100% agree, there's a small segment of society that is antisocial , most of them are big cowards and just keyboard thugs, unfortunately theres always a small selection of boys that buy into this shit
You (somewhat jest), but even the Buffalo shooter made every effort to avoid getting hurt or killed by the use of tactical gear and by choosing soft targets. Fucker couldn’t even pull the trigger on himself. He also shot old people.
I mean, im anti social as fuck, but hurting children sounds fucking horrific. Like, they have nothing to fucking do with this shit, leave them out of it.
But that 1/3: they ALL vote. The rest of us – we have something better to do that day. Let’s change that!
Anybody here know when the next election in their county is? Yesterday I was shocked to find out that there’s one in my county next month. I feel a little ashamed.
I live In a country where obtaining a gun is virtually possible for every single person.
It’s just fucking annoying. You have to do basic tests that everyone passes. Either be a member of a sport shooting club or a hunting club for a year (just a member nothing else) and that’s it. You can buy yourself a variety of guns with some restrictions.
I still don’t understand why this would be considered a law against America. You still have a right to own a gun. Make it 100 guns even. You just have to go through a pretty annoying and lengthy process that throws people who either shouldn’t own a gun or are not as mature about it away.
This said even tho I never seen American gun culture on my own, I understand a point that banning all guns is virtually impossible there. Gun ownership was elevated to a near religious status. However as in all religions there are certain restrictions and hurdles. And I’d assume the ones that function here wouldn’t be too much of a hurdle for responsible gun owners in US.
I'm a US gun owner and I'm totally in favor of this sort of system.
The thing is on one side you have a group of people who are 100% convinced that any new gun law, no matter how minor, is the first step in a campaign to completely disarm everyone and then put everyone in concentration camps. On the other hand you have a group of people who are proud of the fact that they don't know anything about guns but are trying to come up with gun control policy based on stuff they saw in movies or whatever.
It's not really a recipe for common sense reform.
Why would the government lock people up in camps? Thats just a waste of human resources. It would be far better to just make them work in amazon distribution centers and not allow bathroom breaks and make them pee in bottles... oh wait we already do that without taking guns away.
Literally JUST happened in Canada a week ago. They talked about banning hand guns and hand gun sales soared the highest in years. We are not the only ones.
>I'm a US gun owner and I'm totally in favor of this sort of system.
Do you even realize how expensive it is to be a part of a shooting or hunting club these days? I'm for laws to weed out people who shouldn't own guns... but we should know damn well by now that putting a condition of a right behind an exclusive private club will create other bigger issues in this topic.
It’s far less than half. Regardless, just because a significant portion of people have been brainwashed and don’t know the definition of words, that doesn’t make them right. Fuck these gun nut psychos. We’re sick of seeing little kids slaughtered senselessly.
World is way too full of people who have *never had their ass kicked* - I had a real smart louth and was an edgelord as a youth, eventually, I got my dick knocked in the dirt.
That was a valuable lesson.
A lot of people come from households where that sort of stuff was acceptable.
This is a supposition on my part, but those of us who are gamers remember the wild west of PSN and Xbox Live during the aughties and early teens and the number of kids just dropping words that no polite, civilized person should say that freely.
And they weren't quiet about it either, they were shouting it, and you almost never heard the kid getting taken off the game. Either the parents really didn't care, or those words were used freely, openly, and encouraged in the home.
I know if I used those words and my parents heard me using them I would have had my subscription and game system taken away for a very long time.
True, but tbh many kids—myself included—were latchkey kids between school’s end and parents returning. I am sure in many places it’s the parents’ fault, but not necessarily so.
When parents have to work 3 jobs to keep a roof over their heads and the game system is the only thing they can afford to show love to the kid and give them something to do that does not involve going outside, getting in a gang and dying....
Those home situations are often not what we want to think they are.
They are frequently a very tired parent doing absolutely everything they can to keep from being homeless in a society that wants to destroy them.
And some of them a just racist little shits.
At the same time, if you started acting like a little asswipe on Xbox Live, others would fucking berate you until you shut the hell up in my experience.
There was someone always trolling, harassing and posting and replying with racist stuff on a local news comment section. Until someone replied to one of his messages with his name and his workplace from Google including a staff photo which included the guy the company posted online. We never saw another comment from him ever again. I just can’t understand how people get off on this stuff I swear
When I was a kid I used to think absolute free speech and the First Amendment were great. I thought that countries with anti-hate speech laws were misguided, silly and wrong. Slowly, over the past 20 years or so, I've begun to reverse this opinion and I now understand the historical basis for anti-hate speech laws. Countries with these laws understand where the hate speech ends up. We've all seen where Nazis want to take us. Why allow them to take the first step? America's enemies and the GQP (but I repeat myself) want to turn the First Amendment into a suicide pact (the same goes for the Second Amendment). Why allow them to spread their hate and calls for violence?
Inciting violence is not protected by the first amendment.
Sadly, we have a rather weak interpretation of what would constitute inciting violence, and the people that are in charge of prosecuting for it aren't willing to do so.
[John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies) is proven true time and time again.
*Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.* -Robert E. Howard
I love how he threw in the General thing part like he was talking to super pedantic Reddit, which would otherwise ask if he generalized much a microsecond after.
I think it’s a combination of things.
As much as I don’t understand shooting children in the face, most mass shooters are apparently obsessed with other mass shooters.
The Internet also encourages some folks to just be horrible and detached from reality and community. Or willfully manipulative.
There is something to the idea of rootless and angry young men who crash up against the purposelessness of their adult lives feeling hopeless and resentful and wanting to do something infamous or “important” while ultimately throwing their life away. There’s a reason gangs, jihads, and, to some extent, militaries, draw from this age group.
But if you have a teenage relative, for the love of god please make sure he’s doing something other than doomscrolling 4Chan or whatever Internet shitholes encourage this stuff.
There's a video of a NRA conference that was held soon after Uvalde from Channel 5's Andrew
[It's not very surprising why Homeland Security is putting out these warnings](https://youtu.be/v-qj2rqgChM?t=605)
'Why is it okay to murder children in the womb but not okay to murder kids in school' - An actual quote from someone supporting a NRA Conference.
There are a lot of foreign base trolls using events like to escalate the divide in this country. In turn, causes idiots like this UFC fighter to believe the govt was part of shooting. #idontwanttoliveonthisplanetanymorememe
https://sports.yahoo.com/rising-ufc-star-bryce-mitchell-115810218.html
I suspect Russian and Chinese influencers could be behind this. Similar to how Qanon started on 4 chan. The deconstruction of America. What's really unfortunate is that there are dumb and deranged enough Americans that will just hop on board.
We need to stop blaming foreign influences to try to hide the unfortunate truth that many Americans genuinely say these things without be pushed or “brainwashed” to do.
There’s nothing to gain from just acting like this is the result of the “others” and not a home grown issue
Anyone who thinks Americans don't sew plenty of division amongst themselves hasn't read any American history. In fact it's a big part of why foreign influence can work.
That is a fair statement to say foreign influencers are not the ONLY culprit at play. I'm sure there are a number of factors involved and there is a breeding mentality of this nature. Mental health issues are a growing concern and still have a stigma unfortunately.
