Mass shootings

[padraig (u.s.)]

i am not saying that mental health could be a factor when these things happen but the fact that it's always the first thing people go to, in an attempt to pathologise these people and their habits as if its a sure fireway has had alot of repercussions that i don't think stop to realise what this means for those who aren't and will never get their hands on high powered guns to go ahead and kill people.

oh I see your next post clarified some of that

well, yes

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

and yes it's absolutely a way to skirt systemic issues

same thing with bad cops

the CPD is a shining example of everything wrong with major American police departments - a decades-long history of corruption, torturing suspects, an illegal secret detention facility, and so on

I'm glad the cop who murdered LaQuan McDonald was finally brought to some kind of justice but yeah, just a bad apple

 

[forclosure]

and yes it's absolutely a way to skirt systemic issues

same thing with bad cops

the CPD is a shining example of everything wrong with major American police departments - a decades-long history of corruption, torturing suspects, an illegal secret detention facility, and so on

I'm glad the cop who murdered LaQuan McDonald was finally brought to some kind of justice but yeah, just a bad apple

i mean shit padraig you saw the whole debacle with the last head of the Met Police and just like with Lori Lightfoot people thought she was going to be a herald of great change just because she was a gay woman

which i'm sure has to stem from the idea that still gets trotted out (my mother brought it up a while back) that if you want to change the system police etc you have to change it from within, this idea that you being in there as a ethnic gay and/or non gender conforming person is radical enough as is and if you work your way up then you can use that power to make the changes you want to better the community

 

[version]

Something which muddies the waters somewhat is the fact the FBI have been implicated in egging people on and providing them with weapons and resources in the past.

I posted a Chris Morris interview somewhere on here where he was talking about it in relation to a film he made called The Day Shall Come based on an actual case of them encouraging a small group to commit a terrorist attack.

 

[version]

He was self-aggrandising, full of shit at times and talked like a poet, but some of the stuff Pasolini was saying in that book I read recently felt incredibly prescient, particularly his final interview and the bits on neoliberalism, and this keeps swirling around in my head,

"I want to say it plainly and clearly: I go down into hell and I see things that don't disturb the peace of others. But be careful. Hell is rising toward the rest of you. It's true that it dreams its own uniform and its own justification (sometimes). But it's also true that its desire, its need to hit back, to assault, to kill, is strong and wide-ranging. The private and risky experience of those who've touched "the violent life" will not be available for long. Don't be fooled. And you are, along with the educational system, television, the pacifying newspapers, the great keepers of this horrendous order founded on the concept of possession and the idea of destruction. Luckily, you seem to be happy when you can tag a murder with its own beautiful description. This to me is just another of mass culture's operations. Since we can't prevent certain things from happening, we find peace in constructing shelves on which to keep them."

 

[Mr. Tea]

Something which muddies the waters somewhat is the fact the FBI have been implicated in egging people on and providing them with weapons and resources in the past.

I posted a Chris Morris interview somewhere on here where he was talking about it in relation to a film he made called The Day Shall Come based on an actual case of them encouraging a small group to commit a terrorist attack.

Great turn of phrase: "an online chat room where racist hatred was discussed."

- Hey bro, what do you think about racist hatred?
- NGL, I think it's pretty neat.
- No way! Same, bro!

 

[version]

It could be nothing, it could be just a case of some retired federal agent also being a racist and having their own agenda or there could be more to it as there's often a question of how retired people like that ever really are - even ordinary cops still have "friends on the force" and that seems to run deeper the higher up you go.

To be clear, this is to do with the Buffalo shooter with the manifesto the other week, not the school shooting in Texas.

 

[version]

For all the talk of atomisation and the argument I mentioned the other day about lone shooters, a fair few of them seem to have people in their ear, be they internet randoms on sites like 4chan, undercover law enforcement or members of extremist groups.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

For all the talk of atomisation and the argument I mentioned the other day about lone shooters, a fair few of them seem to have people in their ear, be they internet randoms on sites like 4chan, undercover law enforcement or members of extremist groups.

lone shooters/wolves are only lone in the act

people like the Uvalde shooter - what you might call, unfortunately, the Columbine model - are much closer to being actual loners

anyone primarily ideologically motivated was/is being indoctrinated somehow

esp when they're young - ignorant kids pumped full of [x thing] by some online echo chamber and/or older militants

