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YouTube Video Warned About School Shooting
mytrip writes to tell us that CNN is reporting at least eight dead in a Finland school shooting that was apparently planned out in graphic videos posted to YouTube. "YouTube appeared to have removed 89 videos linked to his account, many of them featuring Nazi imagery, shortly after the incident. Finnish media reported someone posted a message two weeks ago on the Web site, warning of a bloodbath at the school. A video posted earlier Wednesday, by 'Sturmgeist89,' was titled 'Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007.' 'Sturmgeist89' identified himself as Auvinen, and said he chose the name 'Sturmgeist' because it means 'storm spirit' in German."
While it's reasonable to assume that some people will react with "We should ban X" -reactions, judging from the recent local news (I live in Finland) I think this time around there will be more talk about how no one noticed what was happening inside the shooters head and less about what to blame.
Interestingly, the news interviewed a friend of his who apparently hadn't noticed anything much more than the kid keeping to himself. It seems to have come as a surprise to everyone.
The shooter's manifesto also claimed that he did not wish anyone to be blamed for his own actions. It seems he saw the media reaction coming.
Ultimately, much depends on the survival of the shooter. When I last saw the news at 22:00 local time he was alive but in a critical state after having shot himself in the head. If he does survive the aftermath will hopefully have less guessing to be done.
There's a Wikipedia article about the Jokela school shooting as well, with some bits and pieces of information.
.: Max Romantschuk
The eternal question: Is he just messed up, or is he scary messed up?
People always telegraph their intentions beforehand, but seeing it is almost always reserved for after the fact. Most attempts to predict this sort of behaviour run aground on the fact that it doesn't sound all that different from regular messed up behaviour. Of course a lot of people would like to stomp that out, but a lot of antisocial people still don't go to the point of mass murder...or even solo murder, or self-murder.
I look at things like this, and my first response is never: "Oh gosh, we should have seen it coming!" For every real nutjob, there are a hundred others who are just being young, alienated, and angry. Every quasi-normal action is held up as a "warning sign" and every admittedly abnormal action is magnified, and then used to villify people who "should have seen it coming."
I don't know. Just my experience that, every time something like this happens, it's used as an excuse to harass people who don't fit the "normal" mold, whatever the hell that is, and when, in reality, 99% of the people you're harassing have done nothing wrong, and will do nothing wrong.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
M.A.D. It worked for your superpowers. Now let's make it work for you.
un burrito me trampeó.
When the PATRIOT act was passed I said if an attack of this magnitude (9/11) every 50 years is the price of liberty it's still worth it.
And that may sounds selfish if you know someone who died on 9/11 but I have to live in the US too, so I have just as much chance of dying as anyone. People die from guns; worth it for the freedom to own guns. People die from drugs; worth it to have the freedom to control your own body. People die from terrorist attacks; worth it to have freedom and privacy. The only way you can win against terrorism is by not fighting it and LIVING FREE. Don't take stupid risks, but by far the bigger danger is from over correcting and NOT from doing too little. This is not something people like to hear, and so we get stories like this one and the politicians take away our guns, our drugs, our privacy and we say it's worth it to protect ourselves. I fear that the sun will rise on a day when a generation of Americans wakes up and finds that they no longer have any freedoms left to give.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
God the PATRIOT act is a fricking nightmare. Has it made anyone safer?
The real issue is, 9/11 won't happen again. As a country, we've learned our lesson about "just sit tight and wait" when it comes to plane hijacking. Box cutter? You best have a flamethrower next time, because me and everyone in business class are going to beat you to death with our laptops as soon as you start trying to wave that piddly crap in our faces. Akbar Macbook, Bitch!
It was a surprise. People bought it. That day has passed. But in response we have done unto ourselves far worse things than they could have ever hoped to have accomplished. Massively stupid.
And we will have other successful attacks on our soil. It's inevitable that, over time, everyone will miss someone. The occasional deranged teen will go on a shooting rampage. The occasional terrorist will pull off a successful attack.
