This very weird and slightly deranged column by an old liberal white woman in the Washington Post is getting lots of traffic. She is listed as a music critic, but that does not seem like a real job. It’s more of a hobby, like being a model train enthusiast. Then again, maybe there is a position in the media for covering hobbyists. Like higher education, the mass media is full of made up jobs and titles.
As deranged manifestos go, the final YouTube video made by suspected Isla Vista, Calif., mass murderer Elliot Rodger was remarkably well-made. Filmed by Rodger in his black BMW, with palm trees in the background and his face bathed in magic-hour key light, the six-minute diatribe — during which he vows revenge on all the women who rejected him and men who were enjoying fun and sex while he was “rotting in loneliness” — might easily have been mistaken for a scene from one of the movies Rodger’s father, Peter Rodger, worked on as a director and cinematographer.
Indeed, as important as it is to understand Rodger’s actions within the context of the mental illness he clearly suffered, it’s just as clear that his delusions were inflated, if not created, by the entertainment industry he grew up in. With his florid rhetoric of self-pity, aggression and awkwardly forced “evil laugh,” Rodger resembled a noxious cross between Christian Bale’s slick sociopath in “American Psycho,” the thwarted womanizer in James Toback’s “The Pick-Up Artist” and every Bond villain in the canon.
David Berkowitz thought his dog was telling him to kill people. The dog did not make him crazy or make him kill people. Berkowitz was crazy and crazy people think the family dog is telling them to kill. Some percentage of crazy people act on these delusions. It’s sad and we all hope that one day science can address these biological problems, so that spree killing can be eliminated from life. Until then, crazy going on rampages is a feature of modern human existence.
If that day comes, people like Ann Hornaday will still be out there looking to “find meaning” in the randomness of biology. Frivolous people who feel some need to speak in public will always be with us. If emoting about random acts of violence is taken away, they will find another way to annoy us. It would probably be better for society to solve the harpy problem before the mass shooter problem, but a society willing to do that will not have either problem for very long.
I have seen no reason to declare Rodger mentally ill. What I see is a class of people who need to explain him in those terms. He is not so different from John Walker Lindh, who’s career as a Muslim convert and enemy combatant began with the amazing coincidence of his father leaving the family–for another man. Nothing to see there, move along.
Ann Hornaday is just doing her job. She wrote a story explaining a tragedy using the rhetoric of white male privilege and entitlement because that’s what semi-literate people want to read and share with their friends these days. If she wasn’t willing to cook up a trendy think-piece that supplied the meaning and emotions people crave she’d be out of work, but newspapers and websites would still publish their fashionable narratives and you and the rest of the arch two point five sigma+ crowd would just label Ann’s replacement stupid. That’s how the world works.
As for the beta male brigade and the eerie parallels between Rodger’s rhetoric and theirs, I have to agree with roissy & friends that the “sexual marketplace” is a very strange place in 2014 and a lot of “betas” seem extremely bitter whenever they glance at reality. Fortunately, most don’t: they’re too busy playing video games (the amount of time young men spend on video games is underappreciated). But for truth-obsessed people nerds, as Sailer calls them/us, the facts on the ground are startling, with “riding the cock carousel until it’s time to find a sucker” being a pretty damn accurate description of what most young women are up to. Find a good looking meathead from the gym and ask him to show you his Tinder account. It’s enough to blow a beta’s mind.
Stefan Molynuex breaks down the facts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oybAUKZhaMA
Half Sigma is a bright Jew who received an undergrad degree from an ivy (Penn) and then a Law degree from a much lower ranked school (?Arizona State?). He qualified for a high IQ society that requires much higher scores than Mensa but his IQ is not high enough to gain entrance into the 160+ level societies.
He is an odd duck to be sure. At one point he was walking around NY City taking photos on the sly of people he saw as he walked. He may still be doing that.
My impression of him is that he is not happy in his skin hence his interest in this latest spree killer who had some smarts but little skill in coping with life’s obstacles. Both of them appear to be similar it appears.
Dan Kurt