Looking backwards, looking forwards

Reading one of my earlier posts recently I made a connection that I’m sort of surprised I didn’t make way back then. I mentioned once I have this recurring intrusive thought or daydream of poisoning homeless people. Not any particular homeless individual, in fact I think the idea is that I’d specifically avoid the ones I know. See there’s a few who hang around near where I work, and sometimes I’ll give my tips or some of my tips to them after closing up. They’ve all come to recognise me when they see me now, there’s this one guy in particular who is very friendly. When I have to take the bin out to the sheds at the end of the shift and there’s not much room he’s helped me get it through the door a couple times. Yes it’s just a gesture, I can manage it easily enough and he’s there because he’s come to expect some change when seeing me ultimately, but nevertheless I appreciate it. I quite like these people, even if most of them probably rightfully earned their current situation, and I wouldn’t want any harm to come to them.

That’s the funny thing really, and I suppose I already did this bit in that very same earlier post so I won’t go on about it, but while I will judge these people for their poor character and decisions I don’t necessarily dislike them. On the other hand the strawmen I’ve conveniently just made up who would say I’m a nasty and ignorant person for doing so do tend to. Like I said I’ve already mentioned it before, but there’s a real disdain that most people have for the homeless and it’s a very visceral thing. It’s really a feeling of disgust, and it makes sense because they do often smell but it’s more than that, almost like they sense that their poor fortune might rub off on them. Even when I don’t have change or don’t want to give my change to one of them I’ll feel a bit bad and will always acknowledge them if asked, so many people just ignore them entirely. I mean completely blank them, they’ll be walking right by and definitely within earshot but they just pretend not only like they were never asked for money but like the beggar doesn’t even exist.

I said something else in that very same post as well actually, an insight which I lost as soon as I had it. I was worried when going back to reread some of these earlier posts that they wouldn’t hold up and would seem stupid and cringy but that’s not the case, unusually for something I’ve written and revisited after some time. There were a few things that I did in those earlier posts that I’ve decided to stop doing because of those reasons, but the general ideas and message I stand by in almost all cases which is what I’m talking about. Anyway, I said in that same post that ignoring someone is not something people do to those they don’t care about but actually to people they have a problem with. It’s not disinterest, if you’re being ignored it’s not because the person really doesn’t think about you, it’s a minor act of aggression. Not like being punched in the face or even insulted of course, but in principle it’s the same if not in degree. It’s a deliberate act, I think were my exact words.

I think this is why being “ghosted” bothers people so much, there’s this explanation that it’s because you realise how little you mean to them but that never sat right with me. That’s not what’s happening at all, let’s go back to the homeless people again for an example. See, the smartly dressed cubicle cucks and their heavily made-up female counterparts have to make an effort to pretend the beggar asking for help isn’t there, it’s undoubtedly a conscious act. They feel insulted that someone so gross and stupid (according to them, not me) would even speak to them, and again like I said in that post months back the deliberate ignoring of them really translates as “fuck off” or something like it. Being ghosted is no different, they’re basically saying you’re unworthy of their time and should fuck off. It’s not that you don’t matter to them, it’s that they have grown to dislike you or be annoyed by you and this is their way of saying so.

I’ve noticed as well that being ghosted seems to bother robots and people of a similar mindset even more so than it does normal people. Which makes sense when you think about it, because what is the thing that really seems to define a robot? Other than the obvious I mean. It’s this feeling of being ignored, of being left out. It starts young, and I literally cannot think of a single example of one of these people who doesn’t share this experience. I have had this experience, if you read MTW you’ll see that Elliot Rodger had this experience, it’s one of the most common things to see people lamenting on /r9k/ and in my very brief time spent checking out other spaces online populated by similar people I’ve seen it there as well. I mean you might think that this should mean they’re desensitised to it but I don’t think so. I think that it’s like irritating a wound, see a lot of these people retreat away from the world in their youth, which is partially what stops them from being properly socialised. The desire for companionship being so strong though, they search for relationships with other people online. The time away from the world has allowed for some healing, but then these online things break down as they always seem to and the scar is reopened.

