Can we refer to him from now on as Charlie ("Horst Wessel") Kirk?
posted by growabrain at 12:41 AM on September 27 [17 favorites]

I think that sociologist and DV researcher Nicole Bedera has an excellent point to keep in mind here:

Far too many Americans believe that ideology only exists on a liberal/conservative spectrum or in the confines of religion.

Misogyny is an ideology. White supremacy is an ideology. And they exist within and beyond the traditional institutions we think of as ideological.

Despite what the author and his subject might think, Reddit does have an ideology (and as we've discussed many times here, not a healthy one.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:42 AM on September 27 [28 favorites]

Say more? What is the ideology of Reddit?
posted by eirias at 1:53 AM on September 27 [16 favorites]

updoots
posted by lalochezia at 4:25 AM on September 27 [23 favorites]

It¡¯s like those people who decided constantly quoting Monty Python and Douglas Adams would stand in for a personality, except they have guns and are shooting people.

For some reason, I¡¯m exceptionally angry and depressed that the Annunciation shooter was quoting O9A bullshit. The internet was a mistake. Yes, it brings people together, and that¡¯s the mistake, because you can¡¯t filter which people are being brought together.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:08 AM on September 27 [21 favorites]

What is the ideology of Reddit?

Well, for one, misogyny - which again we've discussed at length. There's also a performative nihilism as well, an attitude that creating a better world is a fool's errand.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:24 AM on September 27 [14 favorites]

I saw a tweet yesterday that said ¡°engraving the bullet casings is the new planting a bag of crack on the body of whoever the cops just shot¡±
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:50 AM on September 27 [60 favorites]

This all makes sense, except for one thing. My issue (as a former band kid) is that he refers to people like this as band kids¡ªI get why the writer might think so, or why that might be their stereotype of band kids, but the person this portrait most reminds me of is the guy I knew who didn't know how to play any instruments but always hung around the band kids, incessantly spouting (as GenjiandProust was reminded of, too) Monty Python references in lieu of developing his own personality. The kind of archetypal person I'm thinking of was not actually part of a cohort of people who had skills or goals or their own talent.
posted by limeonaire at 6:51 AM on September 27 [19 favorites]

A bit OT, but I had no idea the US Coast Guard has an active commissioned 300-foot sailing vessel, the USCGC Eagle. Of course, it was originally built in 1930s Germany and named the SSS Horst Wessel. Wonder when the US will rename it to the USCGC Charlie Kirk?
posted by Ickster at 6:55 AM on September 27 [13 favorites]

I think if I believe that Kirk got what he deserved -- I've been informed that this is not something one may believe -- but if I believed that, then by Occam's razor I'd have to assume that the person who killed him probably did so for the reason that he deserved it. I'll admit this is much more emotionally gratifying than the idea that "irony poisoning" and memes are turning the children into psychotic killers devoid of belief, but I just don't see how a bad sense of humor is enough to do that. I think if someone you love is trans, or an immigrant, or a woman, I don't think you really need to have read Lenin or Bakunin to want to defend them from people who hate them. I think that's only natural.
posted by jy4m at 6:56 AM on September 27 [27 favorites]

Ummm, as someone who happens to love both Monty Python and Douglas Adams and who hopes he is a good person, can we not use those two things as tropes for maladjusted losers who are going to end up as shooters?
posted by Ickster at 6:58 AM on September 27 [63 favorites]

I deeply love Monty Python and Douglas Adams, and I can think of few situations I'd like to endure less than being surrounded by high school aged fans of them.
posted by FatherDagon at 7:07 AM on September 27 [38 favorites]

Right, any of these cultural preferences can be taken out of context. The point is not that liking those things is bad in itself, but rather that those were examples of some millennials' and Gen-Xers' convenient substitute for developing a personality of their own, just as various memes have become for subsequent generations. The point is the lack of imagination and poor sense of humor (also reminds me of a prominent alleged fake gamer who has desperately tried and failed to seem cool or funny by posting and naming government organizations for old memes).

And yeah, I was partial to Douglas Adams myself in high school.
posted by limeonaire at 7:20 AM on September 27 [12 favorites]

Just got back from my town¡¯s Saturday farmers market. Saw tshirts for sale¡­Farewell Charlie. A true patriot. Festooned with a black-and-white american flag, of course. I about lost my shit.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:21 AM on September 27 [7 favorites]

I really think the project of pigeonholing a stranger, whether we get it "right" in the end or not, comes from our less noble instincts. We're mostly doing it because of how that might make us feel about our own values, the rightness of our own causes. I'm guilty to some extent, too.

Can we have any sort of big social movement without vilifying this person or beatifying that one? Maybe not. I don't know.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:22 AM on September 27 [23 favorites]

I dunno. ¡°The popular kids¡± have always adopted signifiers too. Anyone remember shorts that said JUICY on the butt? Starter brand jackets? Poodle skirts? Do people who adopted those things to fit in get accused of doing so in lieu of having a personality? Yes, being a one-note conversationalist is tedious but let¡¯s not equate it to propensity to mass murder. Mass murder is a rare attraction and we will not be successful at preventing it by demonizing whatever the last person who did it happened to be into.
posted by eirias at 7:32 AM on September 27 [36 favorites]

The internet was a mistake. Yes, it brings people together, and that¡¯s the mistake, because you can¡¯t filter which people are being brought together.

People don't scale.

That's why MeFi is the only social networking site I use.
posted by flabdablet at 7:40 AM on September 27 [15 favorites]

I'm 54. I use reddit quite a bit. Daily! Does that make me misogynist or a nihilist?

That's absurd. Reddit is staggeringly huge. Yes there are terrible, horrible parts of reddit and there are terrible, horrible people on reddit. But that's also true of the phone book (remember those?)
posted by SoberHighland at 7:51 AM on September 27 [70 favorites]

Can we refer to him from now on as Charlie ("Horst Wessel") Kirk?

So far part of the reason they're really, really mad (and not just theatrically) is because the Horst Wesseling isn't really gaining much traction. As usual, MAGA idiots only know little tasty surface tidbits of history and haven't figured out that a propagandist is the wrong person to try that with. Wessel was much more of a cipher they could shape at will.
posted by tclark at 8:01 AM on September 27 [16 favorites]

That struck me too, SoberHighland. I¡¯m not really a Reddit user but I¡¯ve lurked in a few subreddits over the last year, one for my city and a couple for shows I was fangirling over. They don¡¯t have a great deal in common socially other than the infrastructure parts. They all have in-jokes but the tenor is different. Only my city one is snarky and I wouldn¡¯t say it¡¯s nihilist. Slightly less NIMBYish than NextDoor perhaps, which isn¡¯t saying much. The fan ones are just ¡­ fannish. (And not in an AO3 kinda way)
posted by eirias at 8:02 AM on September 27 [6 favorites]

The internet was a mistake. Yes, it brings people together, and that¡¯s the mistake, because you can¡¯t filter which people are being brought together.

The internet is just where the mistake happens. The mistake is targeted advertising, and its force-multiplier, the algorithmic feed.
posted by tclark at 8:03 AM on September 27 [42 favorites]

I think the point this piece is trying to make is that this high-profile assassin is just a random reddit dork, not that being a reddit dork will turn you into a high-profile assassin. That is, Tyler was not an incredibly internet poisoned weirdo but a relative normie by zoomer nerd standards. As someone coming up on 40 and not as clued in as I used to be, I thought this was an interesting interview.
posted by theodolite at 8:06 AM on September 27 [41 favorites]

Characterizing Tyler Robinson as an unfunny loser doesn't add to TFAs argument, as memeing is bread and butter in a lot of online communities and not everyone treats it as high art. Otherwise the piece makes sense and it's a drag to see writers missing that and twisting what we see of him into a simple political taxonomy. I don't think we're getting a manifesto out of this one.

