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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.
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.
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.)
... 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.
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