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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.
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".)
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.
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 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 it's 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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