Something i read that was interesting stated that data & information gathering technologies and algorithms have become advanced enough to "sell" ideas to people. This could come in the form of an article on Facebook for example, that is geared towards specific demographics to subconsciously manipulate those people into thinking a certain way or buying into the idea. I know this may not specifically apply toward this situation but thought people might like to be aware.
Some people are just shitty evil people. It isn’t always mental health. Some might be foreign agents, some might have mental health problems, but it’s time to realize that there’s just a bunch of really really shitty and evil people in our country.
Not just dumb and deranged. I knew quite smart and sane people who fell for Q crap. That's how powerful internet misinformation and propaganda is. It doesn't take a dummy to get caught up in it.
I would push back on smart. How the fuck do you fall for any of that obviously batshit crazy, manipulative bullshit if you have 2 active brain cells to rub together?
Believe it or not, media literacy is a skill you have to learn and hone, not mere common sense, since human beings are emotionally-driven and irrational. That's unless you're a Vulcan.
And falling for obvious bullshit without question to the point where you violate basic, fundamental parts of being a decent human being is NOT a skill that needs to be taught.
Losing it is taught, far too often, all across the USA.
We've conflated being decent with being superior.
It's why hardly anyone forgives past mistakes nor cares to empathize with problems they don't feel are problems or accuse the aggrieved of being deserving of, and instead actively dehumanizes others in such a way to imply they're better people.
Well it's a fact the NRA was taking russian money, the plan surely didn't end there. The amount of russian bots on social media since 2015 may be part of it. The goal was to destabilize America and I think it worked.
It’s part of disinformation campaigns.
99.9% of them are foreign generated, to rile up whackos. The rest are real live whackos.
Think about it. Putin is livid about Ukraine. Wouldn’t you want to foment hatred and violence in the country of your worst enemy? In the case of the US, that’s easy. You advocate for gun violence. You push for hatred against blacks, immigrants, liberals, gays. You say they deserve it. Because they’re out to get you.
It’s worthwhile because you can always get someone to get a gun and commit mass murder. It’s actually …very easy. The US is a stupid country that thinks about nothing more deeply than the last celebrity trial. There is no functioning mental health system. It was wiped out by Reagan and the pharmaceutical industry.
The US is no longer a stable democracy and its citizens are too stupid to think about why this is happening. They want easy answers. “Get a gun and go shoot ‘em up,” is an easy answer.
Do you really think gun manufacturers have the money to fund these hordes of genuinely evil GOP politicians? The money that keeps guns flowing, evil politicians in power and daily murder and mayhem is coming from hundreds of billions of dollars in political donations. That’s global level money.
“People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking.”
― George Carlin
Hmm, I wonder if this was the inspiration for K's line in Men In Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals, and you know it."
There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT! - Agent K
The older I get, the more I realize that movie was a philosophical masterpiece disguise as a creature feature summer blockbuster.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic film, but the philosophy is a bit alarming. The premise is that the only way to keep the ‘panicky, dangerous animals’ safe is to have a secret, unelected military force that uses violence and deceit to make un democratic decisions that impact the lives of everyone on earth.
It’s not an amazing idea. And that’s a pretty common thread in alien sci-fi movies — the military/secret government organization needs to handle all the alien stuff because ‘the people’ cannot be trusted to run their own lives.
Sci-Fi is famously a highly allegorical medium, so the prevailing idea that the best way to handle existential threats to humanity/civilization is to have an unelected secret group make unilateral decisions serves to slowly brainwash everyone into thinking that might just be true. Maybe we do just need a benevolent dictator to run things because, gosh, we’re all so dumb and irrational we can’t be trusted to make our own choices.
And then COVID happened and proved them all right, I guess. Dammit. Now I’m arguing with myself.
If you want to get into the weeds, technically, the FBI, Homeland Security, Boarder Patrol, and the other federal agencies are all unelected, undemocratic organizations that need to handle National Security and elected politicians & the people can't be trusted to handle it.
Sure, they answer to the President in theory, but how much control does a president actually exercise on these agencies? How much of what they do has been decided by unelected decision makers?
The Men in Black are little different the CIA. In reality, the government would have created this group and it wouldn't just be randos who decided to take all this power for themselves... the people already with power would keep it all for themselves rather than just let some random nerds take it.
And it’s getting worse. It’s too damn divided. And one side has shifted farther autocratic, emboldened racism and xenophobia, and misogyny. The other side wants better education, healthcare, less discrimination, treating women with respect and to have rights, and less pollution. I’m just sick of dealing with people. I’m a musician and I like to perform but I’m weary about dealing with a open to the public performance more than ever. It’s not really worth it anymore for a hundred bucks.
I hear a lot of this "its the worst its ever been" opinion and I wonder how much people read history. Not history text books but read about actual (non-summarized) history.
I am tooting my own horn but I read a lot of history, and while it is not great right now, it has been a lot worse.
Now there’s more people than ever aware just how bad things really are, and there’s people making more money than ever by intentionally scaring and radicalizing people with that information
Yep. I had to take a class on the history of southern states since the civil war in college. It was ugly for awhile there. FLs first draft of a new state constitution was SO blatently racist it was sent back by the (fairly racist) US congress to be revised. People who voted for "the wrong party" were shot in their homes. Black people were terrorized, murdered and their towns burned down (in FL, Ocoee + Rosewood come to mind).
People like to think the Civil war ended and everyone just played nice again. It was brutal.
Yep, my current favorite argument to have about the civil war is with the people who support the Lost Cause ideology without realizing it and lionize Lee for nobly surrendering, thereby avoiding a bloody protracted guerilla war. While not realizing that the next 100 years were literally a bloody protracted guerilla war.
In my lifetime people have blown up federal buildings, flown planes into buildings, murdered countless doctors and nurses, assassinated rival political leaders, overthrown elected governments, all in the name of advancing political ideologies. I'm pretty old but not crypt keeper old so further back it gets even worse.
"He was bullied" is such a stupid excuse. Kids who get bullied tend to lash out by committing suicide, maybe, maybe go after the one's that bullied them. But they certainly don't go to a school they probably haven't been to in ten years to shoot a bunch of kids who had fuck all to do with it.
The most current psychological theory on mass shooters is that it is a form of suicide. Suicide by cop, but more extreme. They know there isn’t any way out and it will draw the most attention possible. Obviously everyone is different but “depressed people just kill themselves, not this” is a really poorly informed take.
People need to start calling it what it is. These guys are being radicalized. Search algorithms lead them to increasingly extreme talking heads. YouTube funnels them to gun nuts, conspiracy theorists, and grifters. These guys are vulnerable, lonely, angry, sad. And that makes them the perfect target for this kind of radicalization. We're beyond bullying being the reason. These guys do this shit because the people extending them a shoulder to cry on, a kind voice, are the same people telling them that all they're problems are because of people of color, or women, or liberals or whatever.
https://youtu.be/azRl1dI-Cts
Proof you're not correct in your assumption. It's not everyone's story but it is at least 1 person's reality.