I had another post very early on, my second or third, about school shootings. I feel like without the whole build up the hot take I have on the subject doesn’t have the same gravity so I’d say if you’re reading this and haven’t checked that one yet you should read it before this, but it’s not crucial. Essentially, I see school shootings/ mass shootings in general as performance art. The problem is that the message of the piece is not something I think the performers (the people doing the shooting, whether it be Elliot Rodger or the Columbine kids or whoever) are consciously aware of. I will say though, something I didn’t say in that post, that the increase in such events or at least the increased reporting of them is an interesting development. See take the example of Columbine, everyone always assumed they were bullied losers but they were actually relatively normal. They had a group of friends, one had a girlfriend I think, this is something that surprises people. It surprises people because it makes sense for school shooters to be losers, after all who is it who fantasises about doing that kind of thing? Even if only as an escapist fantasy, and they’d never actually do something like that, just like how I would obviously never actually harm the homeless. It’s kids who are bullied, kids who are meek, kids who struggled to find friends.

Now though, and there’s been a new one since that post actually but I haven’t taken the time to really read much about the story, you’re seeing a lot of these shooters more explicitly identify with this role or be identified with it. I’m not really here to talk about just shootings though, I think it’s bigger than that. After all, there was that guy Alek Minassian and he certainly fits in with this despite using a vehicle to attack the public rather than a firearm. So we all kind of know that it’s “losers” and now a more recent term “incels” who are the kind of person to engage in this sort of thing, even when it’s not, if you understand. Incel is a really interesting term, and I’ve had another idea for a post just regarding the term itself and why it over all the similar ones has come out on top in the public discourse recently, but right now I just want to talk about one particular thing regarding the term.

It’s something I’m sure I’ve talked about in a previous post, but I can’t for the life of me find it so maybe I never actually got around to that one. Does the term incel describe a kind of person, or an ideology? I mean of course it describes a person but I mean is it merely a person, is any young man who can’t get laid an incel? Or is it a young virgin male who also believes specifically in the usual things that are associated with the term incel? So, does being an incel also mean you have to be in that whole world of Chad and Stacy, of the blackpill, of the very term incel? I mean there’s the idea of the “hopecel” (which is one of the funniest words I’ve heard in a while) going around, which describes someone who would generally fit the incel archetype but doesn’t buy into the whole “blackpill” idea. The thing is, hopecels are considered a variant of incel (by incels, who are the ones who coined this amusing term) which leads me to believe that according to most people who would identify themselves as an incel it’s not about an ideology. To these people it is just what it says, a portmanteau of involuntary and celibate, someone who can’t get laid.

The problem is whenever incels are spoken about in normie media outlets they are identified as an ideological group. Even a terrorist group, lol. Any article on the subject from a major news organisation or even just a buzzfeed kind of thing (glorified blog that operates within the overton window) makes the preface that they’re not talking about all virgin men but merely the people who believe in the toxic/ misogynist/ hateful/ delusional or whatever other meme buzzword they have ideology professed on incel forums and other such places. This then filters down and nowadays the term incel when used in general public discussion also means this. So the question is really, what is this ideology? To me if there is one right now, and I’m not sure there is, it’s basically just a variant of the same “redpill” stuff that’s been here for over a decade. It’s really not much different than what PUAs, or MRAs or MGTOWs and so forth believe, other than a few admittedly crucial differences. It’s a lot like Marxism in a way, you have socialists and anarchists and Leninists and so on, but they all see one another as comrades when push comes to shove.

These crucial differences are, at least from my understanding, the “blackpill” and the acceptance of violence. So the blackpill is essentially the idea that it’s fucked and there’s nothing you can do about it. I don’t know if Eggy’s video is the actual first use of the term but it certainly was the point from which it entered the meme lexicon. It’s kind of spread to certain alt-right circles, you see some of those e-celebs use the term but it’s taken on a slightly different meaning when they use it, thanks to the pol9k pipeline which I’ve already talked about before. It’s ultimately the same feeling, hopelessness, just applied to politics. I’m not going to go on another several paragraph long tangent about this, but I’ll quickly say that there are even within incel circles different ideas about what the thing to be “blackpilled” on even is. It doesn’t matter too much, the only thing that matters is that the blackpill has been taken, and now you see how hopeless your situation really is.

