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Notes -
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.
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
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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