applies just as much to the alleged victims of Gamergate, to trans people who receive such "threats", etc.
No, I hadn't heard of her having tomato juice poured on her. The perpetrator was convicted. Was there widespread sympathy for the perpetrator among trans people?
No, I hadn't seen any of those, either. Perhaps the problem is that I hung out in trans spaces – places where trans and questioning people talk to each other and the odd curious observer like me – and not at public events where the rhetoric is meant for the general public. You'd think they'd want to tone things down for the public, and be forthright about their ill intentions in more trans-focused spaces, but in fact, in the latter, I've seen zero calls for any kind of actual violence.
But, in general, I'm sure you could cherry-pick a similar amount of violent rhetoric if you looked at the fringes of anti-trans activism. (One that comes to mind is the emote of a trans person being hanged on rdrama.net. "Trannies get the rope" gets 196 hits on Google – and that's just one, highly specific phrase.) In neither case is it representative.
You seemed to be advocating for consistency in the opposite direction: that trans people and incels should both be treated as violent threats to society. If you agree that both are overblown as a whole, and that individual cases should be examined individually, then we are in agreement.
I don't know, arguing over which is worse seems a bit pointless. Can we agree both are bad?
Tumbler Ridge and Turkey, what's the third one?
Eight events in the entire world is not enough to suggest a pattern of any kind, given that there are tens of millions of trans people in the world.
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Sure, and if we simply joined hands together and sang kumbaya we might unlock world peace. This is a meta level observation on the discrepancy in interpretive rigour. One domain demands extreme nuance, while the other is a closed case. If the shooter is trans, you must pussyfoot around their gender dysphoria, use polite language, trace their psychology with maximum granularity, and absolutely never generalise. This tells me that the "other side" does possess the critical thinking skills and understanding of basic human psychology necessary to recognise the complex pathways from social alienation to real world violence. So when they don't extend these complexities to the "manosphere" or incel adjacent spaces, and instead treat their alleged behaviours as deterministic, self-evident and ideologically settled, as well as silence alternative explanations that may deviate from their "right-think" priors, that is a conscious choice.
Charity is a two-way road.
You are just repeating that they are being dishonest. That you should be dishonest in turn is a non sequitur. Again, why not point out their dishonesty and double standards and be better than them? At least on this website, if in the real world you feel a need to act dishonestly for pragmatic political reasons.
"Look your reasoning is flawed and collapses rather quickly under the standards you reserve for your own sacred cows" is not me advocating for tit-for-tat dishonesty, I'm simply echoing their own framework. Again, this is a meta-level observation about the discourse, not the shooting itself (which, to be clear, I agree extends beyond the shooter's gender dysphoria). So I'm not sure what dishonesty it is that you think I'm defending. Unless you believe that my meta-level observation itself is quite dishonest, in which case, please enunciate how and why.
Do you believe incel/manosphere attackers should receive the benefit of the doubt, i.e., their attacks should not be attributed to them being incels/part of the manosphere?
At minimum, you need to demonstrate a consistent and reproducible pattern showing engagement with online spaces as the causal driver of violent attacks, holding all other factors constant.
Tangentially, video game violence may have played a role in cases like Daniel Petric, but millions of people spend long hours gaming globally without exhibiting real world violence, so you have a much harder time arguing that any single factor in isolation drives such outcomes. And yes, I extend that logic to trans shooters as well.
As for the manosphere, Andrew Tate literally got streisand effected to fame. He had less than 4M followers on Twitter/X when he started making headlines around 2022. He's sitting at 11M now.
If we were to believe the narrative, that surge in visibility and consumption should be coupled by a corresponding uptick in violence against women, and that this uptick can be reasonably traced to his content. Instead, violent crime is trending down in both the US and UK.
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If it can be clearly established that the perpetrator of a mass shooting or similar spent a great deal of time in incel/manosphere spaces which pushed him to do something heinous, then that mass shooting should be attributed to the perpetrator being an incel or manosphere adherent. I have zero problem characterising e.g the Isla Vista incident as an example of incel-motivated violence.