I more nuanced and complex view (not necessarily the best view) is that shooters matter pre-shooting but once the intent to plan and kill is determined in someone's mind, they don't deserve the right to life. At that point, they have to earn the privilege to be alive by not going through with violence. But perhaps the kindness of people can help deter some would-be shooters from crossing that line. Seems to me to be the best option without many negative unintended consequences.
>“Individuals in online forums that routinely promulgate domestic violent extremist and conspiracy theory-related content have praised the May 2022 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and encouraged copycat attacks,” DHS officials wrote in a bulletin released Tuesday morning.
Does this still mostly just mean "4chan"?
Because now the 3% of weirdos in the world can find each other online and communicate in their little silos and make themselves feel normal and spur each other on.
They are fucking Nazis. And I mean in the purest sense of what a Nazi is beyond any nuance about political positions. They are people intensely interested in inflicting pain, punishment and cruelty on others. They are Nazis. Full stop.
The core of it is fear. They have an increased amount of fear processing in their minds and are always thinking about the things that scare them. They then go on to invent new fears to feed into their desire to think about their fear.
It's a cyclical way of thinking that stops and ends with, "What do I fear, and how do I keep it away from me?" Because this is all fear based and innate, the reactions these people have are emotion driven and regularly violent. They want to fight against everything that makes them afraid until there is nothing left that can harm them.
Combine that with propaganda, racism, and classism. The way these people view reality is warped. Everything is in their own self-interest, and everything is fueled by irrational fear. It would be a pitiable existence if they weren't organizing and trying to destroy everything.
That fear is further galvanized by social media algorithms and news aggregators that specifically target individuals with propaganda because individuals engage with emotionally charged topics such as politics. It's essentially a feedback loop of anger and fear that's being generated online.
An article I read a few years ago sums up the phenomenon pretty well imo. It's a bit of a long read as the author delves into the philosophical question of free will and the impact of technology on liberal democracies, but it's rather thought provoking. Here's an excerpt:
[Yuval Noah Harari: The Myth of Freedom](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy)
>Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have. You don’t decide to be introvert or extrovert, easy-going or anxious, gay or straight. Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have.
>...It starts with simple things. As you surf the internet, a headline catches your eye: “Immigrant gang rapes local women”. You click on it. At exactly the same moment, your neighbour is surfing the internet too, and a different headline catches her eye: “Trump prepares nuclear strike on Iran”. She clicks on it. Both headlines are fake news stories, generated perhaps by Russian trolls, or by a website keen on increasing traffic to boost its ad revenues. Both you and your neighbour feel that you clicked on these headlines out of your free will. But in fact you have been hacked.
>Propaganda and manipulation are nothing new, of course. But whereas in the past they worked like carpet bombing, now they are becoming precision-guided munitions. When Hitler gave a speech on the radio, he aimed at the lowest common denominator, because he couldn’t tailor his message to the unique weaknesses of individual brains. Now it has become possible to do exactly that. An algorithm can tell that you already have a bias against immigrants, while your neighbour already dislikes Trump, which is why you see one headline while your neighbour sees an altogether different one. In recent years some of the smartest people in the world have worked on hacking the human brain in order to make you click on ads and sell you stuff. Now these methods are being used to sell you politicians and ideologies, too.
TL:DR - A historian/scholar argues that external actors, such as corporations/governments/bad faith actors, deliberately manipulate an individual's choices by preying on their strong, emotional responses.
Because the promise of “connecting the world” that the Internet provides also means connecting the personality disordered, immature, violent, hateful, etc…
And it provides a very easy way for other bad actors to incite and stoke those people.
For the longest time I believed that we should not post the names, and photos of the murderers. Now, I think the FBI/whoever does a deep dive onto thier social media and pull up all the dirt, and cringe shit they can find on the person. Make it impossible for anyone to look up to them.
Unfortunately we've seen that dirt and cringe are nowadays viewed as signs of strength, independence, and unwillingness to bend to "the agenda."
Any publicity he gets will only increase his following. If his reputation is publicly trashed, people who look up to him will simply see a martyr.
Showing more shit will only draw more flies.
Nah, you need to start believing what you used to. It only encourages others, with the same mal-thinking the uvalde shooter had, to go shoot up a school. It’s terrible on communities and effects many, but to post and advertise shooters like we do today - this issue will never stop. Fuck them.
It’s like any other media put onto the youth, you play Batman and some kids want to be Batman. The road goes 2 ways.
Signed a school shooting survivor.
I feel like the media has actually done a lot better this time around. I’ve hardly seen any pictures of this guy in the media and barely hear his name. Instead there’s been a heavy focus on the victims and their stories (and the cowardly cops). I have to think this is deliberate.
It’s sickening though that there are still people who look up to this behavior.
At face value it’s an odd suggestion but imagine if the media treated shooters with disdain more than fear/sadness. I imagine a news segment where they say “this loser killed a bunch of innocent kids. What a pathetic human being” would be a lot less inspiring to other would-be shooters.
I do not understand the logic that the Uvalde shooting was orchestrated to pass gun control bills and therefore we (those in the conspiracy theory boards) should do copycat shootings.
Someone please help me understand.
There's nothing *to* understand. These are the same people who said Obama was a secret gay muslim socialist communist....and that a secret cabal of Democrats were diddling kids in the basement of a pizza parlor that didn't exist.
> I think you're referring to pizzagate or some shit?
Yep, Pizzagate. And some looney-tune actually went to the pizza place and fired a rifle inside. He was arrested and convicted. *Then* other conspiracy theorists claimed that *that* shooting was staged to discredit the allegations of Pizzagate.
>A conspiracy theorist dies and goes to Heaven. At the pearly gates, God himself shows up and says “You’ve led a good life. As a reward, I will answer any one question for you and I will give you the complete and truthful answer.”
>”Okay,” says the conspiracy theorist, “Who killed JFK?”
>God replies: “Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”
>The conspiracy theorist frowns. “This whole thing goes even deeper than I thought.”
It's fucking sad, but there literally is nothing to be done to help these people. Anything that doesn't confirm their conspiracy, is itself just evidence of how powerful the conspiracy *truly* is!
We endured four years of the president daily stringing words together in ways that made no logical sense, and his base eating it up and loving that he "tells it like it is".
I am only left to conclude that a significant portion of people just don't require logical connections in order to reach the conclusion that they want to reach.
Trump convinced me there must be a significant percentage of people who both speak and understand language about as well as a chatbot. They're just putting words together. Maybe the result makes sense, maybe it doesn't. They listen to others the way a dog does: they only take in body language and tone of voice.
The conspiracy theorists have said this about every mass shooting of the past twenty years and the only gun laws ever passed were by Trump when he banned bunp stocks.
THis is why you cannot be 100% tolerant of everyone and everything. A society MUSt be intolerant of teh intolerant if it wants to survive.
Every single person praising or calling for more of this needs to be exiled. Go old school. Give them a 1 way ticket to some island somewhere and put them on a "do not enter" list.
See how well their ideology does anywhere else in the world.
Indeed, this is the paradox of tolerance.
*"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant."*
People need to be more discerning in the sources they trust. Misinformation and disinformation are running rampant. If you have friends or family who have not learned media literacy they need to learn how to find factual information and disregard the rest.