What are some of these definitive 'reddit has an ideology' threads? I'd honestly like to see the discussions. In my experience on both Reddit and Discord, they're filled with wildly different communities and their tone really depends on the topic and how they're moderated (or not moderated). Fuck the centralization were seeing in these platforms. Fuck the monsters who are buying them up fully intending to shape media and culture. But Reddit and Discord are still - I think - mainly driven by the relatively mundane goal of making money (and Discord wasn't even laser focused on that until recently). And within a subreddit/server the content is still chronological. There's isn't an algorithm shaping your feed.
posted by telepsism at 8:19 AM on September 27 [11 favorites]

The other piece important here is that millennials (I say this as one) seem broadly not to recognize the fragmentation the Internet has created for the generations below us. Covid turbocharged it, I think, along with tik tok and general permanent access to a multitude of online worlds.

We are no longer in a left versus right divide, there are untold number of ideological pieces in the shattered remnants of our shared, collective understanding of the world. We cannot even catalog or even fully grasp how many different personal realities people have for themselves today. Have there always been some degree of nuance within the camps of the right and left? Yes! But now, it seems to me, that number has just ballooned beyond any reasonable measure.

Without knowing this to be true, I feel democracy does better when enough people do have shared beliefs, and are aware of the important, shared truths of being a citizen while having healthy hobbies that aren¡¯t all encompassing. We just don¡¯t have that right now in the western world.
posted by glaucon at 8:19 AM on September 27 [20 favorites]

OK, so that means I can be summed up as "just a random reddit dork?"

I guess I am. But that's meaningless -- except it isn't. The reader/listener will just assign whatever pet-peeve identity to the person they associate with "random Reddit dork" that their internal bias points towards.

I don't see how identifying the killer as a random reddit dork is at all useful or helpful in any way. I'm not trying to be defensive here... I admit I'm a dork. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is this classification just means getting pigeon-holed into whatever slot the reader/listener decides to fit me (or the killer) into.

I know that sounds defensive, but I swear that's not my point.
posted by SoberHighland at 8:20 AM on September 27 [3 favorites]

For example, we¡¯re arguing (understandably!) about what the ideology of Reddit is but that¡¯s not even close to the right question.

Reddit has no ideology, users do not have unified beliefs across the platform and simply believing people on Reddit do does not make it true.

There are similarly hyper-specific worlds and landscapes on TikTok, discord, podcasts, YouTube, X, on and on and on and on. The carnival mirror is broken and shattered.
posted by glaucon at 8:23 AM on September 27 [18 favorites]

How would this recent assassination be the same and different, had it occurred during the early 20th century? 100 years ago
posted by Didymus at 8:25 AM on September 27 [4 favorites]

I see we're now in the "identify personality quirks of the accused, and then vilify those quirks rather than the insane gun culture that was actually the root cause of the whole mess" stage of media coverage. 30 years later and we've learned nothing, so let's turn our gaze on loner kids in trench coats band kids from Reddit.
posted by Mayor West at 8:36 AM on September 27 [40 favorites]

The internet is just where the mistake happens.

In discussions like this I'm always reminded of the words of panama joe :

We were excited about the internet because we saw it as a place where you could connect with other nerds about your niche hobby. What we did not predict was that other peoples¡¯ niche hobby would be white supremacy.

Man do I feel nostalgic for the old days where the most heated arguement was EMACS vs VI and no one was going around assassinating either side.
posted by Mitheral at 8:39 AM on September 27 [29 favorites]

How would this recent assassination be the same and different, had it occurred during the early 20th century? 100 years ago

Well, 1925 would have been Hearst's heyday so the assassin would have probably been either lauded as a hero or branded a dangerous lunatic depending on one man's opinion.

Which I guess is another way to say "quite the same, and not all that different."
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 8:46 AM on September 27 [7 favorites]

I really think the project of pigeonholing a stranger, whether we get it "right" in the end or not, comes from our less noble instincts. We're mostly doing it because of how that might make us feel about our own values, the rightness of our own causes. I'm guilty to some extent, too.

This right here.

I think the truth is sort of closer to the opposite of this next point (but which does really engage with the dynamic at hand):

I think if I believe that Kirk got what he deserved -- I've been informed that this is not something one may believe -- but if I believed that, then by Occam's razor I'd have to assume that the person who killed him probably did so for the reason that he deserved it.

The whole thing about projecting reasons onto the killer is that it always validates our own current politics. And the reality is that he had his own reasons, reasons that may or may not map easily onto larger cultural understandings. In fact, the shooter's motives were most likely far more personal. He could have been having an argument with his dad (in which the political was overlayed onto a complex history of conflict and approval), and this was his way of saying, "Oh yeah, dad? You like that? You like the way that this guy encourages violence? Well how about this??" I don't know anything, that's pure speculation, but that's the kind of thing that people do.

The character Crake in Oryx and Crake is a perfect illustration of this.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 8:51 AM on September 27 [9 favorites]

Just a general note, I think using the term "assassination" is adopting MAGA's preferred terminology. Just like January 6th was an attempted coup (or auto-coup) or an insurrection, and not just a "riot." My opinion is that Kirk's killing is better described as a murder.
posted by tclark at 8:51 AM on September 27 [23 favorites]

I don't see how identifying the killer as a random reddit dork is at all useful or helpful in any way.

If you're interested in the truth of who the guy seems to be, it seems like it's a closer description than "he was a Groyper" or "he was a card carrying Marxist Antifa supersoldier", so from that angle of course it matters. He was a particular kind of dorky normie, not someone up all night reading manifestos.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:53 AM on September 27 [8 favorites]

Nobody's talked about this, but he has a StatTrak sniper rifle from Team Fortress 2 with 250 kills on it--not an impressive number of kills, but the kind of thing you could start a whole moral panic about that could get TF2 banned.

So we may suppose this is why you would call him a Reddit kid instead.
posted by Brian B. at 8:55 AM on September 27 [1 favorite]

the shooter's motives were most likely far more personal.

a great recent example of this is that I think probably nobody could have reasonably guessed the motivations of the guy who did for Shinzo Abe
posted by BungaDunga at 8:57 AM on September 27 [11 favorites]

The internet was a mistake. Yes, it brings people together, and that¡¯s the mistake, because you can¡¯t filter which people are being brought together.

I personally think the 24/7 news cycle and 24/7 news channels are much more to blame than the Internet because they created this breathless "here's what we know so far..." style where the minute you've got a breaking story to cover you bring in experts who know NOTHING about this situation to start commenting on it as if they DO know something. Because you've got to be first but also you have to fill air time. At least if you had to wait for the precious minutes at 6 pm you made curatorial and editorial choices.

Would the Internet have created it on their own? Maybe.

I really think the project of pigeonholing a stranger, whether we get it "right" in the end or not, comes from our less noble instincts. We're mostly doing it because of how that might make us feel about our own values, the rightness of our own causes. I'm guilty to some extent, too.

Can't favourite this enough. Haven't we learned from Trenchcoat Mafia? (Answer: no.)
posted by warriorqueen at 9:09 AM on September 27 [23 favorites]

that said he did seem to have thought Kirk's rhetoric was hateful and probably shot him for that reason, so perhaps there just aren't any more details to come out to radically change our understanding of it
posted by BungaDunga at 9:27 AM on September 27 [4 favorites]

Ummm, as someone who happens to love both Monty Python and Douglas Adams and who hopes he is a good person, can we not use those two things as tropes for maladjusted losers who are going to end up as shooters?

Do you deploy quotes from them constantly in lieu of anything else that you or the people around you might be interested in? Then you are probably not in the class.

So, I am on a Discord instance for a hobby, and there is a meme channel. The hobby produces a lot of memes, and they get repeat posted. A lot. Sometimes several times a day. Sometimes within a few comments of each other. And I used to think this was a sign of people just jumping to the end of the thread to post without having read anything above, but...