But I think there's a clear double standard in which attacks get attributed to which ideologies/communities in the progressive media: that a terror attack is Islamist must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, while preponderance of evidence (if even that) is all that is required to "prove" that a given mass shooting is incel/manosphere/far-right. If a mass shooter is known to have watched one Andrew Tate video, that will go in the lede, while the years of mental illness will be glossed over if mentioned at all. Meanwhile, it's a cliché for progressive journalists to announce that "no motive could be established" for a mass stabbing incident even when the perpetrator was heard bellowing "Allahu Akbar" during the attack. I believe this double standard also extends to mass shootings committed by trans people: progressive journalists seem alarmingly reluctant to acknowledge that the pattern even exists, still less to ask hard questions about the kinds of content the perpetrators may have consumed prior to their attacks and whether there's any causal relationship.
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I in fact, do not know the drill. I'm not even aware of a single school shooter known to be obsessed with anime, though if I'm simply ignorant please enlighten me.
I do know this drill though.
Not quite, autistic, terminally online, and trans is its own monoculture. A large portion of cishet terminally online autists find their own spaces. For example, the kiwi farms is populated by terminally online autists, the proof is in the fact that they spend hours cyberstalking and compiling dossiers on their targets, certainly something a normie would never be seen doing. And in fact this very place, themotte.org is also populated by terminally online autists, and our culture here is absolutely nothing like the autistic, terminally online, trans monoculture.
I would argue that the trans monoculture is especially susceptible to globohomo due to the fact that the community is heavily evangelistic, going through great lengths to promote their ideology to anyone who will listen. Meanwhile most other autistic subcultures are more insular, and happy to do their own thing while staying under the radar.
Focusing on anime is missing the point, I think. As far as I can tell, you're right, strictly speaking - I'm also not aware of a single school shooter known to be obsessed with anime. But if you substitute 'anime' for other types of online content that is not normie-adjacent and are addictive, then OP's point stands.
How is anime not normie-adjacent? It's extremely popular almost everywhere.
Anime fandom is still a counterculture in a practical sense.
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"Give more privileges to the trans monoculture" is currently well-understood to be a conservative-as-in-50-Stalins movement (reformers don't really like it that much) and its adherents can claim to be oppressed and hated if they don't win, much like how back in the '80s the conservatives at the time could reasonably claim rolling back religious rights was a direct attack on Christians.
Consider also that de Tocqueville's statement about revolution only happening when things are improving also applies on a personal level to suicidal [including the running amok kind] behavior- when anti-depressants precipitate suicidal behavior, it's because the sufferer finally has the energy (which leads to collecting other resources) to finally carry out their plan (and is, I believe, why people who have experienced this tend to say "don't go for a permanent solution to a temporary problem").
In this case, we have an angry Moralistic/conservative man who Feels Oppressed, is getting better now that he actually has a support group, and decides it's time to accomplish the support group's stated goals and commit suicide for The Cause at the same time (it takes time for your life to start to matter; young men (13+) perceive, generally [and for society at large, shamefully] correctly, that theirs doesn't so big flashy statements like this are more attractive to them).
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There are almost certainly others, because in 2026 being obsessed with anime is like being obsessed with video games in 2006. Finding it remarkable is the base rate fallacy; tons of people like anime now, especially teenagers.
Lucky Star in particular sits squarely in between "everyone watches this" and "only committed fans watch this". It's a show that used to be popular, and thus still retains a cult following. There are lots of Lucky Star memes. It's easy to find and comfy to view, but slightly too weird and reference-heavy to appeal to people who are not into anime. Few would accuse you of having bad taste for liking it, but it's not indicative of much about one's taste either. Entry-level CGDCT.
"Obsessed with anime", "obsessed with anime", and "obsessed with anime" are different things, I think. There's the hikinomori, who has a serious illness. The standard otaku, who might be normal outside of their intense interests, and whose brain problems typically stop at depression or autism. The normal person who simply watches anime rather than movies some of the time. The Discord teenager who posts about anime they have never seen while "watching" Demon Slayer in the background and is therefore obsessed. And then there's the social media filter. Do you talk about Gundam on 4chan, Twitter (left or right wing?), Reddit, or spacebattles.net? Or are you too busy reading doujins to discuss anything?
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Is it trans motivated? You yourself already said his motive was something else here
Why should we assume that trans identification is the chicken laying the terminally online asocial loser egg instead of the other way around, that terminally online asocial losers seek out communities that make them feel like they can change away from being losers? The same way that white supremacist neonazi groups are heavily overrepresented among shooters. In fact, some shooters are both like the Canada mass shooting
And the Rhode Island roller rink shooter
All of these shootings were motivated by the spiders in the shooters' brains. Trans plausibly, but it can't be proven after the fact, made those spiders worse or pushed them over the edge, sure, but these people did it because they were crazy- and that applies to both the shootings and the becoming trans.
