o while there sure are more desperate people that have antisocial tendencies, just for economic issues, whether they consider those tendencies to be socially acceptable, and whether delving more on them is something that they will do, depends on finding social validation, and nowadays, we do that on the internet pretty easily. This kind of thing could still happen in the past: History tells us so, but the level of disengagement, and depth of the economic reasons required to trigger the radicalization of people, in one form or another, is far lower than before. It doesn't matter if it's people finding support and advice on how to kill themselves, bulimics seeing that their behavior is normal, or just a teenager that finds other people that likes music from the 50s, or goes very deep into pinball. Similar shapes, except some have deadly consequences.
I think fundamentally it’s due to the ostracization and lack of any real social support for outcasts in our open society that creates the monsters. We offer nothing and nowhere to go for those who don’t get along, so they end up in the back corners of the internet at the very bottom of the social barrel with nothing to do but fuck with the society that spurned them (or they themselves spurned).
I've never been that far down the rabbit hole but I can imagine a lack of any human contact playing a role from my experience.
Can't upvote this enough.
But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here.
Lack of opportunities is not case of Roger Elliot, Sandy Hook massacre nor columbine. Not in the mail bomb case either nor that one with skater brother (can't recall name now).
It's both. A combination of hopelessness for their future and an ideology that can be seized upon to fill that same void.
50 virgins in the afterlife is the simplest example of this. Whom might such a future appeal to? Not so much the successful family man, I think. But it's not the only ideology that fits the bill. If you can promise any kind of wider purpose to someone's life (e.g. save your race!) that'll inherently appeal to a portion of the people that feel their life lacks meaning. If that group gets bigger AND an ideology gets increasing mind-share, you get the phenomenon we're now experiencing.
And it has nothing to do with dude "having no prospects". That people in this state then fit greatly into ideological bubble that feeds their delusions is something we can criticize ideological bubble for.
And sure, counter-examples exist, though that particular one isn't really in the same space as this. Certainly people kill each other, and sometimes crazy people kill random strangers. But that was not a mass killing in the sense that this El Paso situation was, or that 9/11 was.
I don't want to spread any more content about him by sharing links or quotes here, but I think it's important to dispel the suggestion that he had a well-functioning social or relationship life.
Media interviews with people who knew of him all indicate that suggestion is false.
Anyway, that's a very poorly written rule. I can only respond to the strongest interpretation I am aware of or can imagine. People read things in different ways. If I had read it the way you apparently did, I would've responded to that.
I didn't attack or demonize. I responded civilly. If he or she had clarified, I would've been happy to accept.
There's got to be room for honest misunderstanding in civil discourse.
>...And its societies fault? [sic]
Well, that's the problem as I see it. There is a huge issue where a lot of young men do not have healthy outlets for their frustrations and were sold a dream from the 90's-2010's that just doesn't really work anymore. The traditional path of high school > college > job + family isn't the norm anymore, as it just doesn't work well in a lot of regions of the US anymore (I'm from the US, so I'll focus on the US).
But, the issue I have with the conversation that tends to happen when these message board groups pop up is that it results in a large number of posters completely removing their own agency from their lives and letting some extremely vile groups of persons tell them:
- You're worthless
- No one cares about you
- You're a low-roll of genetics, and forever a failure
- Society values everyone else above you
- Corollary to the above point it's the fault of $minority_group_poster_dislikes that you are devalued
- There's nothing you can do about it
The list goes on. When I do manage to get a chance to talk to some of these guys, when the memes stop and the copy/pasta has run out and you just start getting their own words and responses, you start to realize that what you have is a bunch of people disappointed with themselves, lacking a positive support structure and proper guidance on things that employers, friends, potential partners, and society in general has weird quirks on.
The biggest complaint I see is that "no one will hire me because I'm an adult white male", but when we get past the rhetoric they've been spoon-fed and finally get a look at their resume or do a mock interview, the problem is clear, and not to put the blame squarely on them, but it __is that they don't know how to present themselves__. They're shy, they're embarrassed, and they curl up defensively as a result.
The message of "it's everyone else's fault but mine" is convenient, and again, this isn't to put the blame squarely on the individuals. US society has failed us in a lot of ways. I stupidly took a literature major in University, and midway through went to a few career fairs focusing on how to get a job because I was getting worried on how I would ever convince someone to hire me with a literature degree. The advisor, while quite nice and pleasant, gave me some awful advice about keyword spamming, phrases that are "guaranteed to work", and so on. Talking with actual recruiters and hiring boards later on, I found out that all of that stuff was non-sense, and instead I just needed to learn how to sell myself and show what I could do, without wasting the recruiter/interviewer's time. Now that I handle interviews as one of the main components of my work, I can see how badly in this area we set __all__ young people up for in this respect. I got lucky, because I could see the forest so to speak, figured out quickly how to talk to employers, how to talk to interviewers, and how to up-talk what I've done without coming off as arrogant. Others are not as lucky.
This is just one example, but the core problem is the same; you have a group of young people (men in this case) that just don't know how to both protect (or even have) their own self-identity while still participating in society at large. The communities online that spew this stupid rhetoric and vitriol are the Jim Jones' of the 21st century, and they're just as toxic, and now dangerous apparently.
So yeah, society has some failings, but we also have a group of people who are diving head first into a dark spiral that just reinforces the negative feelings and they give away their agency over themselves willingly to some ass who wants to sell them something, or even worse, just wants to make people miserable.
At some point these people need to realize that they are doing a lot of this to themselves needlessly, and they can learn to handle the crap hand that society gives all of us. We won't all be millionaires, but it's got to be better than being broke and unemployed posting pictures about how miserable and worthless you are while someone feeds gross propaganda into your head.
What these people need is a status hierarchy that they can feel like they're not at the bottom of, a la "The Melancholy of Subculture Society". Unfortunately, extreme racist ideology makes it too easy - they are eager and able to provide that. The eroding of offline and smaller online communities make these other sorts of places the rare place that actually offers something left.
These sorts of sniping expeditions (as in the OP) at the *chans aren't going to actually fix any of these concerns, this is mainly just in-group backpatting so people can feel good that "we're not like them".
To quote Mao Zedond, "the streets are littered with dried faggots, ready to be lit aflame". 8chan is like that, being on 8chan turns your mind into that and the software model causes it. Who's "smoking all those faggots"? The OS developers, the browser vendors and the server hosts.
There's a reason we don't burn books!
Reversible computing is underway but we don't have to wait for that. The zero-energy aspect - awesome, but what's much more important is the "no unplanned data loss" aspect - every bit is accounted for.
But then one of my closest friends killed himself silently. That was when I realized that these sites are no jokes. Some of the people there have fallen so deep into the pit of hate and depression. Nowadays I don't even link nor share the name of the sites to my younger friends where I see the early signs of hate growing. My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up, making them socially illfit, making them outcasts and making them blame everything on immigrants and so on when they can't find a girlfriend or friends.