The instance is set up so that (as an anti-bot effort), to post images, you need to build up a posting history by commenting. It's relatively minor -- just drop comments and replies in some of the hobby discussion channels for a day or two and imaging posting gets unlocked. There are regular questions about this, and most people respond "oh, OK," but some people get really mad, and when they are assured that the process doesn't take long and it's purpose respond "I don't have anything to say!" You joined a hobby Discord instance! Presumably you like the hobby, have thoughts about the hobby, techniques, maybe questions how to do this or that differently or better or whatever, and... no. The one thing they want to do is post memes, probably memes that everyone has already seen. It's like the only way for them to participate is display signifiers that they are participating and that they belong. (Some of the cases may involve social anxiety, lack of language fluency, or other issues, but not all or even most of them.)

I think the point of TFA is that the alleged killer seems like this sort of person -- not a dedicated ideologue or even particularly passionate about politics. Just a relatively unengaged consumer of online culture who decided to try and kill a public figure. Assuming the accused is the killer, probably the most interesting thing is that he seems to have wanted to shoot the victim specifically for personal reasons, which is interesting. Like the alleged United Health Care CEO shooter, the point of the assassination was to kill the person who was the target. This is different from the Pennsylvania Trump shooter, who appears to have been waiting for someone famous to shoot, or John Hinkley, who wanted to shoot Reagan but not because he particularly wanted to kill Reagan, etc. It's also different from the murders that have been committed by participants in Terrorgram or any of the O9A offshoots or so on, who do not necessarily have any particular personal animus against their targets other than vague bigotry but want to impress or fit in with a particular group of online nihilists and/or accelerationists.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:47 AM on September 27 [21 favorites]

Thorzdad: "Just got back from my town¡¯s Saturday farmers market"

Ahhh, see that's not a farmers market. A farmers market sells items people grow themselves. What you were at is a flea market, which is generally full of junk like T-shirts.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 9:57 AM on September 27 [2 favorites]

Man do I feel nostalgic for the old days where the most heated argument was EMACS vs VI

We clearly frequented a different set of BBSes.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:59 AM on September 27 [6 favorites]

People don't scale

The cube-square law creates problems in both directions. Scaling up, our bones soon couldn't support our weight. Scaling down, proportionately increased surface are would make it hard to maintain homeostasis.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:14 AM on September 27 [15 favorites]

From the article: Ettingermentum: If you're not part of a larger ideological struggle where you have to worry about things like optics or the greater good or a larger cause, these one issues can kind of take up the whole world in your mind, and it might become even more dangerous than being part of just an enlisted soldier in one side of the culture war.

I think to echo others, trying to put someone in a political/ideological box, or painting any one thing/interest/part of the internet as ideologically monolithic, ultimately fails to give us any real understanding of what drives someone to do something like this. I think the above quote at the end of the article gets us part way there. But not all the way there.
posted by eekernohan at 10:14 AM on September 27 [2 favorites]

I'm firmly of the belief that we are in the 4chan /pol terror era. There is no "cause" except "for the lulz" these two shootings sure seem similar (and what about the kid who shot at Trump the first time, he also seemed like that, nobody could at first piece his politics together).

We are in an age of confusion, the entire old order is being uprooted, the fascists want to hearken back to an older order, I think these kids don't buy it, but they don't by the old order either, and they have no real ideals. America was fucked, up America-er is fucked up even more. All that is left is "chaos".

If there is a symbol for this moment/period of stochastic terror, it really is, I think, "The Joker". We used to say that about these kids, esp with Joaquin's but man.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than outright politically motivated violence. Obviously it's nice we can't easily pin it on "the left" (so far), but it's also hard for those on the left to admit that no, not everything is outright far-right (even if, obviously the "for the lulz" crowd thinks anything's game, which isn't what we stand for, and the end results are the same as if the right did their violence).

The worst part is the crackdowns and the excuses being made by those in power which to me is far worse and scarier than some assassinations.
posted by symbioid at 10:35 AM on September 27 [13 favorites]

Tyler Robinson is still alive. It is possible that we might hear about his politics or lack thereof from the man himself, either related to his trial, or afterward. Seems like he was very online, and a bit confused politically, in the manner that twenty-two year old men often are, and a lot more shootery than most. I don't like the rush to paint him as all left anymore than I like the rush to paint him as full MAGA. If we ever finally get a clearer picture, say, from a post trial interview, his politics may have congealed one way or another in a way that will have been influenced by the assassination and his subsequent interaction with the legal system.

Robinson said he did it because "there is too much evil and the guy spreads too much hate." That seems true enough to me. Combine that with whatever he had inside him that allowed him to kill someone (a MAGA childhood? young man hormones? foolishness and easy access to a rifle?) and that's probably enough.
posted by surlyben at 10:36 AM on September 27 [8 favorites]

Thorzdad: “estooned with a black-and-white american flag, of course. ”

It annoys me greatly that these people think they're being so clever with their symbols just because normies don't know what they mean and don't believe it when told.
posted by ob1quixote at 10:56 AM on September 27 [2 favorites]

Honestly he seems like a guy whose underdeveloped prefrontal cortex got the better of him and thought it might impress his love interest to do something ¡°heroic¡±. I use quotes because obviously it was not a heroic act. All of his communications after the fact are sort of an embarrassed brag.

Also, today I learned that a personality is somehow something you curate. Like a museum piece? A stamp collection? I¡¯ll keep my Douglas Adams and Monty Python fan club cards, tyvm.
posted by simra at 11:03 AM on September 27 [4 favorites]

I don't really have a problem with Reddit as-a-whole.

The dissolution of my relationship was both a product of my increasing infatuation with external objectives/responsibilities, and that of the fascist-objective transition to a IPO-centric approach; both of which withered my enthusiasm, and participation.

This being said, I really appreciate your presciently-reflective and cogent psot chavenet.

In a World of one-reference conclusions, it's nice to read (and process) material produced by an enlightened mind which references a smorgasbord of referential citations in support of their thesis.
posted by splifingate at 11:27 AM on September 27 [1 favorite]

I sorta take the point from the FPP to not be what Robinson's ideology was or wasn't, but rather just how our current media culture - as well as most individuals - are incapable of holding space for ambiguity, not knowing, or evidence that contradicts our preferred world view. People Right of Center were quick to declare him a radical Leftist. People Left of Center were quick to declare him part of the radical Right. Not everyone, but many people, including politicians, journalists, professors, etc. The same is true for the most recent shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas. The tie that seems to hold these shooters together is less any specific political ideology but a majority of their human-to-human interactions being mediated through a screen of one sort of another, of a general disconnect from their immediate community. The common refrain from once close friends of shooters is "Yeah, we had kinda fallen out of touch lately. He had pulled away and I gave up trying to engage him." Whether these shooters leaned more "Left" or "Right" in the classic sense of these terms is sort of besides the point - politics may have informed their choices of targets but they aren't the cause behind their violent method - that seems more rooted in spending too much time in spaces where the humans around us are abstract (social media) or fictional (video games, etc.), with an added unhealthy dose of nihilism and/or depression. None of these recent shooters (in which I'm including the shooters of the Health Care CEO, Trump, ICE facility, Kirk, etc.) appear to have been doing great - they all had family or friends or teachers who noticed they seemed to be not doing great, at the very least.
posted by coffeecat at 12:03 PM on September 27 [10 favorites]

Saw tshirts for sale¡­
The farmer's market is where the salt of the earth aka plebs are getting their 'worship charlie' apparel.

A woman I occasionally have followed on FB who has some of the equestrian interests I do has gradually revealed herself to be a rabid maggot even before the shooting. I originally was low-key envious of her lovely well-trained equines and financial ability to participate in many of the activities I would enjoy and can't afford (being a pleb.) She's extremely pretty, athletic, vocal, wealthy, and active on many fronts, increasingly including the political. I hadn't done anything about dropping her bullshit, mainly because I've been using it as a barometer for what the conservative horse people around here are thinking so I know what topics I want to stay away from in certain public spaces. After the shooting, she regularly posted how 'devastated' she was at the loss of someone who would bring back the values America is searching for.. I so blocked at that point.