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the demographic of Islamist attacks in the West trends (I believe) older/more educated

but (again, I believe) suicide bombers and lower-ranking jihadist fighters etc in the ME/Central Asia/etc etc are often more in the vein of Payton Gendron

ignorant cannon fodder manipulated by older, more ideologically mature cadre

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

like if you imagine a spectrum with "directed" at one end and "probabilistic" at other end

ideological attacks in the West etc skew more toward probabilistic (i.e. "stochastic terrorism")

which is the entire idea of lone wolf terrorism

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

with memetic terrorism as a more recent update of the lone wolf model

what you might call lone wolf 2.0

i.e. idk if he was the first to announce it on 4chan but the NZ guy a few years ago directly inspired a bunch of other ppl who then did the same thing

and there's an essentially direct line from Pepe/Chad/etc memes to white supremacists massacring people

(lone wolf 3.0 would/will be some kinda VR/metaverse bullshit - ppl practicing, uploading, etc attacks in VR then copycatting, or something)

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

memes being an infinitely better tool at getting teenagers to do stupid shit - like kill people - than novels and pamphlets

so much more efficient

 

[version]

I haven't seen it mentioned in the wider press, but there was stuff going round Twitter about the Texas shooter being catfished on Insta and messaging whoever this person was about the attack moments before.

As ever, it's difficult to really tell what's happened. It wouldn't be hard for someone to fake a screenshot and apparently a bunch of bogus accounts have popped up too.

There's supposedly also an effort from 4chan types to launch a smear campaign to claim the shooter was trans and they're using photos of some random trans person they found online and spreading them across the web.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

There's supposedly also an effort from 4chan types to launch a smear campaign to claim the shooter was trans and they're using photos of some random trans person they found online and spreading them across the web.

yeah Paul Gosar - possibly the biggest piece of shit to ever serve in the House of Representatives, which is saying something - retweeted that

with an addition that the attack was carried out by a "transsexual leftist illegal alien". all untrue ofc.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the undercover/entrapment is a different angle

that goes back pretty much as far as the idea of undercover cops, I think

i.e. the feds have been accused/gotten in trouble for trying to entrap people several times during the Green Scare

 

[version]

yeah Paul Gosar - possibly the biggest piece of shit to ever serve in the House of Representatives, which is saying something - retweeted that

I think Candace Owens did too or at least took the idea and ran with it.

I saw someone earlier saying the right want to pin this on something to do with the left and progressives to balance out the Buffalo shooter being blatantly right wing.

Have to say, I can't blame some of the people I know who talk about 'domestic gladio' and believe there's a strategy of tension in the US when I hear this stuff. I guess one question is whether this tit for tat thing coming from the right just arises out of partisanship and the way the media operates or whether it's more structured and directed.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the decision about when to intervene vs the continuing intelligence an undercover or CI could get from an unwitting source

I read some absolutely wild shit the other day about pre-revolutionary Russia in this vein, actually

one wing of the SRs (heirs to the 1870s-80s agrarian socialist/nihilist miliant tradition) had a clandestine military wing, like the IRA to Sinn Fein

its head, Yevno Azef, was also the Ohkrana's - Tsarist secret police - chief informant within the SRs

the SR Combat Organization assassinated a bunch of people, including the Interior Minister who was also Russia's top cop

Azef organized that assassination, and plenty of others including the Tsar's uncle

and his handlers knew about all of it and didn't intervene bc I guess they thought his snitching was worth more

granted most revolutionary movements are probably shot through with undercovers and snitches

but still that I thought was wild

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Have to say, I can't blame some of the people I know who talk about 'domestic gladio' and believe there's a strategy of tension in the US when I hear this stuff. I guess one question is whether this tit for tat thing coming from the right just arises out of partisanship and the way the media operates or whether it's more structured and directed.

I pretty strongly doubt it exists at the level organization the strategia della tensione had, i.e. deliberate false flag operations - yet, anyway

but somewhere in between structured and organically arising out of partisanship, sure

the demonization of BLM and antifa, the many attempts to paint them as just "the other side of the coin" to literal Nazis

I remember one specific hoax/meme/astroturf/who knows the summer after George Floyd about antifa "invading Idaho". total nonsense ofc.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

a strategy of tension isn't really about blaming your opponent so much as creating general chaos and confusion, anyway

and if Trump really excels at anything, it's that

and he's spawned a million little Trumps, out there in his wake

so maybe it doesn't really need to be a coordinated, structured strategy, if the effect is essentially the same