On the other hand, more cheerfully, I’m seeing a lot of good mini-essays (which is to say, paragraphs) on Facebook by angry male friends expressing their anger at all the anxious misdirection oh no don’t look at the misogyny look over there at the purple rabbit in a fedora.
Like Martin Robbins for example, who gave me permish to quote him.
A man who was part of a community of extremists who hate women, wrote a manifesto about his hate for women, then went to a female sorority house to kill women.
But it definitely wasn’t about his hatred of women. Oh no sir, it was because of his Asperger’s, or some undefined mental illness. It clearly had nothing to do with his hatred of women because he killed men too, on his way to the female sorority house. More men than women in fact if you count them up. And even if it was related to misogyny, we probably shouldn’t talk about it because hey, if we air these sort of views publicly the terrorists win.
That’s one of several I’ve seen, and that’s just among my friends and just the ones I’ve happened to see. There’s a lot of fedupness – male fedupness – with this “it wasn’t misogyny!!” bullshit. Never doubt it.
Good men being good revives my faith in humanity.
The coverage on the local ABC affiliate’s newscast about bent over backwards to not even mention this aspect of the story. It was pretty sickening. I wrote a letter to the editor. There’s just no excuse for them to be running interference for this guy.
I guess it’s hard to say it’s “just” misogyny when he goes on and on about how much he hates other men as well. Certainly, he was a pretty hateful person. But in this scenario, he hates the men because they are his competitors and he is losing, and he hates the women because they are both his prize and his judge, and he is losing.
Oh, fucking hell, Gemmer. Elliott Rodgers said he wanted to kill women. he talked about hating women because they stupidly chose other men. He didn’t talk about killing his competition. He did not call men stupid sluts. He reserved that just for women. It is tragic that 6 men and women had to die. We don’t know why Rodgers killed some men on the way. But it is very clear that is main impetus was sense of entitlement to women and his hatred they wouldn’t give what he wanted
karmacat, I totally agree with this much you wrote: “it is very clear that [his] main impetus was [his] sense of entitlement to women and his hatred they wouldn’t give [him] what he wanted.”
But you’re wrong on the facts where you wrote, “He didn’t talk about killing his competition… We don’t know why Rogers killed some men on the way.”
The video “Retribution” ends,
Analyze the facts however you like, just don’t deny the facts.
Dave Ricks
How many of the dead are women? How many are men?
Just don’t deny the facts.
Apparently this Rodgers killed more men than women and this is supposed to prove misogyny played no part in his actions. Well then, vastly more non-Jews than Jews died in WW2; I guess this must prove Hitler was not antisemitic. What makes Rogers’ violence misogynistic is that he was specially targeting women, just as Hitler was specially targeting Jews and Gypsies.
My position? I’m interested in the misogyny. It’s apparently a far more global factor to his anger (he was far more hateful towards women, expressed far more hatred of women, his anger at other men stemmed directly from issues that had to do with women, and seemingly none from women alone). It is a stated reason for killing sprees in his own words. He decided to be indiscriminate when in the moment, but that’s probably a whole different autonomic situation. Until I see systemic hatred of men for appear in the foundational elements of his anger, I’m less interested until someone waves some specific evidence for the thing less in evidence. I’m happy considering one possible cause at a time until appreciated more fully and then considering less likely options.
Yes. This is one male typing who is also fed up with misogyy and the rape culture and the mistreatment and devaluing of women and wants it to stop.
@7. Bernard Hurley : Exactly. Spot on and seconded by me.
@6. chigau (違う) : I think the motive here and Rodgers misogynist speeches say more than enough and are more relevant than the genders of the dead.
PS. If Elliott Rodgers had succeeded in entering that sonority house as he wished the death toll would have been much higher with a lot more female victims. Its a small mercy that he was unable to do that.
The amount of “it was not misogyny” “it was not an attack on females” (cue Ferengi voice) is amazing and by amazing I mean vomit-inducing. They guy even took great pains to explain to the world that he hated women, how much he hated women, that he wanted to kill women and it’s still not believed. It’s like not believing that Hitler hated Jews because reasons.
He was a mentally disturbed person…just like Valerie Solanas was. What do we deduce from the feminist icon Valerie Solanas? Prevalent ingrained misandry in society dating back to the 1960’s?
