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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.
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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