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Still, it’s a waste of goodwill. People used to want to serve for patriotic reasons. That was pure profit for the state. It was like a charity, they were fed and housed, but some of the work they did was effectively donated. As with billionaires, the state should find ways to encourage donations, not turn them away to make the diversity quota. You know, tell people what they can do for the country, not what the country can do for them, all that jazz.
Sure, in a wider sense the military has been in a slow-motion recruitment crisis since around 1979 (really, since Vietnam). Enlisted pay was boosted by huge amounts in the 80s, and that and high unemployment and Reagan patriotism kept things from boiling over. The 90s saw the military shrink significantly, easing recruitment issues (although they were a big concern in the middle of that decade). A combination of 9/11 and the dotcom bust boosted numbers through the 2000s, then the Great Recession kept things fine until the mid-2010s. Now the historic pattern is just resuming.
A lot of people who enlisted in the 2000s just had a visceral reaction to 9/11 and wanted to go kill Arabs in revenge. That sounds uncharitable, but I don’t mean it that way, it just is what it is. You saw the same impulse in Israel after October 7, it’s just bloodlust and will to vengeance. The “major” Islamist terror attacks on American soil in the last decade have been by some random guy on a gay nightclub, by a Pakistani husband and wife on a California department of health party and by some Chechens on the finish of the Boston Marathon. None killed as many people as died in other mass shootings like the Vegas one committed by a white male with no discernible motive (and almost certainly not an Islamist one). That’s not driving anyone in a red state to war.
The Stephen Paddock case fascinates me as well because I believe it is the first ever truly nihilism motivated serial killing.
This was a Rich White Man (TM) who whiled away the time passively gambling and enjoying a low tier Vegas lifestyle, replete with copious alcohol and something like a mail order girlfriend / occasional prostitutes. His career seems to have been almost comic bookishly boring with a few well timed investments and what appears to have been a dab of family money.
Then he killed 60 people and injured up to 800 with what looked liked about a weeks worth of true planning [^1].
It really looks like this guy just ran out of interest in life and that that ennui then triggered a much deeper explosion of anger about .... the human condition? I don't know what you would call it.
Hand-wavy armchair psychologists will gesture weakly at "he was crazy ... blew a fuse ... drank himself into going schizo." But we know this isn't the action or pathology of someone like that. The Big Names of serial killing (Dahmer, Gacy, Bundy, Ridgeway) all had patterns and escalation paths. This stuff is taught through a literal manual at Quantico now.
Paddock is different. And the speed with which the news cycle moved onward is not evidence, in my opinion, of a conspiracy, but of a stone could whodunit at the largest (individual killer) scale in history.
[1^]: I'm quantifying the planning here in terms of material actions. The idea was in his head far longer (back to Oct 2016 at the least), but I only "start the clock" from when he showed up in the hotel room and then sketched out the shooting dope.
Maybe, but then again the link between nihilism and mass murder isn’t very clear either, there’s a reason it would be the first nihilism inspired mass murder as you say, namely that nihilists usually just kill themselves. And again, killers of the ‘rage against the world’ type usually leave some kind of manifesto, even if it’s incoherent. I wonder if it wasn’t kind of amusing or interesting to him, and he just decided to follow through for the hell of it. And alcoholism would have an effect on his inhibitions.
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What exactly is the conspiracy?
That the attack wasn’t motiveless (the official narrative says it was).
It's not really a conspiracy if cui bono isn't spelled out.
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The main conspiracy, which seems to be that it was an attempted assassination of MBS, doesn’t make sense if you look into it. I think that as with other conspiracies there’s a ‘soft’ version where Paddock was maybe involved in some marginally shady military supply stuff but also wasn’t an assassin and/or terrorist.
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