@Mark/Mofa, what evidence do you have his mental issues had anything to do with his crime? Even Valerie Solanas’s paranoid schizophrenia is not necessarily linked to her shooting, she thought Warhol and a friend were screwing her out of her rights to her written works. Maybe given the nature of her mental illness that was a factor, but why jump to that conclusion? It is certainly not much of a explanation anyway, just a contributing factor to a bit of banal evil. Nowhere did she write about wanting to get revenge on men in real life and there is no reason to believe her shooting was anything more than a contract dispute that a violent person let get out of all proportion. Given that’s all the evidence points to.
What we do know is that he hung out at misogynist forums where his fantasies about getting revenge on the “sluts, whores and bitches” were not called out. In fact his social group seems to have mainly joined in with their own fantasies along the same lines. He specifically writes and delivers a manifesto where he clearly lays out his aim to live out his violent misogynistic fantasies that he has spent years writing about online and not being called out on. He then delivers on that…
You for some unfathomable reason are desperate to deflect from that misogyny and “explain” it away as nothing more than mental illness. Which as I pointed out is never an explanation anyway. Why is that Mark?
The generally suspicious person in me figures the ‘grandstanding’ accusation and (frankly absurd) ‘what misogyny’ nonsense is really just preemptive offense-as-defense from sleazeballs still trying to insist oh, there is no such thing, sexism is all fixed, women got too much now, and so on…
… and they’re afraid that people in the middle, men and women, are going to see from this how full of it they are. So it’s try to push the Overton as far as possible, as fast as possible, as ridiculous they risk looking, doing so.
But the media are picking up on this, I think, here and there. And asking, here and there, reasonably, more. See:
http://theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/when-killers-target-women-why-do-moderate-men-stand-silent/article18843166/
…for one.
I haven’t read his entire memoir/manifesto, but from what I have read and seen, it’s pretty clear that he only hated men who were taking the women he felt he deserved. His hatred of some men was still wrapped up in his hatred and sense of entitlement to women and occasionally racism. Some of the more… prominent MRA’s hate some specific men (and attempt to harm them with harassment and false accusations) but that doesn’t magically make them not misogynists. You can have a deep, all encompassing hatred for women and still be an asshole to some men. Hate, like most things in life, is not a zero sum game.
That being said, his original plan was just to kill women. He wasn’t able to carry out his sorority massacre, so he improvised. Why he killed his roommates, men known to him, with whom he may have had personal grievances, I don’t know, but I can’t see any evidence for why it cancels out his hatred of women.
I read the majority of his rambling manifesto (I’m not sure why, morbid curiosity I guess). I did only skim a few portions since he tends to repeat himself. But there’s no way you can finish it without admitting he had a deep seething hatred of women. He mentions several times that he views all women as mentally ill and incapable of understanding certain things. Near the end, he mentions how he wants to become dictator of the world so he can order all women into concentration camps and have them starved to death while he watches, describing the great pleasure he would take in seeing it happen. But this is clearly this is the fault of autism, or maybe it’s affluenza, or maybe it’s anything but misogyny, right?
@12 m0fa
Among the silly things about your post is the following: No one is using this incident to prove that there is an ongoing misogyny problem in our culture as you attempted to do with Solanas and misandry. The existence of misogyny, it’s historical roots, and its continuing influence in our culture is proved any of a thousand ways. What Rogers shows is how deadly and dangerous this stuff can be.
Were the a female equivalent, that would prove very little about misandry in the same way that finding a German in 1939 who was anti-Aryan would not lead to the conclusion that Germany of the 1930’s was plagued with anti-Aryan beliefs. Nor would it be sufficient to justify throwing one’s hands in the air and saying, “See, these things are equivalent, just crazy people, no ideological issue at all.”
I don’t think it’s productive to ascribe his aim and targeting ability to his motivation. Counting the gender of the victims accomplishes nothing.
He hated women and the men they dated. But mostly the women.
But this is clearly this is the fault of autism, or maybe it’s affluenza, or maybe it’s anything but misogyny, right?
I read it too – it just seems awfully simplistic to say “misogyny – that’s why.” That’s just putting your own shiny bow on something, a la saying it was mental illness, that’s why. Reading through his memoir, which I found quite fascinating, there were all sorts of things. He never seemed to play with kids or develop any social skills. He was bullied as a kid. He had issues with his stepmother. He was hopelessly addicted to video games as a sanctuary from real life. He felt he was “above” any sort of normal jobs and so refused to get one. He was always angry at every slight against him, and some of his earliest memories are being angry at other kids. He stopped playing World of Warcraft because people were calling him a virgin. He didn’t understand why his friend (also a virgin) didn’t hate women. Nearly every new experience or social experience frightened him. He couldn’t understand why anyone with sleep with a black person. When he saw popular boys he wanted to skin them alive. He was obsessed with winning the lottery. He goes on about killing his brother and stepmom.