I think this is what leads into the second thing, the acceptance of violence. Now most people who identify with incels obviously aren’t violent and thuggish, if anything I’d argue that meekness is much more common amongst them (us?) than the public at large. Statistically speaking an incel is less likely to murder you than a normie, I’m not kidding. What I’m saying is that you’ll never get any kind of condemnation about what Elliot or Minassian or the most recent guy who killed those women in a bank did, in fact you’ll find jeering and celebration of it. This is in opposition to the people who identify with those other associated “redpill” groups I mentioned earlier, who will always claim that they condemn violence. I’m not saying this as a bad thing, I’ve done the same over and over in my time on /r9k/ if I’m being honest, laughing and joking about the victims of various shootings. In fact the picture I think I’ll use for the header image on this is a screenshot of my post from the infamous “some of you guys are alright” thread, if I’m honest I’m not 100% convinced that Mercer actually made that thread and it’s not just a coincidence but it’s certainly a likely possibility. I do find it kind of satisfying, I probably gave that impression on my other post about school shootings too. It feels like a kind of twisted justice has been had when I hear about one of these mass shootings, and I know for a fact that a great many people feel the exact same way.

Until that post about school shootings, or the idea I wrote about in it came to me anyway, I couldn’t properly explain why. After all the people who die in these shootings aren’t even the actual people who excluded or bullied the shooter (if he was bullied that is) in many cases, so it’s not like he’s getting revenge. The people are random, but of course as I explain in that post that’s the point. What unifies everyone who has “taken the blackpill” is this feeling that the thing holding them back from happiness and companionship is out of their control. Whether it’s how they look, or their meekness and lack of proper socialisation as a child or whatever, it’s random, or at least it feels random to someone raised in the individualistic culture we inhabit. It feels wrong to even be angry at the people who did exclude you, after all you’re told over and over that to expect to be treated well or even the same as everyone else is entitled. Again though, going back to the other post I was talking about, ignorance is deliberate. Which should bring me back to where I started this post.

Back to poisoning homeless people, hopefully you’ve figured out the connection already. Just like with a mass shooting or running your vehicle into a crowd, the beauty is in the randomness. Now I can kind of retroactively appreciate why this weird fantasy appeals to me, and again I want stress I personally wouldn’t ever actually leave little poisonous drinks around for hobos. There’s just something about the idea of truly random violence that has a kind of beauty to it. There was a thread I saw a few weeks ago on /r9k/, it was about some crime that had happened and how the perpetrator was found because of his relation to the victim. I don’t remember why it was made, but there ended up being quite an interesting point made about the perfect crime.

The perfect crime you might say, is one without any discernible motive. This example was given by an American, he said what if he were to buy a gun and travel to a different state and then shoot someone at random. Then dispose of the weapon, make sure no fingerprints or DNA evidence is left behind and never talk about it. How plausible this actually is I don’t know, but it’s very interesting to me that it was someone from /r9k/ who would think this way. Again, this idea of randomness of the victim comes up. Just another anecdote that stuck out to me. I think there’s really something to this, and I think that while it may just be unconscious now a very interesting potential development for the “incel community” if there is any such thing will be when people start to become conscious of this.

Living up to my shitty blog title

The problem is that I can’t fucking accept my damn role, I know who I am and who I’m meant to be. I already talked about this, I am a loner and I’m always going to be. If I could just accept that I’d be so much happier, and I want to but it’s instinct to strive for otherwise. That’s why I keep getting obsessed with all these people who wander through my life briefly. That’s what they’re doing, that’s how it’s always going to be for me. People passing through, if I really try hard I’ll keep my two close friends but I will very likely never form another lasting relationship with a person again other than that. That’s what me falling for these girls at work is, it’s the desperate grasping of my reptile brain. If I was some thick dick PUA chad who had women throwing themselves at him I wouldn’t care about any of these people most likely. I know it sounds shocking but it’s true, because look how those people are. I’m timid and nice because it’s some kind of strategy my inner nature cooked up to try and push my genes. It’s not in my control, I think I’m nice because I like being nice but I like being nice because my brain dumps positive feelies in order to incentivise this false niceness which doesn’t feel false. I mean seriously, I struggle through smalltalk with these people that’s fucking it. What I do know about them, the opinions they have and the art they like etc it’s all unimpressive or uninteresting and I see myself latching onto whatever it can but frankly it’s reaching. I want to assume command, my rational thinking conscious mind or ego if you will wants to start making the decisions around here. I’m just not eloquent enough to express myself, I have the vocabulary and the ideas are bouncing around in my head as words but I can’t quite put the puzzle pieces together when I want to record this stuff more permanently in ink or on the internet.