HER shirt of choice is a satin, pearl snap fastened, western style, with RWB Swarovski crystals and flags on the yokes, printed on the reverse: RIP Charlie Kirk (dates) Our American Hero. Since then I've heard she's had a magnet sign made for her truck and ridden with a CK flag in a commemorative lap at her last competition. I threw up a little in my mouth when I heard that.
posted by BlueHorse at 12:25 PM on September 27 [7 favorites]

This stood out to me from the article (not in a finger on the lips hmmm sort of way, but in a jfc grrrr deep soul sigh sort of way):

"A friend of mine, QuoProQuid on Twitter, had a really good point about how school shootings have become routine and not really as newsworthy as before. The type of person just seeking to make an impact on history, or get their name known, has migrated more towards going after public figures, because the security is lighter than at school. And as we saw with Trump and Luigi, they get a lot more coverage than a school shooting.

And especially with the right making such a big deal of it and the world coming to a halt for a full week at this point, if you're some nihilistic loser freak who wants to make some kind of point by killing someone, people in the public eye are a lot more enticing a target at this point than some classroom full of kids."
posted by AbelMelveny at 12:26 PM on September 27 [11 favorites]

Yeah, AbelMelveny, that quote¡­

I mean, if I were to design a space where I wanted assassination culture to develop, I¡¯d make guns as available as candy, have cultural, political, and media organizations extoll violence against ¡®enemies¡¯, then give 2 generations of kids PTSD through direct exposure to shootings and shooter drills at schools.

It just doesn¡¯t seem like analyzing the shooter¡¯s life gets us any deeper of an analysis than that.
posted by herda05 at 1:13 PM on September 27 [8 favorites]

Well, for one, misogyny - which again we've discussed at length. There's also a performative nihilism as well, an attitude that creating a better world is a fool's errand.

I use Reddit to talk about my nonbinary, lesbian and South Asian identities. I¡¯ve found far better communities to talk about these subjects on Reddit than I¡¯ve ever found on Metafilter in the 20ish years I¡¯ve been on here. If all you see on Reddit is misogyny and nihilism, there¡¯s a good chance that¡¯s a you problem.
posted by lorddogbotherer at 1:14 PM on September 27 [21 favorites]

I don¡¯t spend a ton of time on Reddit, but I check in on a few subreddits from time to time, mostly hobby things where the people just seem enthusiastic about the hobby. I¡¯ve checked out some political subs when I was trying to figure out some news, and those seem to have a lot more shitty behavior. For example, Bondi is mega-awful and thoroughly hateable, but when all the comments are going for the misogynist slurs with gusto, I feel that these people aren¡¯t where I want my political analysis coming from. So, I¡¯m sure there¡¯s much worse stuff on that site, but I don¡¯t have many complaints with the hobby areas, at least for my hobbies¡­.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:26 PM on September 27 [1 favorite]

So what the shooter did wasn't heroic

The shooter might not have been "doing great"

Who is doing great?

I suppose it's all a topic for discussion.
posted by Didymus at 1:28 PM on September 27 [1 favorite]

This was a good interview. (Max Read if you see this, for the love of god switch to Ghost or Beehiv.)

I don't think that people grasping at straws wanting the shooter to be a right-wing maniac is that hard to understand: They believed the fascist regime would use the shooter being anything to the left of Genghis Khan as a pretext to start rounding up their enemies. Which, of course, is ridiculous because they need no pretext to start rounding people up.
posted by ob1quixote at 1:30 PM on September 27 [4 favorites]

It feels like a misreading to take "left-of-center people used motivated reasoning to attempt to interpret the shooting as an act of right-wing violence" and try to make it into something generational.
posted by kickingtheground at 1:43 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

Ahhh, see that's not a farmers market. A farmers market sells items people grow themselves. What you were at is a flea market, which is generally full of junk like T-shirts.

Um, no. There were plenty of produce stands. Local apiaries selling honey. Home-baked goods. Everything one would expect at a contemporary large-town farmer¡¯s market.

I wasn¡¯t aware I had to provide a detailed inventory of what all goods were on sale throughout the market simply to describe a tshirt in the tent of a local screenprinter.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:57 PM on September 27 [16 favorites]

Was there locally produced honey?

Because that's a requirement for any Farmer's Market. Also beeswax dildos
posted by Didymus at 2:07 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

I mean, the thing about the 4chan, /pol, "for the lulz" meme stew ideology is that it is, in fact, a fundamentally right-wing ideology. Talking about it as if it's "apolitical" or "outside of left-right politics" is not actually accurate.
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:17 PM on September 27 [13 favorites]

Ummm, as someone who happens to love both Monty Python and Douglas Adams and who hopes he is a good person, can we not use those two things as tropes for maladjusted losers who are going to end up as shooters?

As a nerdy Gen Xer myself who went to CTY (a bit like high level math camp) in the late 1980s, I can testify that there definitely were people who were into almost nothing but Monty Python & Douglas Adams, to the extent that their speech was almost 90% Monty Python or Hitch Hiker's Guide To the Galaxy references. I think this got invoked in the context of the article, because somebody used "band kids" as a social type to explain where Tyler Robinson fit in the teen and post-teen subcultural pecking order. Since band kids in the 1980s were definitely into Monty Python & Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference, I don't think it's a bad analogy.

The difference is that Monty Python & Douglas Adams are way more harmless than the Internet brain rot we have now. It's just that the same old process is going on. You have young adolescent and post-adolescent people with very underdeveloped identities & a lot of that identity is going to get filled in with silly in-jokes. It's just that now those silly in-jokes come from hives of scum and villainy on the Internet like 4chan or Telegraph or some of the less savory parts of Reddit.
posted by jonp72 at 2:31 PM on September 27 [7 favorites]

the thing about the 4chan, /pol, "for the lulz" meme stew ideology is that it is, in fact, a fundamentally right-wing ideology.

4chan might be right wing, but dank memes and Reddit are for everyone - particularly Gen Z and younger.

I don't think that people grasping at straws wanting the shooter to be a right-wing maniac is that hard to understand

I'm not sure anyone is suggesting it's hard to understand? But plenty of easy-to-understand phenomena are detrimental and worth pushing against, no?

ridiculous because they need no pretext to start rounding people up.

Not trolling, this is a genuine question - why this commitment to refusing the existence of cause and effect? If they needed no pretext, why hadn't they already declared "Antifa" a domestic terrorism group? Or ordered that the FBI investigate the Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation? Or why hadn't the FBI already started to consider "Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism" a target? It's not just you, there were a number of users making similar arguments in the Kirk thread, and elsewhere on the Internet. Obviously the Trump admin was already doing bad things, nobody serious disputes that, but study history even a little and all fascist regimes generally do need events that they can spin to further consolidate power. Things can get much, much, worse for a broader swath of the American public, and public opinion still matters. My main source of hope right now is how the admin is overplaying their hand - I mean, nobody with a quarter of a brain thinks Kimmel is part of the radical Left.
posted by coffeecat at 2:53 PM on September 27 [10 favorites]

Didymus: "Also beeswax dildos"

they melt in your mouth, not in your hand?
posted by chavenet at 4:02 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

I read Douglas Adams very long ago (so long ago Douglas Adams was still alive!), and if anything I think his work made me a better-adjusted person and more concerned citizen. Adams gently explored the idea that society could be really, really fucked up, that massive decisions could be made by people no wiser (and often quite dumber) than us, that having authority was not itself proof that one deserved it, and that for all of that you could have a good time anyway but that it mattered if you didn't. I would put Douglas Adams on the same level as Mark Twain in terms of having something very important to say but always saying it in the funniest, gentlest way possible -- or almost always. In other words, I do not believe Douglas Adams is a writer whose work would inspire any normal person to kill another person. Not even a little bit.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:12 PM on September 27 [18 favorites]

??¡â?
posted by glonous keming at 5:47 PM on September 27 [3 favorites]

, I do not believe Douglas Adams is a writer whose work would inspire any normal person to kill another person. Not even a little bit.