He planned to divide his “Day of Retribution” up into phases, and the first phase was to torture, kill, and behead good looking men. The second phase was his “War on Women.” The Third Phase was to kill his brother and stepmother. He will then dump out everyone’s heads so people will see what a “god” he is. Then he will kill himself.
Anyways, the idea that he was some sort of normal kid driven by some anti-woman stuff he saw on the internet seems pretty misguided and simplistic.
You’ve confused the argument that misogyny was a necessary element of his crimes with the argument that misogyny was a sufficient element of his crimes.
Fuck the hell off Gemmer. Go infest some other blog. You’ve already been kicked off of plenty on this network. Here’s hoping you won’t be welcome here much longer.
I should add that the above — it was just misogyny, therefore there’s no reason to discuss the misogyny at all, was a classic argument used by Southern racists, specifically the KKK to dismiss criticisms of violence in the South.
Morris Dees was successful in decimating the modern KKK precisely because he went to court and demolished that position. There are plenty of racists in the world who don’t torture and lynch black people, but when an organization preaches hate year after year and advocates violence, it’s disingenuous, at best, to then claim that there was no causal relationship between the organization, the rhetoric, and the resulting violence.
Was racist rhetoric the only reason for violence in the South? Of course not, but it wasn’t irrelevant, and bringing an end to the violence involved combating the rhetoric and identifying how dangerous it was. The same is true here. The women-hatred spewed by MRAs and PUAs is not harmless.
Gemmer
Page 1, sentence 1 of the Rodger manifesto:
How much more fucking explicit does it have to be before it can be conceded that this may be more about misogyny than anything else?. On page 136 he talks about quarantining women “like the plague they are.” He talks about deliberately starving the vast majority of them to death and how much pleasure and satisfaction he would take in that. He talks about building a tower for himself from which he can oversee the whole process and “gleefully watch them die.”
From page 136:
How much more fucking explicit need he have been before misogyny wouldn’t be too simplistic an answer for you? Jesus fuck.
oolon#13, speaking of the manifesto Solanas wrote a very famous one, her ‘Society For Cutting Up Men’….I am surprised oolon that you ignored her great work and at the same time you declare that she never expressed a desire to get revenge on men.
Clean-up at comment 24. In case you haven’t seen it, Ophelia, m0fa is a known quantity. Banning recommended.
Gemmer – I wasn’t claiming that misogyny was the ONLY reason this happened, but rather trying to point out that it was a major factor. I also read the parts about him wanting to kill his stepmother and brother, but if you read that carefully, the idea of killing his brother gives him pause. He states that he loves his brother, but can’t stand the idea of him living a better life than he has. But about the stepmother he shows no such remorse, and constantly whines about his father tolerating her, and thinks it can only be because “she’s good to him in bed.” This is clearly the mind of someone who not only hates women but sees them as subhuman creatures. Just “things” that he desires sexually but can’t attain and hates. I won’t claim with certitude that Rodger was mentally ill, but he does mention a psychiatrist prescribing risperidone, an antipsychotic, which he refused to take. I can’t confirm or deny that mental illness may have played a role. But his seething hatred of all things female shouldn’t be dismissed as being an irrelevant side-effect of some other issues. It was a factor, and shouldn’t be ignored.
Josh, oh I know – I know a lot about Mark. I’ve been allowing him to expose himself for awhile. You’re right that that clashes with my overall way of curating comments here, but…the curation has room for some flexibility.
There you go, acting like you own the place.
Hehehe
Oolon#13, what evidence do I have that his mental issues had anything to do with the crime? What …you believe that what he did was a normal activity? To stab to death 3 people and then go out and shoot some more people dead is the actions of a mentally healthy individual? You think that he did what he did because he hates women? That apart from his hatred of women he is most likely completely normal? There are men in society who hate women just as there are women in society that hate men but this does not lead them all to committing mass murder. This man was obviously disturbed mentally…is there something wrong with this view? Does it take the attention away from some other issue you would like to focus on?
Shorter Mark: “NOT ALL MISOGYNISTS!!!@!@!!!!!”