I’ve been thinking about what would happen if any of the people I’ve written about were to read this blog, would they be shocked and disgusted? Would they think, what a fucking loser how dare he be attracted to me or think about me like that without me even knowing? Or maybe they can all tell, and it’s all some big joke pretending to act normal around the weirdo. I don’t know what people are saying about me, it’s all women other than me and one other guy who just started so they’re probably gossiping about all kinds of shit, at least that’s what popular knowledge would have me believe. Someone said in a post on r9k the other night that if you work around mostly females and they aren’t shit talking around you, you should be concerned. I know I make them uncomfortable, I know I make everyone uncomfortable. It’s a fucking joke, I understand that it’s evolutionary for us to dislike/ distrust the weak but circling back onto my earlier point can’t we exercise some control over our baser instincts given how we aren’t living in caves anymore. I’m not saying I think I want anyone to give me some succ, I actually don’t feel entitled to sex like a lot of people would claim about incels or whatever I am. I just want people to maybe not resent me or feel weird around me, maybe even make a little more effort in conversation if they can tell I’m having a difficult time. It’s not hard to tell, and I do the same thing when I get customers who I know are a little awkward or nervous. There’s a university not too far from me see, so I occasionally get a few guys who I can tell are a little similar to me. Around the same age, and carry themselves in a way that I can just tell, if that makes sense. They usually come in alone and don’t speak very loud and might have their change ready before coming in so they don’t have to get it out at the counter. I always try my best to make them feel comfortable, again because it gives me the good feelies thinking I might have made life just a little more bearable for a minute for them. It’s really not much to ask for, but almost no one is willing to do it. When they do, I’m so deprived of human warmth I immediately become way too grateful and can’t keep them out of my thoughts. They don’t know this though, or at least I don’t think they do. You’re shunned because you don’t know how to act, which brings me onto the subject of this Wizchan screenshot that really activated my almonds the other day.

It’s all interesting stuff, but the second post is the one that really kind of changed how I think a little. This idea that I and people like me are unable to tap into this secret tongue, which I suppose is a combination of body language and the right kind of eye contact and tone of voice and a bunch of other things, just makes so much sense to me. It also builds upon this idea that has always kind of fascinated me, and which I kind of got close to talking about before in my “thinking about thinking about things” entry. This conflict between our nature and our “spirit” I suppose. I don’t know, spirit might not be the right word here maybe intellect or higher being I can’t think of any one word that expresses what I want to without being potentially misleading. I think it’s clear what I’m trying to get at though, hopefully. I mean it’s not something that only I think about, clearly this question has been asked since we’ve been capable of asking it. We know that something separates us from all the other animals on the planet, but yet we know we are still alike also. Intelligence works maybe, but that’s another tricky word because it has a few different ways of being used so there’s still potential confusion. In some cases it’s used to describe the general characteristic which we think separates us from the rest of the animals (like how we say we’re looking for “intelligent life” on other planets) but often it’s also used interchangeably with cleverness which is a completely different thing. That confusion is what was blocking my progress on the issue I talked about in “thinking about thinking about things” actually, because sure being thoughtful or engaging abstract ideas is what we mean by that first definition of intelligence so it’s understandable that I and I’m sure plenty others assume that more of that is “more” intelligence but it’s this other use of the word which was getting me stuck. You convince yourself you’re some misunderstood genius, when in reality you can be a total idiot but just very thoughtful, and all because of this quirk of the English language. That’s what the “smart but lazy” thing is, ultimately. Language is both our liberator and our jailer, but this is again not some great insight plenty of people have talked about it.