And I can't imagine how his books would inspire a trillionaire capitalist to try to conquer space, but Musk has cited HGTTG as his favorite book. No, I don't understand this either.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:22 PM on September 27 [4 favorites]

Not sure that i have a lot to add to the discussion, except that the guy insisting that it's outrageous that people are being offended by his insistence that this guy isn't a groyper, while using "band kid' as a pejorative, really sets my teeth on edge.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:33 PM on September 27 [3 favorites]

I also wish to defend Reddit's better bits. Sure there is a lot of cesspits bubbling away there. But a lot of good stuff too, ranging from purely practical advice, through general news and current affairs, to more lofty matters.

Like every other source of info and discussion ever in this world a little common sense judgement and discernment goes a long way to the quality and value of your time spent there.

MeFi might be one of the better online places for discussion and debate, but it isn't exactly free from its own problems either, including malign attempts to influence and corrupt it.
posted by Pouteria at 7:05 PM on September 27 [5 favorites]

In other words, I do not believe Douglas Adams is a writer whose work would inspire any normal person to kill another person. Not even a little bit.

Nobody is saying that he is.

In fact, it's almost the opposite - see limonaire's comment above. For a lot of GenX & elder millennials quoting Monty Python or Douglas Adams bits and catchphrases was a way to experiment with creating or developing an individual personality, and a way to find people that might accept you as one of their tribe, especially in the tween-to-early-adult years, while our prefrontal cortexes are developing. You didn't even need to particularly be fans of the works, or to consider or understand them in any depth; you just needed to grasp that saying "so long and thanks for all the fish!" or "The Knights Who Say "NI!"" would get you accolades and attention from some people.

This might have been especially true for kids with some level of social awkwardness or poor understanding of humor - understanding Adams as a truly empathetic humanist author wasn't at all a requirement, you just had to make the connection that when you said "Vogon Poetry" people would laugh with you even if you didn't really understand why Vogon Poetry is funny.

For younger millennials & GenZ this sort of "fishing for friends and personality via cultural shorthand bits" has moved from Monty Python and Hitchhiker's Guide to various memes ("Squatting Slav") created and spread on social media, including reddit and Discord and video game chats.

And there's nothing particularly abnormal about this, which is, I think, the point of the interviewee. We're all little magpies as we grow up, finding and grabbing shiny little bits and pieces of art and culture and taking them home to see which ones fit. Some get discarded immediately, some are important for a while and then get discarded or relegated to the back of our minds, some become core elements of our personality.

Robinson was still very much in that stage of picking up shiny bits and pieces, and didn't seem to be particularly adept at self-analyzing which bits were important to him, or understanding how meme culture operates in creating and spreading jokes and making connections with or gaining the approval of other people. Which is why ¡°Ettingermentum¡± is saying it's pretty pointless to try to analyze him in any real sort of political or ideological way, left or right. The guy wasn't really developed enough to grasp that dressing as "Squatting Slav" for Halloween in 2018 (5 years after the meme was created) was, well, kinda lame, because that meme was so old - so you can't really expect him to have any sort of even semi-coherent political awareness or ideology.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:00 PM on September 27 [13 favorites]

Ummm, as someone who happens to love both Monty Python and Douglas Adams and who hopes he is a good person, can we not use those two things as tropes for maladjusted losers who are going to end up as shooters?
posted by Ickster at 6:58 AM on September 27 [42 favorites +] [?]

I'd have fav'd this one, but I looked at the count and just couldn't.
posted by bcd at 8:28 PM on September 27 [7 favorites]

People who speak entirely in Python and Adams references: terrible

People who speak entirely in Simpsons reference: Greatest heros in American history
posted by Justinian at 8:53 PM on September 27 [4 favorites]

Millennials were just talking completely out of their ass about this

Ettingermentum is talking out of his ass about this.

and the moment that I heard about the bullet casings, I instantly recognized what kind of person this was

So... "I heard this one detail and I instantly jumped to a conclusion."

Well, I'm 23 years old. That's why.

Uh... okay.

I read the rest of the article hoping for something a little more concrete than this because the Groyper/antifa framings haven't been quite convincing, but "he's just an annoying fucking Reddit person" seems to be the extent of Ettingermentum's (aka Joshua A. Cohen) wisdom on the matter.

But I guess the important thing is that this substack got a click out of me.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:55 PM on September 27 [3 favorites]

I mean, the thing about the 4chan, /pol, "for the lulz" meme stew ideology is that it is, in fact, a fundamentally right-wing ideology. Talking about it as if it's "apolitical" or "outside of left-right politics" is not actually accurate.

4chan itself obviously skews heavily right-wing - because /pol/ skews extremely right-wing - but I think it¡¯s true enough that not every overlapping cultural sphere is purely right-wing. The author loses me in trying to define a ¡°type of person¡± to fit Robinson, though. I am not 23 years old but the picture he¡¯s trying to draw doesn¡¯t look particularly sharp to me, and that seems like the real point, anyway, that people wanted to read a lot into details that mostly signify that he was a regular 20-something dork who liked tired memes. But I don¡¯t know that people were reading into those details because they needed an explainer from a genuine 23-year-old. More likely, they were reading into those details because they were operating in a social/media environment that rewarded it.
posted by atoxyl at 9:20 PM on September 27 [5 favorites]

Can you even get fresh memes in Utah?
posted by telepsism at 10:01 PM on September 27 [4 favorites]

Only at the state store.
posted by atoxyl at 10:13 PM on September 27 [5 favorites]

Ideology of Reddit as a whole is, probably, American slightly-center-left, and everything that entails.

Ideology is best found on Reddit in its negative space; each subreddit is ostensibly about some topic but what is common is the cognitive-discursive style that is structurally incentivized by the pseudo democratic libertarian moderation ethos and threading structure. That's how the ideology arises in totality.
posted by polymodus at 11:41 PM on September 27 [2 favorites]

> Just a general note, I think using the term "assassination" is adopting MAGA's preferred terminology. Just like January 6th was an attempted coup (or auto-coup) or an insurrection, and not just a "riot." My opinion is that Kirk's killing is better described as a murder.

Pat Kahnke: "I was really shaken by Kirk's murder personally and it came on the heels of the murders this summer in my own city of Melissa Hortman and her husband and the shootings of another couple that night by the same guy. A guy who apparently has ties to this whacked religious movement that I've been personally speaking against on this channel. So like a lot of other people, especially people who are like me who are trying to reason with people in public, I'm still dealing with some personal trauma from these violent incidents that have been happening."
posted by kliuless at 2:34 AM on September 28 [1 favorite]

Am I the only one who still thinks that murders like this are the acts of insane people, rather than just ordinary people with a grudge taking things a bit too far? Aren't we losing sight of the mental health aspect in all the heated discussion of the minutiae of this person's cultural and political life? I think you have to be extremely mentally dysfunctional to do something like this, in a way which qualifies as insanity. I don't think you can lay the blame purely on ideology, memes or websites. A violent murderer has to have some level of insanity don't they? Isn't that a crucial ingredient that separates them from the rest of us? Whether it's caused by the structure of their brain, or some kind of trauma-related emotional dysfunction. Am I wrong to see people who commit these attention-grabbing murders as being fundamentally different to me, and to "normal" people, in a very extreme and unhealthy way? Yes, websites and ideology can fuel these acts, but don't they need an unhealthy mind to prey on in the first place? The desire to portray the malefactor as being a product of one or another ideology, to discredit that ideology, ignores the fact that they are abnormal, and can't therefore be seen as being representative. Aren't they abnormal? Aren't they different from us?
posted by mokey at 7:48 AM on September 28 [5 favorites]

Not sure about y'all but the Reddit I visit is mostly about old movies and fluffy kittens.
posted by mokey at 8:12 AM on September 28 [5 favorites]

Am I the only one who still thinks that murders like this are the acts of insane people, rather than just ordinary people with a grudge taking things a bit too far? Aren't we losing sight of the mental health aspect in all the heated discussion of the minutiae of this person's cultural and political life?