“Women have control over which men get sex and which men don’t, thus having control over which men breed and which men don’t. Feminism gave women the power over the future of the human species. Feminism is evil.”
by Elliot Rodger
Yeah, it’s all just a puzzle, clearly. Oddly, this crazy dude goes after women. Now, sure, presumably, there’s some logical reason he doesn’t, I dunno, go after pigeons or something. Though hey, you just never know with these crazy dudes… Pity. But, hey, have hope… Perhaps, someday, some brilliant denizen of the atheoskepticoblogosphere will solve this utterly mystifying peculiarity of his. Gonna have to be them, though, I guess, since the social sciences are all, apparently, contradictions in terms…
Trends? Patterns? Systemic what? Eh?
(Sorry. Can’t hear you. Was too busy cranking up this noise machine… Anyway, we’ll get back to you when our large, manly minds solve this thing for you. Stay tuned.)
Call in the Global Secular Council!! Quick! Where’s the switch that turns on the fart symbol??
m0fa (30), rather than focusing on him as an individual (which is a job for his doctors), it would behoove us to take a look at society in general and see what is feeding into this sort of destructive belief.
We do not have access to him, so any discussion of him as an individual is idle speculation. We all have access to the society around us, so we can remark meaningfully on our observations of that.
For example, there are a great many assaults on women in India, where women have lower status in the community and severely limited options in life, due to the patriarchal culture. It would be useless and a waste of time to investigate each of the Indian men who attacks, rapes, and oppresses Indian women, because the fact that these women have so few options and no real protection under the law is the source of the problem. The men are behaving badly because they can (no repercussions or negative consequences) and the society around them has given them the message that this is okay, because that’s all women are good for.
The Santa Barbara shooting is a manifestation of a deeply ill culture, and that is what we should address. It’s not an isolated instance of one guy whose motives and mental state are the only concern.
EG @19
I read it too – it just seems awfully simplistic to say “misogyny – that’s why.”
This is not what is being done. People are choosing to focus on misogyny because it appears to be the primary motivating factor in his behavior. Other people are choosing to try to get the people choosing to look at misogyny to look at other things.
Look at the post again. Did Ophelia say there were no other factors? No the post is about the people that seem to really really very badly want other people to talk about things less in evidence first. But you felt the need to bring up a different subject and thus provided us evidence of the behavior that Ophelia is talking about.
Person A tries to talk about the misogyny, person B repeatedly feels the insert another subject. There are probably places where the mental illness angle can and is being investigated. But you felt the need to change the subject to something less in evidence somewhere else. Why?
Re:m0fa 12, 24
Don’t fall for it oolon. It’s just another attempt to change the subject from the misogyny in evidence to something else. The have to defend the link to mental illness. You can just call that out and walk away (unless you are playing for your own fun, if so I apologize).
If changing the subject from the subject in evidence to ones not in evidence dies not work, there is always the attempt to point to things other people are saying. Anything but the misogyny “Our subject first!”.
Re:mofa 30
>”What …you believe that what he did was a normal activity?”
The argument from personal incredulity is common in creationists too. Perhaps you can’t imagine how he could be sane, but that he is somehow defective in a way that one could apply a diagnosis to is your argument to make.
Blanche/#34:
Heh…
…And to think I was just wondering under what circumstances would we use this?
/Nefario.
(/… And re #35: not so fast! Have you considered our groundbreaking hypothesis that maybe there are just a lot of crazy people in India?)
Brony,
Person A tries to talk about the misogyny, person B repeatedly feels the insert another subject. There are probably places where the mental illness angle can and is being investigated. But you felt the need to change the subject to something less in evidence somewhere else. Why?
I wouldn’t call it changing the subject. Of course he hates women, and says so several times. However, trying to tease out misogyny as something separate and distinct from his other problems seems inaccurate. He clearly hates a lot of people. He often refers to situations where he sees a man having success with a women and feels outraged at the man. You might even call it triggering, as he recalls several times he started crying or acting strangely when he saw a couple or a popular man. He feels triggered by men several times in his writing, and I might be wrong but I don’t recall him ever mentioning a particular woman that makes him feel this way. It isn’t hatred of women that drives him, it’s hatred and fear of sexuality. In other words, if he were gay, everything else being equal, he wouldn’t be bothered by women at all, but instead rage at the men he finds attractive who refuse to have sex with him.