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Well, this is exactly what I was complaining about. It's what Scott calls a "fighting a rearguard attack against the evidence", where whenever a member of a favoured community does something atrocious, we have to exhaustively dig through every single thing they ever said, wrote or posted about to find something to pin it on other than their membership in said community. And what particularly frustrates me is that you trotted out exactly the same line of reasoning
onetwothree trans mass shootings ago, insisting it was the Annunciation Catholic shooter's participation in far-right neo-Nazi fora that radicalised him and that his gender identity was incidental to his violent implosion (even though he personally admitted that "gender... fucked up [his] head" and that he wished he'd never "experimented" with it).Regardless of our respective opinions on gender ideology, I think we can all agree on the following:
If three people in three different countries all participated in the same constellation of incel fora (or far-right fora, or blackpill fora) and went on to commit horrific acts of unpredictable, indiscriminate violence, I very much doubt you'd have any problem asserting that participating in an incel forum is a potential red flag for violent radicalisation. But when three people in three different countries participate in the same constellation of trans fora and go on to commit horrific acts of indiscriminate violence, you insist that there's nothing to see here, their trans identification had nothing to do with it, and one time this perpetrator liked a tweet containing a swastika in the background so CASE CLOSED. How many of these mass shootings will it take before you acknowledge there's a pattern here, that trans subreddits aren't just sweet little hugboxes where trans kids can feel like they belong but also, in many cases, hotbeds of hateful, violent rhetoric?
This is precisely the causal pathway I support. As I said above (and as I already said to you in August of last year), terminally online asocial losers participating in online trans spaces would be unobjectionable were it not for the fact that there's a lot of really dark, violent messaging in trans spaces which is like catnip to the dangerously unhinged. Forum moderators, social media censors and governments have historically treated the people spewing violent rhetoric in trans spaces with kid gloves, when they would never tolerate it if expressed in incel fora or similar. It must stop, now.
The term "fighting a rearguard action against the truth" was coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Is it somehow a sin to look for other things that may have motivated them? The causal explanation may not end simply with their identification in a particular community.
It's not a sin to look for other contributing factors. It's equally not a sin (nor "misinformation") to suggest that this might be a contributing factor. And there's a clear double standard in which school shooters get their motives and inspirations scrutinised to the nth degree.
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This is called motivated reasoning. It's obvious that progressives and liberals are applying extra scrutiny to avoid asking any hard questions.
It would be like being told that monkeypox was effecting gay men, animals, and children, and then someone barged in and told you to quarantine the petting zoos.
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Huh, I didn't know that.
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If you don't understand the difference between "X is a member of Y" and "thing that X does is because of Y membership" then you're not approaching in good faith.
What you're giving is another asocial loser who gets into identifying as trans and neonazism because of the asocial loser part. Even with the last line, you're literally writing that he wasn't actually trans and thinking that he was a mistake of his. He was a loser who sought out meaning and change in his life.
"I made up something in my head about you, so you're a hypocrite" is one of the worst types of arguments people make. I consistently argue the exact opposite logic, that individuals should be treated as individuals and I do not believe in collective blame or group responsibility and that the large majority of basically every group is actually peaceful. Heck even "asocial losers who want to feel change in their lives and superior to others" is still a group that is largely peaceful. You don't actually need to fear the average terminally online social outcast teenage boy who posts edgy violent stuff on the internet even when we get that hyper niche. There's a lot of them, and very few actually convert to real world violence.
If you wish to box the strawman in your head, at least have the decency to keep it in your head.
I mean I can go along with mere membership doesn’t prove much maybe the first or second time something happens. If the pattern is revealing itself and you can find a half dozen people who all were part of one community and despite never meeting and not even sharing the same culture start doing the same thing over and over, it’s not reasonable to keep saying “anyone who sees this specific group of people doing this thing is just misrepresenting reality”. Those people specifically keep doing that thing. Despite being in different circles in separate countries and not having the same language. If I found that most of the current crop of school spree shooters all liked speed skating, it would be worth talking about especially if the people shooting had few or no other points of connection.
I've talked before with misandrism on how people fuck up statistical understandings when they're being bigoted. Most bad things are such low base rates that even when elevated in certain populations, the result is still a very low base rate. Like the statements "men are more likely to be violent (than women)" and "men are likely to be violent" are incredibly different in meaning off of a single word. The former is true, the latter is false. The male baseline is in fact still very peaceful.