I agree with you in some ways, with the caveat that just because people who kill people like this probably have some kind of mental health issue going on, doesn't mean that people who have mental health issues are all nascent murderers.

Sometimes that might be a baked-in neurological difference like psychopathy and sometimes it might be someone experiencing psychosis and sometimes it might be depression or complex trauma at play or a host of other things.

I am relieved that's not the only or main narrative in many ways though because we know that people with mental illnesses are much more likely to be victims of violence than to commit it.

As someone who has been in this space for a long time (mental health), I do think that there are some new factors where we may see a rise in certain behaviours. I think that both the Internet and AI intersect with psychosis in new ways that need to be studied and understood (on a personal note I have see this up close with a relative and it really is scary.) I think the isolation and lack of care over the pandemic and subsequence stresses on the medical system continue to be a huge issue. And I suspect that some long-term effects of Covid on the brain may also show to be one of those "swiss cheese" factors that can add up to mental health issues + actions.

All that said...I think of the Toronto van attack where incel ideology and indeed, the example set by an incel, was a factor in how things went down. I think sometimes the shape psychosis (although note - the perpetrator in this case was found to be mentally competent) takes can be impacted by people's social and information spheres.

But...it's really complicated. I think the best thing is not to rush to judgement.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:20 AM on September 28 [5 favorites]

Am I the only one who still thinks that murders like this are the acts of insane people, rather than just ordinary people with a grudge taking things a bit too far? Aren't we losing sight of the mental health aspect in all the heated discussion of the minutiae of this person's cultural and political life? I think you have to be extremely mentally dysfunctional to do something like this, in a way which qualifies as insanity.

Might as well be insane so yes, the label can only help him now. Sanity attaches importance to weighing the results of an action known as fallout or unintended consequences. It's not just not seeing them, which is normal, but refusing to, or not caring. Good intentions is not a defense either because there is a pro-social narcissism that meets their grandiose needs for attention, but which exposes their anti-social style. This could also describe their support.
posted by Brian B. at 8:49 AM on September 28 [2 favorites]

Am I the only one who still thinks that murders like this are the acts of insane people, rather than just ordinary people with a grudge taking things a bit too far? Aren't we losing sight of the mental health aspect in all the heated discussion of the minutiae of this person's cultural and political life?

This is a very negligent view that serves to stigmatize and harm the mentally ill - who are statistically much more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators. I think that violence is disquieting to a lot of people for a number of reasons (and I will note that there has been a push in our culture of the idea that "violence is never the answer", a position I find to be both privileged and harmful.) But just because it is disquieting to us does not make it a sign of mental illness, and arguing that it is serves as a form of othering that both serves to prevent us from understanding root causes as well as harming the vulnerable.

So in short, I argue that the opposite is true - we too readily turn to "mental illness" to explain actions that discomfort and disquiet us, and we need to stop doing that because it causes real harm.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:51 AM on September 28 [10 favorites]

"Insane" is not currently a diagnosis, and calling murderers insane makes it seem like their actions come out of nowhere. The real world impacts mental health; even if you have a mental illness that you inherited, the way it's expressed is influenced by culture. I remember reading an article that says that, while Americans with audible hallucinations often hear voices telling them to do something violent, people in India are more likely to hear someone telling them to do household chores.

It seems likely to me that the mental health issues experienced by terminally online types, running the gamut from Redditors to members of the Order of 9 Angles, are heavily influenced by what's happening in their lives and in the world in general. There's a feeling of hopelessness, helplessness, and disconnection among younger people. They're not insane, they've just been failed in a lot of ways.
posted by LindsayIrene at 10:10 AM on September 28 [7 favorites]

I would count the damage that lengthy involvement with 4chan creates as not mental illness but mental injury. Retreating from the complex difficulties of the real world into a social space where revealing any kind of human frailty or vulnerability reliably triggers relentless mockery is ethically debilitating, and honing the competitive trolling skills that such environments select for is a reliable path to stupidity.
posted by flabdablet at 10:18 AM on September 28 [7 favorites]

Murdering a guy you hate might be a bad and evil thing to do, but it doesn't seem inherently disordered in the sort of ways we usually label mental illness. It's all joined up and coherent, it's just morally very bad.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:21 AM on September 28 [8 favorites]

Good point, flabdablet. On top of that, Reddit is full of male-oriented subs with a crab-bucket mentality, convincing schoolboys that they're going to be forever alone and unloved.
posted by LindsayIrene at 10:45 AM on September 28 [2 favorites]

There's a feeling of hopelessness, helplessness, and disconnection among younger people. They're not insane, they've just been failed in a lot of ways.

One of the theses of the article is that this specific shooter was personally in a more or less okay place, he seems to have had a pretty normal amount of agency and connection in his life:

He had a trade school job as an electrician. He was an apprentice. He had a relationship. He had hobbies. He went outside. He was a hiker. He went hunting. He was involved in all these communities. There's no traditional story of some kind of super socially maladjusted freak

The best explanation I have is that he saw Kirk as a threat and decided to do something drastic and horrible about it. It doesn't seem like he's a violent nihilist like your median school shooter.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:47 AM on September 28 [6 favorites]

eg his texts make it sound like he hoped to get away with it. he wasn't trying to blow up his own life, he wanted to quietly slip away and return to it. Obviously he was mistaken about whether he could pull that off, but it suggests to me that he wasn't hopeless.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:50 AM on September 28 [4 favorites]

Rather than overanalyze the defendant's engagement with ideas, I want to point to a few things:

1. His competence with a bolt action hunting rifle was a natural consequence of growing up in Utah. Where I live, that is, New England, I need to have enough neighbors adept with deer hunting to keep the roads safe and to keep chronic wasting disease from arriving in our region. So I'm not quite ready to call out Utah for making it a normal part of life there. Utahns can tell me if there's much of a niche for rifle ownership in that corner of the world.

2. Being good with a rifle isn't enough. People have an instinctive aversion to putting the booger hook in the trigger guard when the rifle is aimed at a human being. Norms in rural America celebrate and sustain the aversion, and an integral part of basic training in the army is overcoming that aversion. But... this dude's a gamer. Spend hours a day in military simulation games, and that checkbox is ticked. (This is my own bias talking, I'll admit. A friend of mine worked at Electronic Arts for a few years, came out much the worse for wear from it.)

3. The whole meme space of reddit, 4chan, et cetera. I don't think there's that much of a point to engaging in detail with it. Suffice it to say that it means the defendant was immersed in a space where there's a lot of talk about crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of war.

4. There's the natural resentment that people his age get when everything they try to do with themselves involves friction frustration, and humiliation, from a condescending professor, brusque senior tradesman, or sergeant or boatswain. That resentment is that much more intense if you're an avid gamer who wastes hours a day on something that gets you nowhere towards your goals in life, while being conditioned to think that every major obstacle you'll encounter should be overcome in time for your next bathroom break.

None of these things come from the left wing. A lot of all this comes from aspects of our environment that the right wing uses to sustain its support, and thus wants to preserve.

But then comes issue #5: whatever happened between the defendant and his partner/roommate, which if true, is basically the equivalent of an Uno reverse card. Something that takes a pawn created by the right wing off the board and changes it for one the opposite color.

This is why the right wing is so freaked out about the killing of Charlie Kirk. IT's not like they can clamp down on guns to prevent a case like this. The murder of Charlie Kirk actually is the price we collectively pay for allowing what actually is a responsible gun culture. We could clamp down on guns to stop mass shootings by defining assault rifles and banning them, and still have hunting rifles. We would not have mass shootings, but we would still have the occasional murder like this.
So that's off the table. What's left: figuring out how to find and destroy all the Uno reverse cards.

And that's not going to happen, but they will try, and there will be collateral damage from it.
posted by ocschwar at 11:13 AM on September 28 [5 favorites]

...if I were to design a space where I wanted assassination culture to develop, I¡¯d make guns as available as candy, have cultural, political, and media organizations extoll violence against ¡®enemies¡¯, then give 2 generations of kids PTSD through direct exposure to shootings and shooter drills at schools.