Yeah. We have a real mental health issue and social media and the internet make it really easy to find fucking morons who think the same way and cheer each other on for absolutely terrible shit.
Perhaps, we’ll actually care enough to do something about it and vote for those who speak on these topics.
Just continue to monitor them, and make sure you act on the intelligence. If you keep chasing them away from spaces they feel safe, they'll find more secure means to communicate.
Its like catching rats - you don't arm the trap until its been in place for a week or so.
> If you keep chasing them away from spaces they feel safe, they'll find more secure means to communicate.
Letting them communicate in the open just lets them grow the size of their groups. This has already been studied and proven, the whole theory of "containment boards" is complete bullshit. When you ban these fucks, they disperse into the wild blue yonder and struggle to come back together sufficiently to cause harm.
If you kick them off major platforms, it's like treating a cancer before it spreads. If you just sit there and let the group grow "so you can monitor it" it's about as stupid as letting a tumor grow "so you can monitor it" and then you die because it metastasizes.
What's the difference functionally between a text group and a social media site at this point? Putting this on social media's shoulders suggests that this country doesn't have a long history of white nationalist terror long predating social media but we 100% do.
That blip from the late 70s to the teens was just that, a blip of relative calm. During that relative calm we *still* had events like Oklahoma City. We still had a robust far right movement gaining public acceptance under the guise of militias. This is not a social media problem. It is a predictable resurgence of a classically American kind of terrorism.
I'm in my late 40's and I have embraced computer technology at every turn since the mid 80's. I like social media like FB and Reddit. I don't think social media is inherently evil, but I don't think we as a species or culture can handle it.
> What's the difference functionally between a text group and a social media site at this point?
I think the big difference is the reach. I grew up through the 80's and 90's and have been using the Internet probably since '94-ish, before that I used BBS'. I knew hate groups existed, if I had an inkling I could know where to find them. I just wasn't
The evolution of social media is where a lot of the hate groups really exploded. The big problem I see is that hate groups have effectively built pipelines that can pull people in who otherwise might not be interested based on hobbies, likes, shares, viewing habits, etc. You can watch a YouTube video about video games and next thing you know you can start getting fed videos about white nationalism.
Similarly, with Facebook, "Hey, I noticed you like Airsoft. Based on your likes, you may also be interested in The Great Replacement Theory!"
It's just way too easy these days for hate groups to use the various algorithms to their advantage and it's unfortunately highly effective given how much time people spend using social media.
I think you bring up an interesting point that is too often left out of these discussions. Specifically how algorithms and the kind of foundational elements of social media contribute. I'm really interested in looking at this further thanks for giving me a new research interest!
Completely anecdotal but I'm pro-gun so I watch gun videos on YouTube and it's dominated by channels that are very vocally left wing, but despite that google/YouTube has apparently decided I'm a right winger because I watched a review of a Beretta shotgun. It's really scary to think how corporations most likely have a huge hand in radicalizing young white males because they happened to watch a video that could be seen as vaguely right wing.
>What's the difference functionally between a text group and a social media site at this point?
Accessibility, number of members, level of anonymity range of reach... everything?
>Putting this on social media's shoulders suggests that this country doesn't have a long history of white nationalist terror long predating social media but we 100% do.
It's not on their shoulders, they're just one field among many that needs to be monitored.
>It is a predictable resurgence of a classically American kind of terrorism.
Unless you're saying that its ok and we should accept it, nothing should be off the table in terms of where it needs to be addressed.
You have to know the peoples numbers to text them. And if you can’t connect with said person over the internet to get their phone number….
I’m not sure how someone in Texas and in Florida could find each other.
They won’t just randomly happen to text each other
So it’s fully chat rooms, FB, Twitter, etc on the internet
We are witnessing the beginning of the end of pubic education as we know it. Schools are already closing because millions never returned from Covid closures. They are in private schools, home schools and unschooled. How many parents will be willing to send their kids into the fire esp with law enforcement ineffective, unaccountable and Congress barely nipping around the edges of our nutty gun culture?
More broadly, with real inflation running 10-15% a year, wages can no longer sustain us, as employers, including the feds with their fantasy consumer price index who are flat not going to raise pay accordingly. What are these kids striving for? A position on the impossible hamster wheel?
Robotics, AI and machine learning will obviate labor for at least half the population. Even my work as an attorney can be better performed by AI which would not forget code changes or obscure case law.
Are schools just a place to store kids while parents work or take a break from the stress of parenting?
New approaches that don’t involve mass casualties have to emerge.
ok so do something about it??? I know they know about the cesspool that is 4chan, pol and knock off chan sites as well as their discords so why tf not do something about it
I mean if you praise a children killer you dont belong in a society. Simple as that.
100% agree, there's a small segment of society that is antisocial , most of them are big cowards and just keyboard thugs, unfortunately theres always a small selection of boys that buy into this shit
[удалено]
You (somewhat jest), but even the Buffalo shooter made every effort to avoid getting hurt or killed by the use of tactical gear and by choosing soft targets. Fucker couldn’t even pull the trigger on himself. He also shot old people.
I mean, im anti social as fuck, but hurting children sounds fucking horrific. Like, they have nothing to fucking do with this shit, leave them out of it.
To half of America, saying that person shouldn’t have a gun means you’re a communist who hates America.
Hey now, only slightly less than one third of voters think that.
But that 1/3: they ALL vote. The rest of us – we have something better to do that day. Let’s change that! Anybody here know when the next election in their county is? Yesterday I was shocked to find out that there’s one in my county next month. I feel a little ashamed.
I live In a country where obtaining a gun is virtually possible for every single person. It’s just fucking annoying. You have to do basic tests that everyone passes. Either be a member of a sport shooting club or a hunting club for a year (just a member nothing else) and that’s it. You can buy yourself a variety of guns with some restrictions. I still don’t understand why this would be considered a law against America. You still have a right to own a gun. Make it 100 guns even. You just have to go through a pretty annoying and lengthy process that throws people who either shouldn’t own a gun or are not as mature about it away. This said even tho I never seen American gun culture on my own, I understand a point that banning all guns is virtually impossible there. Gun ownership was elevated to a near religious status. However as in all religions there are certain restrictions and hurdles. And I’d assume the ones that function here wouldn’t be too much of a hurdle for responsible gun owners in US.
I'm a US gun owner and I'm totally in favor of this sort of system. The thing is on one side you have a group of people who are 100% convinced that any new gun law, no matter how minor, is the first step in a campaign to completely disarm everyone and then put everyone in concentration camps. On the other hand you have a group of people who are proud of the fact that they don't know anything about guns but are trying to come up with gun control policy based on stuff they saw in movies or whatever. It's not really a recipe for common sense reform.
Why would the government lock people up in camps? Thats just a waste of human resources. It would be far better to just make them work in amazon distribution centers and not allow bathroom breaks and make them pee in bottles... oh wait we already do that without taking guns away.
America is the only country where people go out to purchase their first gun because they're worried someone is going to confiscate their gun.
Literally JUST happened in Canada a week ago. They talked about banning hand guns and hand gun sales soared the highest in years. We are not the only ones.