So in this sense consider it the same way. A half dozen people is not very much considered to the millions and millions of trans people there are. Even if it's an elevated rate, it still remains the case that the large large large large (continue on for a while) majority of trans people don't seem to be doing mass shootings. The statements of "trans people are more likely to be violent" and "trans people are likely to be violent" are just as different as the previous example. The main baseline is still being a very peaceful group like almost any other group.
But even if that was the case, how many people do speed skating? Tons. Clearly speed skating isn't the main catalyst given the however many much larger majority of speed skaters who aren't shooting up places. Now maybe speed skating is an accelerant on already broken minds somehow. Or maybe there's something about speed skating that attracts those with violent and broken minds. That is possible. But speed skating isn't causing shooter behavior in most people.
Are there millions and millions of trans people? They're a pretty small minority that's simply absent from large parts of the world. And there seems to be multiple phenomena involved, with most of these people specifically being MTFs, which isn't even the biggest group.
I'm getting flashbacks to the Catcher in the Rye obsession among prominent murderers, for some reason. No doubt there are many people who like Catcher in the Rye, but it seems overrepresented among murderers.
In the US alone at one of the lower estimates of around .5% that is still almost 2 million people on their own. So yes, there is millions and millions
The US is way on the high end for transgenderism population prevalence, for one thing.
And for another, does that .5% include non-binary, genderqueer, etc things that are different phenomena, and which would dominate the numbers if included? Most statistics that I see show a ‘not male or female identifying’ category, when in reality MTF’s, FtM’s, agendered weirdos/fake genders, and intersex(rare birth defects) are four essentially unrelated things. To the best of my knowledge intersex and fake genders are much more common than FtM which is much more common than MtF.
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Isn't this textbook Chinese Robbers Fallacy? There are a lot of humans. Even a relatively niche online subculture might have tens of thousands of members. A half-dozen violent criminals out of that number doesn't really prove anything, let alone provide sufficient grounds to condemn the subculture itself. The question, at that level, is not whether all mass shooters like speed skating, but how many speed skaters turn into school shooters.
That depends on whether you're trying to determine how to treat your friend the speed skater, or trying to stop school shootings. If most Ys are Xs, and you want to get rid of the Ys, it's generally a good idea to take a look at X to see whether you can make it lead to Y less often - whether or not Ys are a large fraction of Xs. This chain leads back to FtttG talking about how trans spaces ought to be given a spring cleaning of terrorist propaganda, not talking about how all the transsexuals are evil and must die.
A fair reply, but,
I still don't think that's been demonstrated, for multiple reasons.
First, the point of Chinese Robbers is not merely that you shouldn't discriminate against the Chinese as a whole just because they have a significant minority of robbers among them. The point is that it is a statistical illusion. There is not, in fact, a particular reason why so many Chinese become robbers - you would be mistaken to organize any interventions predicated on the notion that there is some specific reason why the Chinese are more likely to become robbers than anybody else, even if you avoid the most egregious mistake of treating any randomly-chosen Chinese person as meaningfully likely to become a robber. Whether popular Chinese media depict stealing in a positive light is irrelevant because there's nothing there to actually be explained. They're not more likely to become robbers than any other human beings; there's just way more Chinese than Belgians, so all else being equal you numerically end up with more Chinese than Belgian robbers worldwide. All that has been shown here is that there are a fair few trans shooters - but nobody has tried to show that it's a statistically significant number relative to the total number of shooters. I'm not claiming it's not statistically significant, but leaping from "there's been like, six of them!" to proposed interventions without actually running the numbers is just plain bad epistemics.
Second, it also hasn't been demonstrated that violent rhetoric in trans spaces is responsible. Insofar as disturbed individuals from varied backgrounds and ideologies converge on becoming school shooters, it seems fallacious to point to anything violence-related in a specific set of shooters' background and blame that. Compare "many mentally-disturbed young males become trans, some mentally-disturbed young males become shooters, some online trans spaces include violent rhetoric - is the violent rhetoric to blame?" to familiar moral panics like "many mentally-disturbed young males are gamers, some mentally-disturbed young males become shooters, some video games include violent content - are violent video games to blame?". Lots of people consume various forms of violent content, and it is a favorite trick of censors to lean on Chinese Robbers situations to blame whatever kinds of violent content they don't like by claiming that the correlation shows that this time the violent content directly led to real-world harm. Me, I'm skeptical of the entire framework. AFAIK basically no trans spaces encourage their members to go forth and kill random children to prove they're the übermensch. The Zizians' private Discord server, maybe, but come on, that's not the kind of "violent rhetoric" that's lurking on regular trans subreddits. If we were talking about an epidemic of Kirk-style killings I might find the argument more persuasive, but here you can only point at a much hazier blob of "violence", and I think that's a stretch.
