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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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This could shape to be peak toxoplasma. A lot of things are still unknown so my thoughts are pure speculation.

28-year-old woman kills 3 students and 3 adults at private Christian school in Nashville, police say

An armed 28-year-old woman fatally shot three students and three adults at a private Christian school in Nashville before she was shot and killed by police, authorities said, in the deadliest school shooting in nearly a year.

The shooter, who was not identified, entered the Covenant School via a side door and was armed with at least two assault-style rifles and a handgun, said Metro Nashville Police spokesperson Don Aaron. She fired multiple shots on the first and second floors of the school, he said.

A five-member team of police officers heard the gunfire, went to the second floor and fatally shot the woman, Aaron said. The first call about the shooting came in at 10:13 a.m. and the shooter was dead 14 minutes later, he said.

Police initially said the shooter appeared to be in her teens but later said she is a 28-year-old White woman who lives in Nashville. Police Chief John Drake said his initial findings showed she was at one point a student at the school. A vehicle was located nearby and gave clues as to the suspect’s identity, he added.

  • The police seemed to have actually acted adequately. It was not Uvalde - so the only thing resembling a good thing in the situation.

  • This is the first mass school shooting by a woman that I know. Probably the first mass shooting I hear at all committed by a woman.

  • The police released the race and age of the shooter, but not name or picture. There was a macabre joke that if the picture is not shown - the shooter is black. She is unidentified so far - which decreases slightly the chances the shooter was far right.

  • Two AR-15 and a handgun ... probably a loadout a bit high unless you are Caleb. (if you get the Blood reference - sorry buddy - you are officially in the risk cohort for covid by age)

  • Low body count - unexperienced shooter.

So I have the suspicion that either the shooter is trans or someone radicalized over Roe v Wade overturn. Also some last minute news outlets started saying female instead of woman. So I guess trans. Anyway CW-wise - will be toxic as hell.

Edit: NBCNews and NYPOST openly call it transgender woman. Not clear if MtF or FtM. And there seems to be manifesto.

WARNING: The following video contains potentially dangerous levels of Freedomâ„¢. Do not watch if you have recently been exposed to DDT.

Nashville Police release body-cam footage of officers entering the school and engaging the shooter.

Fuck man this stuff really gets me :( - like there's a switch that flips in some peoples' minds when there's somebody that needs help, and they just focus in and do the work.

These guys aren't being slow about it, they're methodically moving towards somebody trying to kill them, because there are some kids that need them.

I don't have much to add here I guess. This video made me tear up. Most human beings have an incredibly powerful instinctual caring for one another, and will absolutely march themselves directly into a meat grinder, without even thinking about it, when it's necessary to help vulnerable people, especially children. If you've ever seen people in this situation you know what I'm talking about.

There's got to be a social aspect to the instinct. That's the only way I can see to explain the seeming unanimity of the response here vs the contrary unanimity at e.g. Uvalde and Broward County. We're not looking at two different models of human, right? There have to be at least a few potential heroes and a few potential cowards in all places? But if you want to be a hero and yet your peers and/or your boss are dithering about "establishing a perimeter", maybe that's enough to keep you from advancing on a gun-toting murderer by yourself; conversely, if your peers are charging forward, even someone who'd rather be elsewhere might not want to be the only coward who doesn't have his friends' backs.

There's got to be a social aspect to the instinct. That's the only way I can see to explain the seeming unanimity of the response here vs the contrary unanimity at e.g. Uvalde and Broward County.

It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino (visibly so), while up to 50% of the US Border Patrol is Hispanic or latino.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/06/26/fact-check-are-half-of-all-border-patrol-agents-hispanic/

  • -16

Dude, come on. Hispanic cultures have their flaws, but cowardice is not one of them.

On its own, this would just be a bad comment I'd probably ding for booing your outgroup and not speaking clearly.

However, you now have a very lengthy record of warnings and bans for these kind of low-effort insinuations made without any kind of substantiation, just a curled upper lip and metaphorical wiggling of eyebrows.

We don't ban criticism of Jews, Chinese, blacks, women, Hispanics, and whichever group you hate today. That doesn't mean this is a place where you can just drop your edgiest hot take about the Racial Outgroup of the day. If you wanted to elaborate on why its "relevant to note" that a mostly Hispanic police force performed poorly compared to a mostly white one, you could have done that, if you'd put enough effort into it for it not to be just like your last few manifestos about Chinese robbers or low-effort sneers about the lower breeds.

But you didn't. You're just doing the same thing, over and over, and degrading the quality of the conversation, and certainly not contributing anything interesting or intelligent in the way of racial theorizing.

@naraburns just told you to stop doing this, and he explicitly told you you were looking at a longer ban. I'm making it two weeks this time. Next time will be months if not permanent.