So I’m not changing the subject – I’m trying to understand his behavior. Saying it’s just misogyny or you’d like to concentrate on the misogyny is fine, but it ends up coming across like the people who want to just focus on the state’s rights part of the Civil War, and leave out anything else that might help one actually understand the issues.
Stop trying, Gemmer. You know what you’re doing, and so do we.
Ah yes. The Civil War. Never fear. We’re all over it… Yes, no doubt, like we who wish to ask the _really_ hard questions, you’re wondering, too, what a _puzzling_ thing it is the South had so many slave owners… Without, you know, discussing racism, if we can help it…
…But trust us. We’ll get this. And we’re easily halfway…
(Yep. So far, we’ve worked out the plantation bosses were crazy, too!)
Congratulations, Gemmer. You’ve successfully derailed the thread. Instead of talking about Rodger’s misogyny you’ve managed to turn the conversation into being about you. Aren’t you proud?
>”I wouldn’t call it changing the subject.”
That is the whole point. You are defining this by your perspective alone and the subject of this post is talking about a pattern that you are a part of. You are not even considering what your actions look like to others. The meaning of an event is not just in the person taking the action, it is simultaneously your intentions and the perception of others. I don’t care what meaning someone into faith healing feels, the action is profoundly about shitty medical care outside themselves. You are doing the same general thing as lots of other people without reasons other then that you find the presence of a discussion on misogyny all by itself disturbing, and don’t offer reasons for why other than how you feel about things.
>”Saying it’s just misogyny or you’d like to concentrate on the misogyny is fine, but it ends up coming across like the people who want to just focus on the state’s rights part of the Civil War, and leave out anything else that might help one actually understand the issues.
Emphasis mine. Literally an emotional argument. We should do something different because of your feelings.
The reality is that people trying to look at the misogyny angle are getting repeated insertions of anything but the subject of misogyny. It’s an unconscious campaign to suppress a subject because no one bringing up the subject is actually offering any specific evidence for these other things. It’s all waving at references to “look at that” without a connected explanation to why a specific part of what they refer to supports a rational change of subject from misogyny. A suggest to change the subject of conversation without reason offered is basically someone saying “change the subject because I want you to”. Further, if the person trying to change the subject does not actually have evidence for mental illness, they are effectively arguing for emotional reasons only. The effect is dilution of the discussion on misogyny literally without reason.
And even if there does turn out to be a mental health connection, discussing of the misogyny connection in isolation is still rational. Looking at how Hate is connected to his feelings for woman and men and everything that he hates as individual sets is useful. We get to look at what hate is more foundational, how each hate is expressed, where the flaw in the thinking process was located, what the effect of his chosen community might have been in reinforcing his patterns of thought.
And we get to start where we want.
>”You might even call it triggering, as he recalls several times he started crying or acting strangely when he saw a couple or a popular man.”
It might be in a similar category, but “psychological triggering” as a phenomena has to do with defined excessive emotional reactions that are typically tied to external trauma causing the reactions. His desire to have sex is internal. How he expressed that desire was broken because of his pathological need to see women as possessions and not social partners. This breakdown is possible at multiple levels but again we see no reason to consider this possibility in evidence.
If you want to say he is being triggered and you don’t offer an example of trauma that might have created a trigger, it’s safe to assume you can’t and are simply emotionally reacting to someone talking about something you don’t like. Hint: lack of sex is not trauma. Trauma is a unique external factor that asserts itself onto the person that develops triggers. People not giving you something you want is not trauma. Getting taught to treat women like crap and see them as objects can create traumatic experiences, but the lessons involved in learning those habits were not painful in and of themselves. You are being profoundly insulting to people with actual psychological triggers.
When I said “emphasis mine” You should have seen “…coming across like…” in Gemmer’s statement underlined.
That’s ok Al Dente, the subject of the post is actually the lengths that people will go to in order to de-emphasize the issue of misogyny, and prevent it from being addressed in isolation independent of other factors, he is unintentionally on-topic.
Since they have no evidence that we actually intend to prevent anyone from looking at other factors (and are quite happy to look at them when we are done with misogyny), we are left with the forms of how they try to alter an objective analysis of the Woman-Hate connection while still trying to appear reasonable. The key is revealing the literal lack of reason to why the individual Woman-Hate connection is uninformative on it’s own, and getting them to confront the fact that they are offering no substance as reasons for including more factors. Only emotional feelings, impressions and other things as literal emotional arguments.
It can be fascinating.
Bullshit.
Let me remind you of your statement in that very same post:
Stop moving the goalposts and deal with that.