Third, even if violent rhetoric in trans spaces were in some way causally responsible through normalization, it has not been demonstrated that this relationship is so direct as to make the peddlers of violent rhetoric legally responsible for the shootings to a degree that nullifies their First Amendment rights. How many people read this violent rhetoric without becoming school shooters? My guess is "an overwhelming majority". Stochastic terrorism might be an interesting thought experiment but I do not believe a country can simultaneously have free speech and legally recognize the concept - the slippery slope from "don't publish anything that could motivate the right crackpot out of millions to kill people" to "don't ever criticize anybody too harshly" is so steep it's a cliff-face.
I'm quite explicitly not demanding the arrest of anyone posting violent, hateful rhetoric in trans subreddits, nor claiming that anyone posting such content could be found criminally liable for incitement to violence. Innumerable subreddits have been banned over the years without any of the moderators or posters facing legal action. If Reddit decides to ban a subreddit which consists of nothing but people ranting about how much they despise "femoids" (or black people, or homosexuals, or Jews etc.) and openly fantasising about how much they'd like to assault and torture them, they should adopt the same standard when it comes to subreddits consisting of people ranting about how much they despise TERFs, "cis scum" or similar. Or we can do the modus ponens and say that if trans-identified males are allowed to share their creepy fantasies about murdering TERFs on Reddit, then incels, racists and homophobes should be allowed to as well.
I think you're constructing a strawman in an effort to make me sound like an authoritarian and an opponent of free speech (particularly laughable when I've racked up multiple QCs for loudly condemning the censorious approach adopted by several Western governments). I don't appreciate it.
I made this point at greater length in the linked post: if you think I'm getting too worked up about trans-inspired violence, that logically implies that Western governments are getting far too worked up about incel-inspired violence. Can't have it both ways.
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And even that doesn't necessarily matter too much! Mass shooters are extremely rare, so even a statistically significant difference between populations often goes from extremely rare to extremely rare but slightly less so.
Like I can't imagine anyone has preregistered the belief that .05% of a group = acceptable shooter rate but .09% = unacceptable and needs a crackdown.
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Mostly decent points; I was largely criticising the structure of your argument, not particularly taking a firm position on the issue, and I did think of some of these questions myself.
I will note that, uh... not trans spaces specifically, but some SJ spaces can get pretty bad. When I said "terrorist propaganda" I wasn't being hyperbolic; I was talking about the shit I've seen, which is if anything worse than the stuff mentioned in that Unherd article (I hadn't actually read it until writing this post). I was talking about literal calls to do terrorism, and advice about how to avoid being arrested for violent crime. I'm pretty libertine when it comes to speech, but "don't literally urge people to riot and assassinate" is probably like #2 on the list of exceptions everyone makes (#1 being the most blatant forms of harmful sensation, like pointing a concert-rated speaker into someone's bedroom at night). You're right that mass shootings specifically have some mental-illness issues, but I do think there's cause to crack down on the places that start to function as insurgent communications infrastructure and that doing so might ease some of the rioting in the medium-term.
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Real transgender has never been tried, comrade! Trans cannot fail, they can only be failed.
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I do understand the difference, which is why I specifically outlined in my comment (twice!) a plausible causal pathway by which trans identification (and, more specifically, participation in online trans communities) could lead to violent radicalisation: namely, the fact that these communities are rife with hateful, violent rhetoric and baseless doomsaying about the imminent trans genocide.
If you really believe this, it sure is funny that you made a top-level post about four instances of people expressing antisemitic opinions or making antisemitic jokes in order to mount an argument that the entire American conservative movement has an antisemitism/neo-Nazism problem. I mean, was the intended takeaway from that post really meant to be "these people said nasty things, and that's bad, and it reflects poorly on the specific individuals involved – but every other young conservative American should be treated as an individual and not subjected to collective blame or group responsibility"? Frankly, I don't believe that it was.