It was a Hispanic bortac agent who took the guy down.

Shh you weren't supposed to notice that, you were supposed to mindlessly parrot the rationalist consensus. ;-)

Eh, what consensus? I don’t even see anything about the unknowable female mindset.

Are you equating "rationalist" with "white supremacist" now?

Not "white supremacist" so much as "bio determinist".

Edit to elaborate/be less inflametory: Let's be blunt the willingness to argue that things like culture, upbringing, economic background, might matter more than one's skin color has already marked guys like facelesscraven and I as outliers here. The rationalist consensus is that "it's all genetics". As much as this particular user may get downvoted, takes like that of @Lepidus' above are the norm here rather than the exception and far more representative of what "rationalism" as a movement stands for than anything I might write.

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I think it’s more that Uvalde is a small town. You don’t expect to deal with that kind of thing there, whereas I’m sure every major metropolitan police force has real school shooter training.

It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino

I think it’s more that Uvalde is a small town. You don’t expect to deal with that kind of thing there, whereas I’m sure every major metropolitan police force has real school shooter training.

It looked like "making a business decision" to me, not poor planning. As @faceh just posted upthread, they were afraid that the shooter had an AR-15 and knew they'd take casualities. It's unfortunate they weren't equipped to respond to the situation safely. But in any functional non-decadent society, armed men are expected to charge into danger when the community's children are being slaughtered.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

This is partially downstream of immigration and ethnic diversity weakening the country's civic bonds, though I don't draw a straight line between the ethnic makeup of the police and their business decision.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

It's their fundamental responsibility as cops: willingly going into danger on behalf of the larger community. At those tho haven't forgotten they "protect and serve" the people by upholding the law.

While Texas has gotten more Hispanic over the past years, uvalde has, uh, not been a magnet for immigrants. It’s a fairly homogenously Hispanic town that can plausibly claim to have been homogenously Mexican-American Hispanic since 1848 if not before.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

Not a fan of this 'as men' line. Try 'as police officers', or as 'a good person'. I really don't think women should be absolved of such costly responsibilities when they clamor for equality. 'Women can be heroes too'. No, they have to be. Else, the kitchen.

Just because feminism wins in some arenas with its unsustainable social ideas doesn't mean we should cater to all of its delusions. Asymmetry is sometimes better than equality. If we start insisting lady teachers storm doors to stop terrorists, we will get more dead children and teachers. And that will have the disastrous downstream affect of legitimizing more gun control.

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I believe men's lives as expendable in the defense of women and children is a satisfactory social arrangement, possibly the only sustainable one*, extremely honorable, and probably encoded somewhere in our genes. Has there been any culture in history that demanded something like "Return with your shield or on it" of women? I believe that's probably impossible.

* With the ALOHMNBIDTAI proviso ("All Lessons of History May Now Be Irrelevant Due to AI")

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It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino (visibly so)

So were the students. Not exactly an argument that supports a racial solidarity angle.

At least one of the Uvalde cops, if I remember correctly, had a child inside the school and was restrained from entering. Still trying to get my head around the videos of all that beyond a dismissive 'people get weird in weird situations'

Why is that supposed to matter?

40% percent of Americans say that most people can be trusted while only 11% of Mexicans feel the same way. That demographics that differ in social trust people might show differing levels of willingness to take on risks for strangers --- matters.

https://ourworldindata.org/trust

Upvoted for bringing data, but come on: your support for "trust is genetic, not cultural" includes a graph showing levels of trust in Mexico dropping by two thirds in barely a single generation. Did Mexico just finally get colonized by untrusting Mexican people? Or have there been environmental changes (cartel violence) that didn't reflect in America? The Ciudad Juarez homicide rate went from "3x the USA" to "50x the USA" and back (briefly; it's gotten worse again) in just one decade, while on the other side of a river (and wall, and freeways...) the city of El Paso (14% non-Hispanic white, 80% Hispanic) was untouched at "1/2 the USA". It would be entirely reasonable for Hispanics on just one side of the river to get really skeptical about "trust".

Were any of the Uvalde responders not Americans?

If you’re suggesting a mixed-race Latino police force implies a Mexican national’s level of trust implies lower risk-tolerance for strangers explains their terrible response…that seems pretty tenuous.

Why would it be? Garrett Jones makes a compelling case that even European immigrants only assimilate about half-way, generations after they've forgotten even their original language. There is a considerable IQ gap between mestizos and white europeans. Why shouldn't our prior be an absence of complete integration?

Also, the idea that American citizenship means much when you can obtain it without knowing the language is prima-facie absurd. Even if you are a Civ Nat it should be obvious that we are a long way away from anything resembling integration conducive conditions.

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