Anyway, I’m really all over the place here I’ll try to get back on course a little. You might remember me ending that “thinking about thinking about things” post by saying that what ultimately links people like me together isn’t social alienation or introversion or lack of interest from women, although those are of course often things we have in common, but that we both spend so much more time thinking about things than normal and respect others who do. I also said that this is why those of us who are like this but lack self awareness gravitate to this idea that is right now best represented by the NPC meme but before in terms like sheeple, etc. Well I basically think that there’s kind of a spectrum (not the autism spectrum, although it is funny that autism and autist are terms so commonly thrown around in places we congregate, like r9k) which kind of covers this nature/ reptile brain aspect of humanity and this “intelligence”, for lack of a better term. I don’t think it’s new, like I said it’s something that I think is very common to think about. See, when I was in my /pol/ phase (not that I’ve put those ideas behind me, I’m still influenced by my time there) Evola was brought up a lot. He was a thinker of the Traditionalist School who were apparently a group that believed in this idea called the perennial philosophy. I never read anything from him, maybe I will one day in fact I plan to, but from what I understand the idea of the perennial philosophy is that all the major religions and belief systems found the world over are all trying to get at the same fundamental Truth. So, maybe I’m completely off here but it seems to me that in order to get an understanding of this Truth, one should look at what these religions share in common and discard the rest. Well, something that stands out immediately is how seemingly independently these religious orders have in one way or another arrived at a kind of asceticism. Whether it’s drug and alcohol abstinence or fasting or more extreme things like buddhist monks who meditate in extreme climates or the Japanese monks who mummied themselves while still alive by deliberately dehydrating themselves. Of course it’s the Japanese who took things to the absolute extreme, they really do as a people embody this end of the spectrum I’ve imagined, which might be why so many people like me have this obsession with japan and Japanese culture actually now I think about it but I can’t get sidetracked again now. The idea is always that these kind of activities bring you closer to God/ Enlightenment/ Truth/ whatever, and really what they all are is you deliberately going against your nature or instinct to indulge. The seven deadly sins are all instinctive/ animal associated behaviour. Perhaps that the idea of man as fallen, common in Christianity is getting at the same thing. Our intelligence, this thing that separates us from animals if unrestricted by our nature is God. So we really do get closer to it, the more we choose not to indulge.

I don’t know, maybe I sound like a total idiot and none of this makes any sense. I’m always so self doubting, it’s hard to commit to anything without feeling like a fraud. I’m not sure anyone is even capable of an original thought nowadays, we’re so bombarded with information it’s probably just us riffing on something we heard or read and thought we’d forgotten about. I think what people call the crabs in a bucket mentality of 4chan doesn’t help someone like me either. They say that during a Triumph in ancient Rome, which was this parade celebrating a major victory, the general leading the procession would have a slave who would stand right behind him and whisper “Memento mori” in his ear over and over. That translates roughly to “remember you are mortal” I think, and in moderation I think 4chan has the same effect. Unlike basically any other major forum or social media platform or whatever which is basically a complete fucking hugbox in comparison you actually get called out on your shit and I think that’s healthy. Most of the users though, especially in the /pol9k/ sphere of the site which doesn’t just mean those two boards but anywhere else that group predominates, aren’t casual users at all they’re there for several hours a day. After so much time around it does become less of a positive and more like the crabs in a bucket, and you can kind of tell who is and who isn’t steeped in this after a while. You really can sense this “newfag”, or nowadays I guess people will call you reddit meaning the same thing, aura from certain posters. I think I have more to say though, going back to that wizchan screenshot. Maybe the opposite end of the spectrum from the ascetic detached thoughtful end are the normalfags, the people who just are tuned in to this secret tongue.

I also have something to say in regards to that third post on there, the one at the bottom which talks about intuition and instinct. See his initial response was quite different from mine, an equally fascinating way of looking at this though. Whereas I kind of think that maybe it is just instinctual for people to tap into this secret tongue, and that being people who are more on the detached/ unbound end of this spectrum I’ve imagined we can’t tap into it. He says it’s something learned, and the reason we can’t tap into it is I guess because we never went through that learning process. In his view the normalfags actually agree with me as it being instinct, but they believe that it’s universal and anyone can tap into it unlike me. It’s probably because there are normalfags who suffer from social anxiety and things like that, I mean every youtube e-celeb seems to have it and every soundcloud rapper and every millennial normalfag with a platform anywhere really. It’s more common than fucking toxoplasmosis at this point, but these people still manage to have friends and romantic relationships and careers so naturally to incels and robots that’s all a little suspect. I’m not going to get into that issue right now though, perhaps another time. The point is that for those people bee urself does kind of work, and so it’s just assumed it must work for all people with “social anxiety” which is a term I think we should just kill off because as I’ve explained it clearly is used to describe two groups of people at once and that’s having a negative effect. Once again with the tricky nature of language. So you’re shunned for not being able to communicate using this secret tongue, you feel “off” to people and therefore you never have any opportunity to get better. If we’re sticking with that anon’s metaphor of learning the piano, you won’t ever be able to become a maestro if you don’t start learning from a very young age, but you can still learn to play competently as an adult. What do you do though if no music teacher will do lessons with you? I think that some of us are just meant to be alone, but even though we might be less in touch with out beast nature it is ultimately still there and it roars at us in hunger constantly.