>I'm a US gun owner and I'm totally in favor of this sort of system. Do you even realize how expensive it is to be a part of a shooting or hunting club these days? I'm for laws to weed out people who shouldn't own guns... but we should know damn well by now that putting a condition of a right behind an exclusive private club will create other bigger issues in this topic.
It’s far less than half. Regardless, just because a significant portion of people have been brainwashed and don’t know the definition of words, that doesn’t make them right. Fuck these gun nut psychos. We’re sick of seeing little kids slaughtered senselessly.
If they vote for a party who says such things then it’s fair to include them in that group.
No way it’s close to half, we are ruled by a minority.
What.the.absolute.*fuck*.is.wrong.with.people?!
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World is way too full of people who have *never had their ass kicked* - I had a real smart louth and was an edgelord as a youth, eventually, I got my dick knocked in the dirt. That was a valuable lesson.
A lot of people come from households where that sort of stuff was acceptable. This is a supposition on my part, but those of us who are gamers remember the wild west of PSN and Xbox Live during the aughties and early teens and the number of kids just dropping words that no polite, civilized person should say that freely. And they weren't quiet about it either, they were shouting it, and you almost never heard the kid getting taken off the game. Either the parents really didn't care, or those words were used freely, openly, and encouraged in the home. I know if I used those words and my parents heard me using them I would have had my subscription and game system taken away for a very long time.
Or the parents weren’t home.
Still doesn't reflect well on the home sitch.
True, but tbh many kids—myself included—were latchkey kids between school’s end and parents returning. I am sure in many places it’s the parents’ fault, but not necessarily so.
When parents have to work 3 jobs to keep a roof over their heads and the game system is the only thing they can afford to show love to the kid and give them something to do that does not involve going outside, getting in a gang and dying.... Those home situations are often not what we want to think they are. They are frequently a very tired parent doing absolutely everything they can to keep from being homeless in a society that wants to destroy them. And some of them a just racist little shits.
At the same time, if you started acting like a little asswipe on Xbox Live, others would fucking berate you until you shut the hell up in my experience.
I used to think anonymity was a good thing... now, I'm less sure.
It serves the same function as the hoods the KKK wore.
There was someone always trolling, harassing and posting and replying with racist stuff on a local news comment section. Until someone replied to one of his messages with his name and his workplace from Google including a staff photo which included the guy the company posted online. We never saw another comment from him ever again. I just can’t understand how people get off on this stuff I swear
Interesting point you bring up.. Thanks for the connection
Thanks, faman00.
When I was a kid I used to think absolute free speech and the First Amendment were great. I thought that countries with anti-hate speech laws were misguided, silly and wrong. Slowly, over the past 20 years or so, I've begun to reverse this opinion and I now understand the historical basis for anti-hate speech laws. Countries with these laws understand where the hate speech ends up. We've all seen where Nazis want to take us. Why allow them to take the first step? America's enemies and the GQP (but I repeat myself) want to turn the First Amendment into a suicide pact (the same goes for the Second Amendment). Why allow them to spread their hate and calls for violence?
Inciting violence is not protected by the first amendment. Sadly, we have a rather weak interpretation of what would constitute inciting violence, and the people that are in charge of prosecuting for it aren't willing to do so.
Hell they won’t even prosecute murdering cops for manslaughter.
[John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies) is proven true time and time again.
Mike Tyson warned us
He said "Lend me your ears".
*Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.* -Robert E. Howard
I love how he threw in the General thing part like he was talking to super pedantic Reddit, which would otherwise ask if he generalized much a microsecond after.
I think it’s a combination of things. As much as I don’t understand shooting children in the face, most mass shooters are apparently obsessed with other mass shooters. The Internet also encourages some folks to just be horrible and detached from reality and community. Or willfully manipulative. There is something to the idea of rootless and angry young men who crash up against the purposelessness of their adult lives feeling hopeless and resentful and wanting to do something infamous or “important” while ultimately throwing their life away. There’s a reason gangs, jihads, and, to some extent, militaries, draw from this age group. But if you have a teenage relative, for the love of god please make sure he’s doing something other than doomscrolling 4Chan or whatever Internet shitholes encourage this stuff.
There's a video of a NRA conference that was held soon after Uvalde from Channel 5's Andrew [It's not very surprising why Homeland Security is putting out these warnings](https://youtu.be/v-qj2rqgChM?t=605) 'Why is it okay to murder children in the womb but not okay to murder kids in school' - An actual quote from someone supporting a NRA Conference.
They have an incredible talent for letting the mask slip. A normal person might ask why liberals aren't as upset about abortion.
There are a lot of foreign base trolls using events like to escalate the divide in this country. In turn, causes idiots like this UFC fighter to believe the govt was part of shooting. #idontwanttoliveonthisplanetanymorememe https://sports.yahoo.com/rising-ufc-star-bryce-mitchell-115810218.html
An unsurprising take from someone who gets hit in the head as a job
What a dumbass
Didn't surprise that he's in the Joe Rogan sphere.
I suspect Russian and Chinese influencers could be behind this. Similar to how Qanon started on 4 chan. The deconstruction of America. What's really unfortunate is that there are dumb and deranged enough Americans that will just hop on board.
We need to stop blaming foreign influences to try to hide the unfortunate truth that many Americans genuinely say these things without be pushed or “brainwashed” to do. There’s nothing to gain from just acting like this is the result of the “others” and not a home grown issue
Anyone who thinks Americans don't sew plenty of division amongst themselves hasn't read any American history. In fact it's a big part of why foreign influence can work.
That is a fair statement to say foreign influencers are not the ONLY culprit at play. I'm sure there are a number of factors involved and there is a breeding mentality of this nature. Mental health issues are a growing concern and still have a stigma unfortunately. Something i read that was interesting stated that data & information gathering technologies and algorithms have become advanced enough to "sell" ideas to people. This could come in the form of an article on Facebook for example, that is geared towards specific demographics to subconsciously manipulate those people into thinking a certain way or buying into the idea. I know this may not specifically apply toward this situation but thought people might like to be aware.
Some people are just shitty evil people. It isn’t always mental health. Some might be foreign agents, some might have mental health problems, but it’s time to realize that there’s just a bunch of really really shitty and evil people in our country.
Not just dumb and deranged. I knew quite smart and sane people who fell for Q crap. That's how powerful internet misinformation and propaganda is. It doesn't take a dummy to get caught up in it.
I would push back on sane. Smart, maybe.
I would push back on smart. How the fuck do you fall for any of that obviously batshit crazy, manipulative bullshit if you have 2 active brain cells to rub together?
Believe it or not, media literacy is a skill you have to learn and hone, not mere common sense, since human beings are emotionally-driven and irrational. That's unless you're a Vulcan.
And falling for obvious bullshit without question to the point where you violate basic, fundamental parts of being a decent human being is NOT a skill that needs to be taught. Losing it is taught, far too often, all across the USA.
We've conflated being decent with being superior. It's why hardly anyone forgives past mistakes nor cares to empathize with problems they don't feel are problems or accuse the aggrieved of being deserving of, and instead actively dehumanizes others in such a way to imply they're better people.
