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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.
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
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 that it 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.
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.
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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.
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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 antisemetic 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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