I don’t know what I’m talking about, I just had to loosen the tap and let this stuff out it’s not a cohesive piece of work. This isn’t a thesis or an academic paper, and yes I’m doing that cowardly thing people do who want to hide from real criticism by saying “I’m just throwing ideas around man, don’t take me seriously”, it’s just what’s been on my mind. I kind of had to get it all out, I rushed my last entry because I felt I was taking too long between updating. I think I’ve got it all out of my system, I hope this is interesting or entertaining. I’ve been thinking about this blog itself some more too, I’ve finally decided what I want to do. You probably already have heard of the album ITAOTS (I know I’m an entry level /mu/ hipster faggot, pls no bully), well after it was done the main guy behind the project Jeff Magnum never recorded again as far as I’m aware. He knew when he was done, he knew that record would be the peak of his artistic career. Well, one day I suppose I’ll be done with this. Elliot Rodger left behind his “manifesto” before he went on his shooting, My Twisted World (I’ve both read through it myself and listened to a reading, if you haven’t already it’s worth at least a read) and I understand exactly why he did. It’s about having some control over how you’re remembered, see it was called a manifesto but it was more of an autobiography and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t actually referred to as a manifesto in the document itself. I’m aware of plenty of normies who actually read through the thing, and pretty much every last one of them had some sympathy after, but the many more who only heard what was said about him on the news or in a few short interviews with his family tended not to. If you read it you get an idea of his thoughts and beliefs and how they evolved, a rundown of all the important and meaningful events in his life and a real sense of closeness/ humanity. It’s hard to hate anyone you know so intimately. I don’t give a shit about the normalfucks he killed so that wouldn’t bother me anyway, but of course for most people that’s an issue, without an understanding of the guy they hate him.

In a way Elliot still lives on through MTW, I mean I remember there was a weekend a couple of years ago where some anon had found like 300 never before released photos of him throughout his life and was releasing them slowly over multiple threads. Well at one point I was suddenly reminded, this guy is dead. Not only is he dead, I’ve only ever known of him after his death. Yet I feel like he was part of my life, I know I’m not the only one what about that mullato guy who’s built a whole youtube channel on talking about Elliot. I’m not saying I plan to commit a mass shooting, there are no guns here. But one day when I finally feel like I’ve finished. When I feel that this blog taken as a whole truly represents who I am and was, I’ll switch it from most recent at the top to the reverse and be done. Or maybe I’ll do nothing of the sort and decide to keep going forever, or maybe within a year I’ll stop getting any visitors and give up, but I have this little romantic vision right now and if I stick to it that’d be cool. I find it so hard to talk to people you know. If everything is all in one place, all my concerns about context and being taken the wrong way will be gone. People have this tendency to ascribe a motive for something you do because it happened recently, and they miss the bigger picture. For example in Elliot’s case if we didn’t have MTW but just some events we knew of, we might think that that night when those guys broke his ankle and robbed him at a party was what made him decide to perform a shooting. It might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but with My Twisted World we got a detailed description of all the other straws that didn’t. It’s only with this knowledge, that at last we can understand him. Of course by the time I feel finished I imagine this entire thing will be a lot more daunting and all over the place, because I’m not streamlining at all or in a rush to get it all out, but it should provide a complete picture. How I think about things, how I got to be the person I am, etc. Of course it’s totally narcissistic to assume anyone will give enough of a shit to read everything I publish, but I would do it for someone I found interesting or engaging and I think I can be those things to some people. So that’s the plan, maybe.

Maybe it’s ok to just let this keep happening

Ok so before anything I just have to say that I’m obviously not an expert, I have no academic qualifications because I’m a dropout piece of shit. What I do have is way too much free time (if I’m not working I’m at home almost guaranteed) and an interest in this kind of thing. It’s hard to find the best place to start when it comes to this subject, I’ve thought about it so much for years now and I keep getting thrown off every time I think I’m getting somewhere writing this up. I’m just going too have to accept that I won’t cover everything I have to say in this post. It’s like when people say “I could write a book on X subject”, I keep getting sidetracked by other aspects of the issue. Basically, my idea is that mass shootings are a form of performance art and I’ll try to explain how and why I got to this perspective. I’m not going to talk about the gun debate, the mental health of these shooters, the very particular time and place of this modern phenomenon (the US in the last 30 years or so), how overblown the whole thing actually is and the disproportionate media coverage it gets when compared to literally any other fucking violent crime except maybe sandmonkeys blowing shit up, etc. outside of when it directly relates to what I’m trying to talk about.