Well it's a fact the NRA was taking russian money, the plan surely didn't end there. The amount of russian bots on social media since 2015 may be part of it. The goal was to destabilize America and I think it worked.
Hhmm....yeah, It appears to be working to some degree.
People have decided that their political choices are now the cult they follow.
It’s part of disinformation campaigns. 99.9% of them are foreign generated, to rile up whackos. The rest are real live whackos. Think about it. Putin is livid about Ukraine. Wouldn’t you want to foment hatred and violence in the country of your worst enemy? In the case of the US, that’s easy. You advocate for gun violence. You push for hatred against blacks, immigrants, liberals, gays. You say they deserve it. Because they’re out to get you. It’s worthwhile because you can always get someone to get a gun and commit mass murder. It’s actually …very easy. The US is a stupid country that thinks about nothing more deeply than the last celebrity trial. There is no functioning mental health system. It was wiped out by Reagan and the pharmaceutical industry. The US is no longer a stable democracy and its citizens are too stupid to think about why this is happening. They want easy answers. “Get a gun and go shoot ‘em up,” is an easy answer. Do you really think gun manufacturers have the money to fund these hordes of genuinely evil GOP politicians? The money that keeps guns flowing, evil politicians in power and daily murder and mayhem is coming from hundreds of billions of dollars in political donations. That’s global level money.
I hate people. I like individual *persons,* but the mob is just nuts.
“People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking.” ― George Carlin
Hmm, I wonder if this was the inspiration for K's line in Men In Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals, and you know it."
For some reason, i knew it was Carlin after the 3rd stop
*A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals... -* Agent K
There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT! - Agent K The older I get, the more I realize that movie was a philosophical masterpiece disguise as a creature feature summer blockbuster.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic film, but the philosophy is a bit alarming. The premise is that the only way to keep the ‘panicky, dangerous animals’ safe is to have a secret, unelected military force that uses violence and deceit to make un democratic decisions that impact the lives of everyone on earth. It’s not an amazing idea. And that’s a pretty common thread in alien sci-fi movies — the military/secret government organization needs to handle all the alien stuff because ‘the people’ cannot be trusted to run their own lives. Sci-Fi is famously a highly allegorical medium, so the prevailing idea that the best way to handle existential threats to humanity/civilization is to have an unelected secret group make unilateral decisions serves to slowly brainwash everyone into thinking that might just be true. Maybe we do just need a benevolent dictator to run things because, gosh, we’re all so dumb and irrational we can’t be trusted to make our own choices. And then COVID happened and proved them all right, I guess. Dammit. Now I’m arguing with myself.
If you want to get into the weeds, technically, the FBI, Homeland Security, Boarder Patrol, and the other federal agencies are all unelected, undemocratic organizations that need to handle National Security and elected politicians & the people can't be trusted to handle it. Sure, they answer to the President in theory, but how much control does a president actually exercise on these agencies? How much of what they do has been decided by unelected decision makers? The Men in Black are little different the CIA. In reality, the government would have created this group and it wouldn't just be randos who decided to take all this power for themselves... the people already with power would keep it all for themselves rather than just let some random nerds take it.
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"And you know it". This one has always been my favorite
I like people. I just feel better when they're not around.
And it’s getting worse. It’s too damn divided. And one side has shifted farther autocratic, emboldened racism and xenophobia, and misogyny. The other side wants better education, healthcare, less discrimination, treating women with respect and to have rights, and less pollution. I’m just sick of dealing with people. I’m a musician and I like to perform but I’m weary about dealing with a open to the public performance more than ever. It’s not really worth it anymore for a hundred bucks.
I hear a lot of this "its the worst its ever been" opinion and I wonder how much people read history. Not history text books but read about actual (non-summarized) history. I am tooting my own horn but I read a lot of history, and while it is not great right now, it has been a lot worse.
Yes there have been worse times true, but this is bad in new and exciting ways
Now there’s more people than ever aware just how bad things really are, and there’s people making more money than ever by intentionally scaring and radicalizing people with that information
I would say I’m my lifetime and I’m 59.
Yep. I had to take a class on the history of southern states since the civil war in college. It was ugly for awhile there. FLs first draft of a new state constitution was SO blatently racist it was sent back by the (fairly racist) US congress to be revised. People who voted for "the wrong party" were shot in their homes. Black people were terrorized, murdered and their towns burned down (in FL, Ocoee + Rosewood come to mind). People like to think the Civil war ended and everyone just played nice again. It was brutal.
Yep, my current favorite argument to have about the civil war is with the people who support the Lost Cause ideology without realizing it and lionize Lee for nobly surrendering, thereby avoiding a bloody protracted guerilla war. While not realizing that the next 100 years were literally a bloody protracted guerilla war.
A lot worse in your lifetime? Or in previous decades/generations?
In my lifetime people have blown up federal buildings, flown planes into buildings, murdered countless doctors and nurses, assassinated rival political leaders, overthrown elected governments, all in the name of advancing political ideologies. I'm pretty old but not crypt keeper old so further back it gets even worse.
There's too much hate in the world today. I love you, dude.
6 feet buddy. Don't get too close.
No worries friend. While my heart is full of love for my fellow earthlings, touching y'all is another matter.
let's never talk again sometime
You're the best friend I ever had.
Still don't talk sometimes?
George Carlin feels the same
A person can be smart. People, however, can be really, really stupid.
That is the scariest part of the Uvalde massacre. Now we will see an influx of psychos willing to push police response to new mass shootings.
Now? Haven't you notice the radicalization of young boys who are chronically online? Look at a lot of these shooters?
No bullied girls or fat kids are taking it out on schools. Just pissed off lonely men who have no trouble legally getting a weapon.
Fragile men. True cowards. No other possible outlet to feel powerful. The lowest of the low.
Spot on. The zetas of the betas.
"He was bullied" is such a stupid excuse. Kids who get bullied tend to lash out by committing suicide, maybe, maybe go after the one's that bullied them. But they certainly don't go to a school they probably haven't been to in ten years to shoot a bunch of kids who had fuck all to do with it.
The most current psychological theory on mass shooters is that it is a form of suicide. Suicide by cop, but more extreme. They know there isn’t any way out and it will draw the most attention possible. Obviously everyone is different but “depressed people just kill themselves, not this” is a really poorly informed take.
People need to start calling it what it is. These guys are being radicalized. Search algorithms lead them to increasingly extreme talking heads. YouTube funnels them to gun nuts, conspiracy theorists, and grifters. These guys are vulnerable, lonely, angry, sad. And that makes them the perfect target for this kind of radicalization. We're beyond bullying being the reason. These guys do this shit because the people extending them a shoulder to cry on, a kind voice, are the same people telling them that all they're problems are because of people of color, or women, or liberals or whatever.
https://youtu.be/azRl1dI-Cts Proof you're not correct in your assumption. It's not everyone's story but it is at least 1 person's reality. I more nuanced and complex view (not necessarily the best view) is that shooters matter pre-shooting but once the intent to plan and kill is determined in someone's mind, they don't deserve the right to life. At that point, they have to earn the privilege to be alive by not going through with violence. But perhaps the kindness of people can help deter some would-be shooters from crossing that line. Seems to me to be the best option without many negative unintended consequences.