The murder of Charlie Kirk actually is the price we collectively pay for allowing what actually is a responsible gun culture.


Sorry, please explain to me in what conceivable way can anyone think that the United States has a responsible gun culture.

Do I believe this young man is mental disturbed? Yes, to want to kill another human being not directly threatening you is mentally unhealthy. Do I want him identified as such and using as a symbol of what the right considers to be evil and something less than human? No.

The far right is also designing a space in which the "other" including the mental ill can be disposed of, just as in Nazi Germany. Allow them to die by starvation or hypothermia from lack of shelter. "Or involuntary lethal injection, or something," "Just kill 'em." Kilmeade.
posted by BlueHorse at 11:49 AM on September 28 [2 favorites]

Sorry, please explain to me in what conceivable way can anyone think that the United States has a responsible gun culture.


America does not have a single gun culture. It has several.

IT has a gun culture that's all about showing off and spending irresponsible amounts of money on quasi military firearms that let you spray a volume of fire at a direction.

It also has a gun culture in my area where Puritanical respect for frugality and disdain for showing off means I know there are people around me who own firearms, but I will never see them in use or on display. Those firearms are not useful for spree shootings. But yes, they are available enough that something like the Kirk murder could happen here too.

That's a risk I'm willing to take because I don't want the deer population to get dense enough for CWD to arrive here. And I don't want to hit a deer with my car. And if I travel far enough into the Berkshires I'll be in areas where if a rabid raccoon or coyote shows up in your yard, animal control will tell you that they're going to take some time and suggest you or a neighbor shoot the animal first.

Yes, you could escalate a gun clampdown to the point where it covers this use case too, and it would not bother me if it happened. But I'm not going to spend my time and energy picking this particular fight. I'd rather flatly say that I find the risk of school spree shootings unacceptable as a "price for freedom," but the murder of an entitled self-indulgent douchebag who died with blood on his hands from his irresponsible advocacy for ivermectin, as a "price for freedom" or whatever.

And also, that if there's a risk that exposure to ideas causes our aimless young men to aim their guns at the rightwing instead of the left, that is very much a cost I'm willing to incur as a "price for freedom." The first amendment protects the right to print uno reverse cards.
posted by ocschwar at 12:03 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]

using "band kid' as a pejorative, really sets my teeth on edge.

I thought the point he was trying to make was that the shooter was something like a band kid, which is a normal and non-pejorative thing for a kid to be.
posted by straight at 12:08 PM on September 28 [6 favorites]

Reddit is staggeringly huge. Yes there are terrible, horrible parts of reddit and there are terrible, horrible people on reddit. But that's also true of the phone book (remember those?)

I wish when people made proclamations about what Reddit or Facebook or Twitter is "like" they were more aware of when they mean "the tiny sliver of Reddit I've seen, not the millions of people whose use of it I know nothing about."
posted by straight at 12:12 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]

Reading this interview and looking at all the time spent on analysing the killer, a fundamental truth is ignored: I don't know the shooter. You don't know the shooter. Everyone commenting about him, are no ways better informed. All of this forensic pigeonholing is perhaps a coping mechanism. But I have doubts on whether it's healthy. The killer hmself may not know his own motivation. We live behind our eyes, and every word is a window fogged from the inside.
posted by storybored at 12:22 PM on September 28 [6 favorites]

Sorry, please explain to me in what conceivable way can anyone think that the United States has a responsible gun culture.

I feel like there's a Mitch Hedberg adjacent joke to be made about how there's a responsible gun culture but there's an irresponsible gun culture too.

Both things exist in the US. Responsible gun culture is made up of people who think about gun safety. It includes things like gun safes, trigger locks, the idea that you never point your gun at a human, firearms safety training. As a non gun owner, I see it when hunters thank me for wearing hunter orange during hikes in hiking season, or when those same hunters aren't waving their rifles around like crazy people.

The other culture also exists, of course, and sometimes I think they know each other too well.
posted by surlyben at 12:24 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]

to want to kill another human being not directly threatening you is mentally unhealthy

I dunno, if his partner's trans, he wasn't insane to see Kirk as a threat to life and limb.

I don't think a lot of people on here would insist that the only people willing to, say, punch a Nazi must be mentally unwell. Yes, obviously, murder is very different. But "see someone you think is a threat and think about doing something violent about it" is a really common impulse. Often a really really bad one! I'm not endorsing it! But it's not crazy.
posted by BungaDunga at 12:44 PM on September 28 [7 favorites]

like if you haven't ever looked at a powerful political figure and thought that life would be improved on net if they fell down a manhole one day then you are more pacifist than most people and I applaud you
posted by BungaDunga at 12:56 PM on September 28 [6 favorites]

I expect Charlie was a big fan of "stand your ground" type laws. His ilk usually are. They are all about of protecting your loved ones from a perceived threat to their life with lethal force, aren't they? And rarely seem to care if that perception was accurate.
posted by bcd at 12:58 PM on September 28 [4 favorites]

if you haven't ever looked at a powerful political figure and thought that life would be improved on net if they fell down a manhole one day

Assholes falling down manholes would improve this planet in ways that murder never has.
posted by flabdablet at 1:08 PM on September 28 [4 favorites]

They are all about of protecting your loved ones from a perceived threat to their life with lethal force, aren't they?

They're about not being told what to do, including being told when it's okay to kill someone.
posted by VTX at 1:34 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]

They're about not being told what to do, including being told when it's okay to kill someone.

Absolutely. Plus, racism. But they never say that quiet part out loud when justifying such laws.
posted by bcd at 1:44 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]

So in short, I argue that the opposite is true - we too readily turn to "mental illness" to explain actions that discomfort and disquiet us, and we need to stop doing that because it causes real harm.

That's a valid view. Here's the stats. The short answer is, it's complicated. Some pull quotes:

Mental health issues were common among those who engaged in mass shootings, with psychosis playing a minor role in nearly one third of the cases, but a primary role 10% of the time.

(This is what I mean by AI triggers etc.)

Suicidality was found to be a strong predictor of perpetration of mass shootings. Of all mass shooters in the The Violence Project database, 30% were suicidal prior to the shooting. An additional 39% were suicidal during the shooting. Those numbers were significantly higher for younger shooters, with K-12 students who engaged in mass shootings found to be suicidal in 92% of instances and college/university students who engaged in mass shooting suicidal 100% of the time.

I think this is where the question of "mental illness" comes in. I think I should have said "mental health issue" though.

As a member of one of the most vilified groups (multiple/DID) I definitely can say that there is a stigma - but I also don't think that it's good to not take a clear look at these things.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:05 PM on September 28 [5 favorites]

The author loses me in trying to define a ¡°type of person¡± to fit Robinson, though. I am not 23 years old but the picture he¡¯s trying to draw doesn¡¯t look particularly sharp to me, and that seems like the real point, anyway, that people wanted to read a lot into details that mostly signify that he was a regular 20-something dork who liked tired memes.

I actually appreciated the work done to put Robinson in a typology. The tl;dr I got from the article is that Robinson is a "Reddit kid" not a groyper, not connected to any organized left-wing group, and may be a furry who dated his trans roommate. (Although I've also heard the discourse about is the roommate trans or a femboy. And do groypers like femboys? And dear Lord my head hurts.)

I'm 53 & in order to help myself understand this story, I had to do a rabbit hole search into what the difference between OwO and UwU is. And I'm not sure I wanted to do that or should have done that.