So quickly some background information, there are two definitions of mass shooting and it’s important to be aware of each. Not just for helping to understand what I’m saying either, but also because all the major media institutions are aware of the difference and abuse that knowledge. There’s the official/ legal definition which I’ve posted a screenshot of above, and there’s what I suppose you can call the cultural definition. The cultural definition is much more limited, it’s really a kind of story that follows a similar pattern and has the same theme every time. For each beat there’s at least one exception but this is a general rule. The shooter is male, which is why in the only instance I can recall of a mass shooting orchestrated by a woman everyone was pointing it out constantly. I’m pretty sure she didn’t actually kill anyone though and she wounded only three people so that’s another example of her not fitting the official definition despite fitting reasonably well into the cultural one. Truly showing how women can do anything men can there. Second, the shooter is a loser or social outcast and probably a virgin or at least kind of unsuccessful with girls. Again, you can find counter examples but the fact alone that this isn’t a shocking statement is enough to prove my point about the cultural definition. The school shooter as a loser/ nerd is something firmly in the public zeitgeist. Third, the shooter is taking revenge. The story of the shooting is ultimately a revenge fantasy. The shooter is going after people who bullied him, or who shunned him or stood by and did nothing to help him in his time of need. Which is why the terms “school shooting” and “mass shooting” are so closely linked. All these kind of resentments centre around school, a place where the social hierarchy is much more overt than anywhere else in life other than maybe the military. You have Chads/Jocks/Alphas and Nerds/Losers/etc. and everything in between. Of course on closer inspection usually it isn’t actually that cut and dried but then if you look at a rainbow close enough the colours blur together you’re not gonna tell me green and red don’t exist. What I’m saying is that your average normalfag has this very specific idea in their head when you mention the term mass shooting. They think of the story as mentioned above and also usually the shooter is white or east asian in this mental image and there’s probably more but you get what I’m saying now I’m sure. The mass shooting has a second definition that we kind of all agree on but isn’t really written down or laid out anywhere in whole (other than above kinda…) and you can see it made reference to all across the western/ americanised world. People jokingly talking about “that white kid everyone thought was gonna shoot up the school” or even nerdy/ loser kids themselves daydreaming about shooting their classmates. The killer is a villain, an anti-hero or a protagonist depending on who you ask, but they all agree on the narrative structure.

Most actual mass shootings are gang related events, nig on nog crime which gets hushed up until the statistics are useful to create a false perception in the minds of the public. Because when someone says mass shooting you think of the two or three big news stories of the last few years, and now you’re being told that that is happening way more than once or twice a year. The second unofficial definition is something that has been deliberately placed into the public consciousness, or more accurately the seeds have been placed so it appears like people came to this shared view naturally. Really think about it, every time one of these specific shootings happens that fits the standard setup it’s a huge news story. Nasim, funny how we keep coming back to her, didn’t even kill anyone. Elliot killed six people, Chris Harper-Mercer (some of you guys are alright) killed 8. There was a shooting a few days ago in California where six people died, yes it got news coverage but it’s not still going now. These numbers are not that unusual in the grand scheme of things. Just go back and look at the aftermath of the Elliot Rodger shooting where the same amount of people died. They were interviewing people related to the story including his scumbag dad weeks after the thing happened. You can say it’s because we’re desensitised to these shootings but think about it. Before Elliot you had Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and a bunch more very deadly shootings but they weren’t enough? I’m having a really hard time staying on focus here, fuck. I made a mistake thinking I was up to this I really did. I’ve written so much and deleted almost everything to restart twice now. I’m not doing that a third time so everything from here on is staying. It’s fucking impossible to do this the way my mind works, because I get completely distracted and then get convinced that this tangent I’m on is crucial to my main point. No more preliminary bullshit it’s just bogging me down. I want to talk about my ideas, but I’m just not able to lay them out for people the usual way. Rambling aimlessly the way I did in the last posts and being a miserable git is easier and more enjoyable and actually quite cathartic, plus the few of you who have been here since the beginning seem to like it so far because you’ve come back for more. This is new ground, and I feel like one of the dorks who writes articles for Return of Kings when I read back this and my previous attempts to make this post.