So so wrong. Of course gay men can get ragey about rejection and failure, but with other men the whole *being raised to think women are inferior and suspect* part is missing.
Yeah there’s no way that if he were gay the result would be a simple find-and-replace women with men in his manifesto. Take this excerpt, which is disturbing (but of course the whole damn thing is): “I concluded that women are flawed. There is something mentally wrong with the way their brains are wired, as if they haven’t evolved from animal-like thinking. They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally. They are like animals, completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and impulses. That is why they are attracted to barbaric, wild, beast-like men. They are beasts themselves. Beasts should not be able to have any rights in a civilized society. If their wickedness is not contained, the whole of humanity will be held back from advancement to a more civilized state. Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilized men of intelligence.” It gets worse from there, but that’s sufficient for my point. He’s claiming that women are inherently inferior to men, subhuman even, and deserving of no rights (including the right to not get raped, apparently). What’s more likely: that this idea that women are inferior just appeared in his brain spontaneously one day, or that he adopted it from an existing culture of ideas?
There are numerous issues involved in Rodger’s atrocity. There’s mental health issues, intervention issues, the American fascination with guns, and several others. However misogyny appears to me to be the driving force behind Rodger’s need to kill people, especially women.
Rodger made it quite plain that he was unhappy that nobody else gave his sheer awesomeness the respect that he felt it deserved. He felt that he deserved women’s adulation. It was women’s collective fault for not fawning over him and giving him sexual gratification. He wasn’t happy with men either but his hatred was for women and their failure to appreciate what a great guy he was. He expected to stand in front of a group of women, strike an awe-inspiring pose, and all the really beautiful ones would rip his clothes off (no plain, fat, old, non-gorgeous women need apply). That this didn’t happen. Women were failing to perform to his satisfaction. So they needed to be punished with extreme prejudice.
Two interrelated points come up: (1) Rodger felt that women’s guilt for the crime of disregarding him was collective. (2) Rodger thought of women as things rather than people. He may have sneered at other men as “losers” but he regarded them as people. Women didn’t meet that criteria. Women were vaginas with blonde hair who paid attention to anyone who wasn’t him. If he wasn’t good enough for them then they weren’t good enough for him and he was going to kill them to prove his point.
Brony,
And even if there does turn out to be a mental health connection, discussing of the misogyny connection in isolation is still rational.
Well of course it is rational. I’m not at all denying the misogynist aspect to his thinking. I’m just finding that explanation unsatisfactory as to many aspects if his behavior, including his plan to kill his male roommates and his brother.
It might be in a similar category, but “psychological triggering” as a phenomena has to do with defined excessive emotional reactions that are typically tied to external trauma causing the reactions.
Typically so – I’m just trying to find a word describing his rather extreme emotional reactions to rather mundane events.
Ms. Benson,
So so wrong. Of course gay men can get ragey about rejection and failure, but with other men the whole *being raised to think women are inferior and suspect* part is missing.
Perhaps so, though I believe there are quite a few similar stereotypes about gay men. But I guess my point is that his diatribes about women focused the women he wants to sleep with. He places them on a pedestal and then demonizes them for being unobtainable. Objectifying women in this way only illustrates it doesn’t matter what the “prize” is. Whether it is the “hot blonde” he wants, or a man, or whatever else, the main theme is his intense desire and fanatical rage and not getting it.
Al Dente,
Rodger made it quite plain that he was unhappy that nobody else gave his sheer awesomeness the respect that he felt it deserved.
Quite so. A theme I picked up was that he treated women like working. He raged at the idea that he didn’t have a beautiful, wonderful girlfriend, or a bunch of money, but he seemed unwilling or more likely, unable, to make any sort of connection or figure out what to do to make those things happen. There is lesson on teaching process over results there.
@ EG 49
>”Well of course it is rational. I’m not at all denying the misogynist aspect to his thinking.”
Then go somewhere where people want to talk about that other connection. You can find other people talking about that connection somewhere else.
Our problem is that you want to make other people talk about that connection here. You are incessantly talking about that other connection in places where they are looking at a different one. If you are continuously coming here and you have other options elsewhere, it’s rational to think your objective is not to talk about the other connections when you have repeatedly been told that people don’t like you interrupting the discussion of the connection that explains more of his behavior.
Note: any response to this about your doubts is irrelevant because you have other places on the net. You are choosing to try to get people who want to talk about misogyny to talk about other things.