A lot of news stories that are connected to Gen Z subcultural stuff should probably have Gen Z journalists and commentators explaining them, but mainstream media journalism suffers from stale gerontocracy just as much as our political system. If there's a wave of random violence that's at bottom driven algorithms and memes, I want journalism that helps me get the details about those memes right.
posted by jonp72 at 2:22 PM on September 28 [8 favorites]

I dunno, if his partner's trans, he wasn't insane to see Kirk as a threat to life and limb.

sure, but it's also not quite sane, or i would say, misogynist and patriarchal, or just wildly confused at least, to make the absolutely wild-yet-somehow-very-white-rural-america leap from

"this person is a hatemonger /profits from generating the stochastic will to violence within Utah toward my friend and partner who lives in Utah, and perhaps a direct will to violence if a few of his audience knows my partner"

to

"the only course of action v hatemonger is granpa's rifle"

and it's that fundamental lack of imagination, hope, proportional response, knowledge of the needs of his partner, or awareness of the collective or community, that lead people to call the shooter conservative individualist, or at the very least patriarchal / white -knight and traditionalist in ideology. like this was some kind of "honor killing" that lost boy seems to have regretted immediately

becoming a sniper is just not the common profile of anyone on the left lately....maybe Essex 1973? Dorner 2013? don't want to "no true leftist" but ...

if you compare this to how avowed leftists talk anonymously about the role of guns at a more dangerous rally than Kirk's Utah rally --Richard Spencer et al's Unite the Right rally in Virginia; no one is talking about assembling sniper teams or individuals, it's more of a better-to-have-if-need tactic embedded in a much larger nonviolent strategy of drawing the nazis out, and a sniper tactic seems no good against the major vehicular attack that happened

on preview, all of this misunderstanding would be clarified if there were the number of reporters working that we had in say, 2013. we just don't have the reporters anymore, to cover any of this
posted by eustatic at 5:12 PM on September 28 [7 favorites]

mokey: "Yes, websites and ideology can fuel these acts, but don't they need an unhealthy mind to prey on in the first place? The desire to portray the malefactor as being a product of one or another ideology, to discredit that ideology, ignores the fact that they are abnormal, and can't therefore be seen as being representative. Aren't they abnormal? Aren't they different from us?"

No. If this were the case, there would be no point to Basic Training. Any human being can be made into a killer.
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:59 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]

becoming a sniper is just not the common profile of anyone on the left lately

The guy who laid in wait for Trump on his golf course seems to have been a bit unstable, but seemingly left-of-center and hated Trump for generally lib reasons.

misogynist and patriarchal, or just wildly confused at least,

Oh absolutely, you have to have a particular outlook to think you can actually solve problems by shooting someone. He wasn't up late reading violent antifa manifestos or whatever, but he was steeped in old fashioned patriarchal violence like everyone else. It's a really screwed up value system but that's one of the reasons I think he wasn't crazy, it is a value system that's commonly shared, it's just an awful one. Same reason why men who are domestically violent can be completely sane.

Which is actually good, it means if values change people will actually behave better, it's not a problem that lies exclusively between men's ears.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:35 PM on September 28 [4 favorites]

I rarely read things that register as ¡°talking out of the ass.¡± I¡¯m reasonably immune to, avoid, have no interest in, or otherwise don¡¯t see, complete bullshit. You couldn¡¯t talk this much bullshit without an agenda, some drugs, or a mad-lib, and maybe have all three.

The bottom line is that I unsubscribed. I refuse to have hamfisted attempts at forcing an opinion anywhere near me. It¡¯s tiring enough ignoring broadcast news without having to constantly wad up flyers for identity politics.

I already have to endure withering stares from people that think I¡¯m visibly insane for wearing a mask in public when barely ten percent of my area is boosted for Covid.

Cancel, unsubscribe, block, count me out.
posted by varion at 11:47 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]

ocschwar: "This is why the right wing is so freaked out about the killing of Charlie Kirk. IT's not like they can clamp down on guns to prevent a case like this"

They don't want to clamp down on guns at all? So why would they be "freaked out?" The right seems absolutely in the thrall of some kind of almost religious fervor over this, it's the best thing to happen for them in ages.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:31 AM on September 29 [2 favorites]

They don't want to clamp down on guns at all? So why would they be "freaked out?" The right seems absolutely in the thrall of some kind of almost religious fervor over this, it's the best thing to happen for them in ages.

I say, with great distaste, that this is their MLK.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:49 AM on September 29 [2 favorites]

They don't want to clamp down on guns at all? So why would they be "freaked out?"

Not would. They ARE freaked out. Because a young man primed for violence at the left appears to have committed violence at the right.
posted by ocschwar at 12:45 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]

I don't see it. The part I quoted was

k. IT's not like they can clamp down on guns to prevent a case like this

It still makes no sense. They don't want to clamp down on guns.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:54 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]

COrrect. They don't want to clamp down on any of the factors that primed the defendant for violence, because those same factors have added to their electoral support in the last 10 years. The only thing they want to act in is whatever redirected his violence in their direction.
posted by ocschwar at 1:06 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]

¡°The political killings you don¡¯t hear about,¡± Siri Chilukuri, Heated, 29 September 2025
posted by ob1quixote at 1:59 PM on September 29 [3 favorites]

They ARE freaked out. Because a young man primed for violence at the left appears to have committed violence at the right.

Some of them are freaked out because a prosperous (prosperity gospel), white, Christian, right-thinking (in their view) advocate for the First Amendment was shot on a university campus.

The prosperity gospel and Christian are key here, because evangelical, American right-wing Christianity basically is a very very personalized view of God. (This is a good overview.) God individually makes you rich, probably good looking, and prominent. If you are a truly righteous person, who trusts in the Lord and works hard, you will be rewarded not just in heaven but right here on Earth with money.

This gospel causes young pastors to get into massive debt to have fancy cars and houses so that they have the visible trappings of God-love. It's a very, in my opinion, evil doctrine, but it is extremely real for people - I have consoled relatives who have believed wholeheartedly when they had financial setbacks that they had to comb their lives for their failures as Jesus was clearly punishing them.

It really is an earth-shaking event for them. And yes, that is very stupid but it's also a human real thing that is happening. It's a very volatile time because either you believe that Kirk was someone God was fine with getting shot in front of university students like that, or you believe that there are super powerful evil forces at work (and probably that they have somehow taken over the US.)

(And on preview, yes, this demonstrates an incredibly myopic view.)
posted by warriorqueen at 2:03 PM on September 29 [4 favorites]

ocschwar: "They don't want to clamp down on any of the factors that primed the defendant for violence, because those same factors have added to their electoral support in the last 10 years. "

Um no, all I was saying was they don't want to clamp down on guns, because they never did. I'm not sure why this point isn't obvious but ok it's a draw.
posted by tiny frying pan at 2:27 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]

Thanks for that link, chavenet - very helpful and enlightening.
posted by Rash at 2:45 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]

The guy who laid in wait for Trump on his golf course seems to have been a bit unstable, but seemingly left-of-center and hated Trump for generally lib reasons.

Sort of. He claimed he was a Trump supporter who no longer supported him. The rest of the evidence suggests that he identified to an almost delusional degree with the country of Ukraine & he was motivated to shoot Trump because of Trump's perceived anti-Ukraine, pro-Russia tilt in foreign policy. I guess supporting Ukraine could legitimately be considered a left of center position, but I think saying he was merely left of center understates how obsessed this guy was with Ukraine.
posted by jonp72 at 7:10 PM on September 29 [4 favorites]

I thought the point he was trying to make was that the shooter was something like a band kid

No, it's right up near the top of the piece: "I mean, I could describe it a thousand different ways. He's like--people know these guys as band kids, because they always happen to be in marching bands and stuff.

Read Max: Okay. Right. I'm 39, ¡°band kids¡± is familiar to me. That's a long-standing type.

Ettingermentum: So this is the latest evolution of band kids. Kind of cloying, desperate for approval, really liable to get into unfunny in-jokes, furry references."
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:30 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]

¡°From the Cesspool to the Mainstream,¡± Suzanne Schneider, The New York Review of Books, 23 October 2025 [Archive]

The ¡°new fusionist¡± intellectuals are the missing link between nineteenth-century race science, twentieth-century libertarianism, and the contemporary alt-right.

posted by ob1quixote at 7:47 AM on October 2

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