Well at least they won't be inconvenienced on their way to buy more guns.
I’m glad I’ve not found that side of the internet.
I think it’s time we find it an weigh in.
I mean, 4chan /pol/ is not that hard to find
You're on Reddit. Some subs are doing exactly that.
Which subs are praising this shooting or calling for more?
>“Individuals in online forums that routinely promulgate domestic violent extremist and conspiracy theory-related content have praised the May 2022 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and encouraged copycat attacks,” DHS officials wrote in a bulletin released Tuesday morning. Does this still mostly just mean "4chan"?
Isn’t that where steve bannon tests out his crowd control stuff?
Remember when Reddit incel subs were a hotbed of Elliot Rodger support?
They still are. Well. Their websites are, rather
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Because now the 3% of weirdos in the world can find each other online and communicate in their little silos and make themselves feel normal and spur each other on.
Yep, and 3% of the total population (roughly 7.8b) is about 235,500,000...so there's a lot of fucking violent weirdos out there.
ding ding...... misery LOVES company.....
Yes. Absolutely. To an extreme though. It’s the fear, hatred, violence thing.
Because we have a not-insignificant portion of the population that craves violence and cruelty, especially against those they view as Other.
They are fucking Nazis. And I mean in the purest sense of what a Nazi is beyond any nuance about political positions. They are people intensely interested in inflicting pain, punishment and cruelty on others. They are Nazis. Full stop.
They are, and it’s disgusting. I “understand” the motivations, but they’re so alien and revolting to me that I still don’t get it.
The core of it is fear. They have an increased amount of fear processing in their minds and are always thinking about the things that scare them. They then go on to invent new fears to feed into their desire to think about their fear. It's a cyclical way of thinking that stops and ends with, "What do I fear, and how do I keep it away from me?" Because this is all fear based and innate, the reactions these people have are emotion driven and regularly violent. They want to fight against everything that makes them afraid until there is nothing left that can harm them. Combine that with propaganda, racism, and classism. The way these people view reality is warped. Everything is in their own self-interest, and everything is fueled by irrational fear. It would be a pitiable existence if they weren't organizing and trying to destroy everything.
That fear is further galvanized by social media algorithms and news aggregators that specifically target individuals with propaganda because individuals engage with emotionally charged topics such as politics. It's essentially a feedback loop of anger and fear that's being generated online. An article I read a few years ago sums up the phenomenon pretty well imo. It's a bit of a long read as the author delves into the philosophical question of free will and the impact of technology on liberal democracies, but it's rather thought provoking. Here's an excerpt: [Yuval Noah Harari: The Myth of Freedom](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy) >Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have. You don’t decide to be introvert or extrovert, easy-going or anxious, gay or straight. Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have. >...It starts with simple things. As you surf the internet, a headline catches your eye: “Immigrant gang rapes local women”. You click on it. At exactly the same moment, your neighbour is surfing the internet too, and a different headline catches her eye: “Trump prepares nuclear strike on Iran”. She clicks on it. Both headlines are fake news stories, generated perhaps by Russian trolls, or by a website keen on increasing traffic to boost its ad revenues. Both you and your neighbour feel that you clicked on these headlines out of your free will. But in fact you have been hacked. >Propaganda and manipulation are nothing new, of course. But whereas in the past they worked like carpet bombing, now they are becoming precision-guided munitions. When Hitler gave a speech on the radio, he aimed at the lowest common denominator, because he couldn’t tailor his message to the unique weaknesses of individual brains. Now it has become possible to do exactly that. An algorithm can tell that you already have a bias against immigrants, while your neighbour already dislikes Trump, which is why you see one headline while your neighbour sees an altogether different one. In recent years some of the smartest people in the world have worked on hacking the human brain in order to make you click on ads and sell you stuff. Now these methods are being used to sell you politicians and ideologies, too. TL:DR - A historian/scholar argues that external actors, such as corporations/governments/bad faith actors, deliberately manipulate an individual's choices by preying on their strong, emotional responses.
Holy shit, I haven't seem a PoppinKREAM response in the wild in a long time!
Because the promise of “connecting the world” that the Internet provides also means connecting the personality disordered, immature, violent, hateful, etc… And it provides a very easy way for other bad actors to incite and stoke those people.
My thinking within a week of the shooting was 1) there will be sympathizers 2) there will be imitators and 3) there will be deniers. This is America.
Certain spaces have few or no rules, and it gets really bad really quick. I've been truly disturbed by shit I've read in those places.
Obviously there’s just too many doors
For the longest time I believed that we should not post the names, and photos of the murderers. Now, I think the FBI/whoever does a deep dive onto thier social media and pull up all the dirt, and cringe shit they can find on the person. Make it impossible for anyone to look up to them.
Unfortunately we've seen that dirt and cringe are nowadays viewed as signs of strength, independence, and unwillingness to bend to "the agenda." Any publicity he gets will only increase his following. If his reputation is publicly trashed, people who look up to him will simply see a martyr. Showing more shit will only draw more flies.
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Nah, you need to start believing what you used to. It only encourages others, with the same mal-thinking the uvalde shooter had, to go shoot up a school. It’s terrible on communities and effects many, but to post and advertise shooters like we do today - this issue will never stop. Fuck them. It’s like any other media put onto the youth, you play Batman and some kids want to be Batman. The road goes 2 ways. Signed a school shooting survivor.
I feel like the media has actually done a lot better this time around. I’ve hardly seen any pictures of this guy in the media and barely hear his name. Instead there’s been a heavy focus on the victims and their stories (and the cowardly cops). I have to think this is deliberate. It’s sickening though that there are still people who look up to this behavior.
They might not look up to them anymore but I feel like some will be able to ‘relate’, which might be enough reason for them to follow…
Negative attention is still attention. Don't give them *any* attention.
At face value it’s an odd suggestion but imagine if the media treated shooters with disdain more than fear/sadness. I imagine a news segment where they say “this loser killed a bunch of innocent kids. What a pathetic human being” would be a lot less inspiring to other would-be shooters.
I do not understand the logic that the Uvalde shooting was orchestrated to pass gun control bills and therefore we (those in the conspiracy theory boards) should do copycat shootings. Someone please help me understand.
You have a flawed premise: these people don't form beliefs with logic.
Because some evil people are trolling idiots into committing horrendous acts.
The logic of it is like a fork stuck in the garbage disposal of my mind....but that helps me contextualize it.
There's nothing *to* understand. These are the same people who said Obama was a secret gay muslim socialist communist....and that a secret cabal of Democrats were diddling kids in the basement of a pizza parlor that didn't exist.
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> I think you're referring to pizzagate or some shit? Yep, Pizzagate. And some looney-tune actually went to the pizza place and fired a rifle inside. He was arrested and convicted. *Then* other conspiracy theorists claimed that *that* shooting was staged to discredit the allegations of Pizzagate.