Here’s the point, and if it has a ton of holes fine. I’m not writing a paper for an academic journal here I’m just trying to share the stupid shit that goes through someone’s head when they’re cooped up inside for days on end. School shootings are a performance, they follow a pattern just like a Punch and Judy show. Or at least those that do are highlighted, the more on script they are the more intensely so, while those that do not are disregarded. Elliot didn’t ever harm any of the people who actually bullied him or shunned him, he killed a bunch of random normalshits who were of a similar social standing to them. They were a representation of those people who he mentioned (by name in many cases) he was actually resentful towards, they were props in his big show. Cho talked about how he was doing what he did for “the weak and defenceless”, he wanted to make a point with what he was doing it wasn’t about getting revenge on his classmates. Adam Lanza went back to his elementary school for his shooting at the age of 20, he wasn’t avenging himself upon people he knew he was killing the school as a representation of the suffering he and millions of boys like him went through in schools across the western world. Look at the fucking most famous of all these shootings, Columbine. Eric and Dylan were in full costume, that black “trenchcoat”, edgy printed t-shirt, black boots ensemble is something that everyone is familiar with today two decades later. They secured themselves a legacy, something all performers long for. Bones put it perfectly in a song about the subject, “young dead suicidal superstar icons”. It’s well known that the fame is a huge motivator, and how not showing the faces or names of the killers is one of the best methods of preventing copy cat crimes but yet every time the exact opposite is what happens. I’m struggling to find it now but there was a paper and interview by this criminologist talking about it that was circulating in pol9k circles not too long ago. You can look for that if you’re interested, or just assume I’m making it up whatever suits you. These shootings are a spectacle, there are various different interpretations of what it all means just like with any good piece of art. They give losers all over the place something to fantasise about as well, they serve as a form of escapism in a sense just like many videogames, movies, books, shows, etc. When I was in school with that friend I mentioned in the last entry we would regularly joke about it. What groups of other kids we’d target, how we’d do it, shit like that. This is when I was at my most mentally healthy… Yes I said I was actually doing reasonably well and was hopeful for the future but we were still the weird kids. I had someone there with me though which also made it way easier, and I was young enough that the whole “they laugh at you now but they’ll be working for you one day” meme and it’s variants were something I thought had some truth. They also give the people who do bully and ostracise these kids validation. You can hear it when that bulldyke 56% face whore from the Florida gun grabbers squad talks about how she and the other normies actively ostracised him because “it was no surprise to hear that he was the shooter”. I suppose this kind of goes against my earlier point, because in the case of the Florida shooting Nick Cruz did personally know the people he was trying to kill. That clip isn’t hard to find if you haven’t seen it btw, the kind of thing that really activates your almonds.

I have to say, there is a kind of beauty to these events or performance pieces as I now tend to see them. Like I’ve said a lot of the victims are totally random. Yes a certain demographic is targeted but that really is the only trend. Some shooters go across the country, others target schools they once went to but students in a completely different age group, the message is that it could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. It fits perfectly within the contemporary view of any hierarchy, that your place in it is random. These kids, the ones who shoot and the many many more who feel they can relate to those who shoot feel like their place which they’re of course unhappy about is random and unfair. What are the chances I ended up at the loser table? Whenever the normalfag hears about these shootings they can’t understand, how could you go and kill a bunch of innocent people? That’s the point, sometimes the best way to express yourself is to just fucking do it. Now people are dead, people like you, you get to experience that feeling of unfairness. The shooter is the performer, the victims are his props, and the normalfags who get sp00ked every time one of these attacks happens are the intended audience. If this were a youtube video essay I’d play Kids With Guns by Gorillaz as my patreon supporters’ names scrolled by now. There’s more I could probably say, but I don’t know what I’m doing and I think this is good enough for me. Not sure what I’m going to talk about after this. There’s two new people at work I haven’t met yet, sometimes interactions with customers can put me on a weird train of thought, who knows. Next time I’m bored with nothing but hours of scrolling through the catalog on r9k to look forward to, somewhere I’ve been an ungodly amount of times the last few years, I’ll write instead.