Yes. Edward Gemmer you’ve made your point, now please stop commenting, at least for now. It’s grating, this placid discussion of what is life and death to people who aren’t you.
@35 “We do not have access to him, so any discussion of him as an individual is idle speculation”.
True…and any correlation between this specific atrocity and the current zeitgeist that pervades our Western societies, with particular reference to masculinity, is ALSO speculation.
@M0fa, don’t think I’ll take your view of what is and what is not speculation with any seriousness. Given all you’ve provided here is uninformed speculation.
> You’ve provided no evidence that his supposed “mental illness” had anything to do with the crime. I looked up his “mental illness” and it appears to be aspergers (NOT a mental illness) and social awkwardness and anxiety (Not necessarily a mental illness depending on the severity) … Neither of which have any correlation to violence in general, let alone there being a link in this case. All you have provided is an insight into your staggering ignorance about mental illness, equating “not normal” to “mental illness”. Then seemingly believing this is an explanation for his actions! You do self identify as a skeptic, right? (*hint* ppl with mental illness are extremely common, orders of magnitude more common than murderers, then on top of that those that kill are far more likely to be “normal”, by your definition, than not)
> Valerie Solanas on the other hand was apparently detained and sectioned due to her paranoid schizophrenia being identified, in law, as the reason for her attack. (I didn’t know this!) So that is pretty good evidence her mental illness was the cause of her actions, exacerbated by her belief her publisher and Warhol were conspiring against her. Nothing to do with her supposed hatred of men according to all the evidence. In fact she was friends with Warhol and her publisher, who she was looking to kill that day, not Warhol (both men). Amusing you bring up SCUM (Not the society for cutting up men, that was invented by Girodias, her publisher) since she was out to kill her publisher, Girodias, that day and he stated it is a parody. He knew her well and had pretty good reason to think she was serious, but he was also friends with her, until she tried to kill him I assume! You not knowing SCUM is a parody tells me you’ve never read it, please do, it’s a great read!
Oh, forgot! M0fa, look up the Stanford prison experiments and Stanley Milgram, you’ll be amazed what “normal” people are capable of 😉
Oolon, amongst your many talents, such as inventing bots and what not you now seem to be implying that you have an expertise in mental health issues?! I have looked up aspergers and I do read that it is not classified as a mental illness but it most certainly is a mental disorder…so you want to play the game of semantics? And yes I know all about the Stanford prison experiment as I took Psychology at Uni, but I fail to understand your point fully and I do not see an analogy here. Rodgers , apparently was on medication that he was refusing to take, he was apparently in therapy and his parents were trying to send him away on a ‘sea change’ because of their concern for his mental state. The guy was not right in the head. every now and then guys (and girls) who are not right in the head go and kill people…end of story.
Right. The fact that he wrote hundreds of words about how he hated women, and the fact that those words actually reflect ideas that, as you put it, “pervade[s] our Western societies,” (just the Western ones?) has nothing, no NOTHING to do with what he did. Why, it’s sheer speculation to assume his stated motivation was his motivation! Silly us.
Sometimes people who are perfectly sane go out and kill people.
People with mental illness are less likely than others to commit violent crime.
And even if Rodgers was on the spectrum (IIRC he did not have a diagnosis,) people on the spectrum are no more likely to be violent than anyone else.
Your desperate attempt to deflect attention from Rodger’s misogyny and the fact that it influenced his actions is noted.
There we have it! Guess we can all go home now, kids.
@M0fa, that was pathetic. You claimed he was obviously mentally ill and this was somehow linked to his crime. Neither of which you have managed to prove, at all! In fact you only agreed with me that aspergers is not a mental illness and is also not correlated to violence. Thanks, I guess.
Let me help you with your comprehension.
Yes it is normal activity, as demonstrated by Milgram and Stanford. As demonstrated IRL by the Nazis, “normal” people in the right conditions need very little to persuade them to act like violent psychopaths. Mental illness is not an explanation or even accurate. Yet *you* claimed it was an obvious consequence of his actions. What grade did you get in your psychology course O_o?
As to your new assertion that he was not taking his medication … [citation needed]. I’ll also raise your baseless assertion with testimony from a family friend – I see PZ has added to his post.
So your easy get out to blame mental illness was wrong, flat out wrong, both in principle and in this particular case. So what now Mark? I see you are saying “not right in the head” now… Great bit of semantics there! Now how does that explain anything?