For reference, 77 million people voted for Trump in 2024, while the Harvard Gazette estimates that there are only 25 million trans/NB people in the entire world. So my sweeping generalisation is at worst only one-third as sweeping as yours.
Quite honestly, I don't think you believe that individuals should be treated as individuals and not be subjected to collective blame. I think you believe that members of your in-group should be treated as individuals. We have a term for this.
And yet the part I quoted has you saying the opposite.
Your whole thesis right there in that sentence relies on "a member of X does Y, we should pin it on their membership of X." Maybe you didn't intend it that way and I'll accept that if you say it, but that's what was said.
This is a continuous issue that you literally aren't reading.
First of all, I focus explicitly on people with actual meaningful personal power and influence. A sitting representative, the Twitter account for border patrol, people with over 1 million subscribers, the CEO of Gab. These weren't four instances of random people like some guy named Joe who works as a cashier at the hardware store posting about how much he loves Hitler.
And I hearken to the broad consensus (among both pro and anti Nazi conservatives) that this rhetoric is growing more popular.
But even in that post I literally give examples of major conservative names who spoke out against the Nazi rhetoric. Radio host EW Erickson, Ben Shapiro, the libertarian economist Phil Magness. The aforementioned Hanania and Lynch. And I say things like
This doesn't contradict my individualism beliefs whatsoever. I actually disagree with many of the Nazi denouncers and defenders I cited (see how I used the phrase apparant rise to hedge there) and believe that nazism is not growing as fast as they claim. The majority of conservatives are not Nazi friendly.
Again, making something up in your head to be mad about. You should try actually reading the words on screen instead. If I was making a "sweeping generalization" I did a pretty terrible job at it when I explicitly cited multiple non Nazi conservatives.
And see right there is exactly why sweeping generalizations like that are pretty much always retarded. Any claim like "being trans makes you a mass shooter" or "being a man makes you violent" or "being a trump supporter makes you a Nazi" or whatever else fails to explain why the large large large large majority of all those groups aren't the thing then. How come most trans people aren't shooting up schools or churches? How come most men aren't violent criminals? How come most Trump supporters aren't doing sieg heils?
It's a bit rich of you to complain about me putting words in your mouth and then turn around and do this.
I don't know how I can make my point any clearer; maybe the third (fourth? fifth?) time's the charm. Not every trans person will commit a mass shooting; indeed, the majority won't. But there are lot of radical online trans spaces which are very scary, and in which hateful, violent rhetoric is normal and even encouraged. (You must know this latter point is true, as in all the months we've been discussing this issue you've never even attempted to contest it.) I am very concerned that the mentally disturbed young men who frequent such spaces are taking this rhetoric to heart and being inspired to commit mass shootings; in short, being "radicalised" by participation in these spaces. Most young men who frequent such spaces will not be so inspired, any more than most incels will commit a mass shooting or most Muslims will commit a terror attack. But enough people will that governments and social media companies should recognise that the pathway really exists; should acknowledge that the people spouting violent, hateful rhetoric are not just "venting", but in many cases mean exactly what they say; should take a more proactive hand in banning communities which refuse to change their ways (much as they've done with e.g. subreddits promoting other kinds of violent, hateful content and rhetoric); and should recognise that participation in radical online trans communities may be a potential red flag for violent radicalisation, in the same way that participation in incel or radical Islam spaces would be. And it's utterly hypocritical for Western governments to relentlessly hype up the threat posed by young men being radicalised by the content they find in online incel spaces, while at the same time outright denying that violent trans radicalisation is a thing at all.
There, that's my thesis statement. I've said exactly what I think on this topic many times, an outright majority of them in replies to comments you've posted, and I really don't think I could be any clearer. If you want to insist that I don't mean what I say and I just secretly hate all trans people and am engaging in "dog-whistle politics" or whatever such nonsense, that's your prerogative, but I refuse to play along anymore.
I didn't say that was your argument, those are just examples of why sweeping generalizations are bullshit. They simply are disproven by the large large large majorities that don't engage in the generalization.
I don't need to contest it, in fact I agree with you. I've talked here about stuff like victim complexes and extreme pessimism being a growing issue with the internet. I think a major part of it is algorithms which are explicitly designed to broadcast angry and scary things.