But the fact that there is a possible danger is not a reason to upend your entire society. Analyze, find your mistakes, and correct them...Don't throw out a system that failed once, and try to replace it whole cloth with something new, designed by committee! Ridiculous.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I don't understand why it's so hard for people to understand that violent fantasies -- not actions, but fantasies -- are therapeutic and cathartic. Dante wasn't a crazed devil because he imagined and wrote The Divine Comedy. Nor was Shakespeare because he wrote King Lear and Macbeth. Look at just about any piece of creative work and you will find violence and usually a non-psychotic who wrote it.
is how desensitized people are to this type of violence. One of my co-workers is friends with an individual that attends that school. He made a joke "Well at least I get to take the rest of the week off and do some drinking!".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is a difference between things that feel good and things that are good for you. Catharsis feels good. Freud told us that catharsis was good for us. Freud also was full of shit.
Here's the deal. Our lives are full of circumstances that provoke us or challenge our assumptions and expectations. If you let things continue to do that, you will have anger. There are many ways to deal with this:
1. Accept the limitations of the situation. Find other ways to get what you want.
2. Use the anger to get energy to overcome the challenges in ways that respect others.
3. Use the anger to get energy to overcome your sense of empathy and ignore the rights of others.
4. Ignore your desire to do something about the challenges. Get depressed.
Violent fantasies do not reduce anger. "Venting" does not reduce anger. They both just increase it. You don't realize that they increase anger when you do it, because anger without a solution feels bad, and dominance and/or validation from others feels good. The good feeling you get after violent fantasies or from venting is not the antithesis of the original anger you felt, though- it's a reward for your anger. This can be good, if you were doing strategy 4 and, because of your increased anger, are ready to go to strategies 1 or 2. But if that's not the transition in strategies that's going to take place, then there's no benefit.
Side note: where did people get the idea that "therapeutic" meant "feels nice"? Improving one's health (mental or physical) very often involves sacrifice and changing habitual ways of thinking and acting. Things that feel nice like "therapeutic" shampoo or "therapeutic" massages or "therapeutic" whatever do nothing by themselves to promote growth or change.
Save a Mentally Ill Person, Save the World.
There was recently a public service announcement on TV that went somewhere along the lines of: Yeah, your friend may flake out on you, or act withdrawn sometimes, but what someone suffering from a mental illness needs most is a friend.
I know that it is human nature for people to make friends with people who fit in similar niches as themselves. And maybe in an idealized view of smaller communities of yesteryear, someone suffering from a mental illness would be more accepted, if only out of necessity (or maybe not). But it is not hard to imagine how in modern society, with so much emphasis on a mobile society and independence, that a person with only a mild case of mental illness could find themselves suddenly isolated and without a support group of family and friends. This could make an illness that was once barely noticeable to become dishabilitating.
Yes, people are free to choose to improve there circumstances or seek assistance, but if there is anything which Nazism and Stalinism taught us it is that even normal people can act in horrible ways given the (im)proper environment. And before this analogy is lost on you, remember that people with mental illnesses generally have either genetically-determined imbalances in their brain chemistries, or else traumatic past experiences. Most people don't wake up one day and decide to become mentally ill.
So instead of making jokes about people that we know as being "the next mass murderer/serial killer/etc" and effectively shunning said person, we should try to include them into our social circle. Otherwise we are just complaining about the symptoms without bothering with the inoculation. It's our society, if everyone did something small we could avert at least some of these tragedies.
The holocaust refers to the mass exterminations of Jews AND homosexuals AND gypsies AND whoever else was included in the purging of human life. It is an event that is named the holocaust. It's not a special "Jew massacre". The only thing that smacks of racism is you believing that it is somehow exclusive to Jews and disliking it for that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears (forced relocation, numerous examples here as well)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre (machine guns turned on women and children)
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/281/22/2127.pdf (smallpox used as a biological weapon)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_treaties (hundreds of broken treaties)
I'm already bored with this, but I could certainly keep going.
I'll grant you that the holocaust is far more recent, but that doesn't really make it somehow more terrible nor more relevant.
Lots of people get the shaft on a regular basis. Yes, European Jews of the 40's are in that crowd. No, we probably shouldn't infringe on someone's right to question whether or not it happened (or at least happened exactly as it was reported.)
If I have to permit people to claim that there is no God, you also get to permit people to claim things you believe to be false.
Right?