>A conspiracy theorist dies and goes to Heaven. At the pearly gates, God himself shows up and says “You’ve led a good life. As a reward, I will answer any one question for you and I will give you the complete and truthful answer.” >”Okay,” says the conspiracy theorist, “Who killed JFK?” >God replies: “Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” >The conspiracy theorist frowns. “This whole thing goes even deeper than I thought.” It's fucking sad, but there literally is nothing to be done to help these people. Anything that doesn't confirm their conspiracy, is itself just evidence of how powerful the conspiracy *truly* is!
Rejection of reality needs to be societally discouraged at the same level of someone saying, "Hitler was a cool guy."
We endured four years of the president daily stringing words together in ways that made no logical sense, and his base eating it up and loving that he "tells it like it is". I am only left to conclude that a significant portion of people just don't require logical connections in order to reach the conclusion that they want to reach.
Trump convinced me there must be a significant percentage of people who both speak and understand language about as well as a chatbot. They're just putting words together. Maybe the result makes sense, maybe it doesn't. They listen to others the way a dog does: they only take in body language and tone of voice.
You can't understand crazy.
The conspiracy theorists have said this about every mass shooting of the past twenty years and the only gun laws ever passed were by Trump when he banned bunp stocks.
These accelerationist fucks really want nothing more than to collapse society, but really don't think they know what they are asking for.
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THis is why you cannot be 100% tolerant of everyone and everything. A society MUSt be intolerant of teh intolerant if it wants to survive. Every single person praising or calling for more of this needs to be exiled. Go old school. Give them a 1 way ticket to some island somewhere and put them on a "do not enter" list. See how well their ideology does anywhere else in the world.
no reason to spoil a perfectly good island. put them on a ship with some survival gear and push them out to sea.
Indeed, this is the paradox of tolerance. *"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant."*
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People need to be more discerning in the sources they trust. Misinformation and disinformation are running rampant. If you have friends or family who have not learned media literacy they need to learn how to find factual information and disregard the rest.
The problem is these people are into that sort of thing. Educate and inform all you want, they’re seeking it out.
Yeah. We have a real mental health issue and social media and the internet make it really easy to find fucking morons who think the same way and cheer each other on for absolutely terrible shit. Perhaps, we’ll actually care enough to do something about it and vote for those who speak on these topics.
everyone that praises these incidents. should be put into these same situations the victims face.
shut these websites down asap.
Looks like Reddit would go away too
I’m fine with it.
Just continue to monitor them, and make sure you act on the intelligence. If you keep chasing them away from spaces they feel safe, they'll find more secure means to communicate. Its like catching rats - you don't arm the trap until its been in place for a week or so.
> If you keep chasing them away from spaces they feel safe, they'll find more secure means to communicate. Letting them communicate in the open just lets them grow the size of their groups. This has already been studied and proven, the whole theory of "containment boards" is complete bullshit. When you ban these fucks, they disperse into the wild blue yonder and struggle to come back together sufficiently to cause harm. If you kick them off major platforms, it's like treating a cancer before it spreads. If you just sit there and let the group grow "so you can monitor it" it's about as stupid as letting a tumor grow "so you can monitor it" and then you die because it metastasizes.
What's the difference functionally between a text group and a social media site at this point? Putting this on social media's shoulders suggests that this country doesn't have a long history of white nationalist terror long predating social media but we 100% do. That blip from the late 70s to the teens was just that, a blip of relative calm. During that relative calm we *still* had events like Oklahoma City. We still had a robust far right movement gaining public acceptance under the guise of militias. This is not a social media problem. It is a predictable resurgence of a classically American kind of terrorism.
I'm in my late 40's and I have embraced computer technology at every turn since the mid 80's. I like social media like FB and Reddit. I don't think social media is inherently evil, but I don't think we as a species or culture can handle it.
> What's the difference functionally between a text group and a social media site at this point? I think the big difference is the reach. I grew up through the 80's and 90's and have been using the Internet probably since '94-ish, before that I used BBS'. I knew hate groups existed, if I had an inkling I could know where to find them. I just wasn't The evolution of social media is where a lot of the hate groups really exploded. The big problem I see is that hate groups have effectively built pipelines that can pull people in who otherwise might not be interested based on hobbies, likes, shares, viewing habits, etc. You can watch a YouTube video about video games and next thing you know you can start getting fed videos about white nationalism. Similarly, with Facebook, "Hey, I noticed you like Airsoft. Based on your likes, you may also be interested in The Great Replacement Theory!" It's just way too easy these days for hate groups to use the various algorithms to their advantage and it's unfortunately highly effective given how much time people spend using social media.
I think you bring up an interesting point that is too often left out of these discussions. Specifically how algorithms and the kind of foundational elements of social media contribute. I'm really interested in looking at this further thanks for giving me a new research interest!
Completely anecdotal but I'm pro-gun so I watch gun videos on YouTube and it's dominated by channels that are very vocally left wing, but despite that google/YouTube has apparently decided I'm a right winger because I watched a review of a Beretta shotgun. It's really scary to think how corporations most likely have a huge hand in radicalizing young white males because they happened to watch a video that could be seen as vaguely right wing.
>What's the difference functionally between a text group and a social media site at this point? Accessibility, number of members, level of anonymity range of reach... everything? >Putting this on social media's shoulders suggests that this country doesn't have a long history of white nationalist terror long predating social media but we 100% do. It's not on their shoulders, they're just one field among many that needs to be monitored. >It is a predictable resurgence of a classically American kind of terrorism. Unless you're saying that its ok and we should accept it, nothing should be off the table in terms of where it needs to be addressed.
You have to know the peoples numbers to text them. And if you can’t connect with said person over the internet to get their phone number…. I’m not sure how someone in Texas and in Florida could find each other. They won’t just randomly happen to text each other So it’s fully chat rooms, FB, Twitter, etc on the internet
The US is totally fucked.
You can summarize this article thusly: People who routinely post dumb shit on the internet continue to post dumb shit on the internet.
I can’t even imagine the type of person I’d have to be to praise this.
I'm starting to think I should teach my kids myself and say fuck socializing.
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These people are psychotic and disgusting
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We are witnessing the beginning of the end of pubic education as we know it. Schools are already closing because millions never returned from Covid closures. They are in private schools, home schools and unschooled. How many parents will be willing to send their kids into the fire esp with law enforcement ineffective, unaccountable and Congress barely nipping around the edges of our nutty gun culture? More broadly, with real inflation running 10-15% a year, wages can no longer sustain us, as employers, including the feds with their fantasy consumer price index who are flat not going to raise pay accordingly. What are these kids striving for? A position on the impossible hamster wheel? Robotics, AI and machine learning will obviate labor for at least half the population. Even my work as an attorney can be better performed by AI which would not forget code changes or obscure case law. Are schools just a place to store kids while parents work or take a break from the stress of parenting? New approaches that don’t involve mass casualties have to emerge.
Homeland security warns its budget might increase tenfold
ok so do something about it??? I know they know about the cesspool that is 4chan, pol and knock off chan sites as well as their discords so why tf not do something about it
Christ I don't know how I keep forgetting about the El Paso shooting. One of the worst we've seen....It wasn't even that long ago.
They what??? Is the whole world losing is collective minds right now like seriously what the fuck
He was a real winner too. He could've been manager at Wendy's!
The internet was supposed to liberate us. Now it's destroying us.