I don't believe trans people are under any meaningful threat, at least not in most western countries. I also don't believe mass shooters of any kind are a meaningful threat to the general public. I consistently say that violence is just not a thing that western first worlders die of, and if you do die of it it is almost always (not literally always but almost always) because you sought it out. People hype up scary anecdotes like some trans prostitute being killed by an ashamed guy or some Ukrainian refugee being killed in a subway by a mentally ill black dude, but those just aren't things that actually happen in real meaningful numbers.
But again refer back to the original question, which one is the chicken and which one is the egg? In my comment I linked above, I talked about how algorithms wouldn't encourage negativity if people didn't bite onto it to begin with. I think social media and online radicalization can be an accelerant, but I do not believe it is the match that starts the fire.
The chicken, the root cause, for many of these violent people is "anti social negativity obsessed violence loving" personalities. The egg, things that happen because of their personality, is participating in violence glorifying forums, seeking out ways to feel superior to others (like embracing neonazi rhetoric), and wanting ways to feel like they can change who they are for the better (some internal shame about their anti social/asocial tendencies) like embracing trans identities.
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Yeah but picking a community that's going to jam you full of extra hormones (though unclear in this case whether he had any particular medical assistance) in an already clouded and confusing time of your life, plus grant a persecution complex due to the narratives around Trans genocide and whatnot. Logically you'd try and get your terminally online asocial losers away from a major cognitive hazard that's gonna increase the likelihood of snowballing into something bad. Without even getting into medical transition having way more potential longterm lock-in ramifications than most edgy teenaged behaviors if you do manage to get medicalized.
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Note that this is about the April 15th school shooting. There was another school shooting in Turkey on April 14th.
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Didn't even have to get to the 2nd paragraph to know the pronouns. How unfortunate (the shooting, although having she/they or he/they pronouns is also deeply stupid).
To focus on "incel violence" over "trans violence" is stupid yes. Although I think both cases the causation is backwards.
Weird, mal-adjusted and outcast boys are generally the ones to do mass shootings. They are also very likely to be trans, incels, or both.
But the root cause is being a weird outcast, not being trans.
So maybe we shouldn't cast out people for being weird then! ("Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs." -- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)
Promote as many anti-bullying initiatives as you please, encourage young children to be more inclusive – in every society, there are going to be people who have a hard time fitting in, who don't get along with their peers, for whom social interaction is challenging. The question is what we do with these people. Simply announcing "we'll just make sure no one feels excluded!" is not a solution.
Your suggestion also sounds suspiciously like a threat. "You see what happens when you don't go out of your way to validate the heckin trans kids? Do you see what happens? Be a shame if it was to happen again..."
And a society which tries to integrate them, to find a place where they can live well, even if it is not always successful, will get better results than one which continually signals to them that they are not wanted and that it would prefer that they quietly disappear.
"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." -- Igbo Proverb
It's not a threat, per se, so much as karma.
What goes around comes around, and if you are cruel to the least of these, whether for 'the greater good' or for your own convenience, sooner or later it will come back to bite you.
I am not advocating for such retaliation, merely pointing out that the most effective strategy for preventing it is to practise the same universal benevolence you ought to have been practising all along.
I find it interesting that this society of yours resides solely in your imagination: mass shootings have been observed in just about every society you care to mention. I wonder why that might be.
What is your evidence for your claim that this is the most effective strategy for preventing it?
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That seems a stretch. Surely there's still a massive contingent of old-fashioned weebs, many of whom aren't even left-wing - last week's thread had an extensive discussion of conflict between woke anime dub localizers and anti-woke anime fans! (Is your argument that these people are all a little older, and all the teenagers are very woke? That would be surprising.)
I'll admit part of it was just the context of this website.
But a post about a shooting by a terminally online man obsessed with anime?
The odds weren't bad for that guess lol
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... yeah. You run into a lot of different outcomes there. Could probably do an interesting "What sort of Attack On Titan fan are you?" question, but I couldn't stand AoT, so can't do it myself. Even in pretty left-leaning woke-heavy places, the trans (and especially) nonbinary numbers are high, but they're not universal or even really a majority. If you're away from the explicitly woke ones, openly rather than merely obviously queer people are still not a majority.
I like the first 2.5 seasons of AoT. Season 4 was awful, not just because of where the story went, but because they decided to switch to weird rotoscoped 3D models instead of traditional animation, and the music was terrible too. But I hated the idea of genociding 80% of the world's population, and Zeke's sterilization idea, and just about everything from the Marleyans' perspective.
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brb, asking ChatGPT to photoshop Jesse Plemons from the Civil War meme into a neckbeard weeb
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