Isla Vista Shootings

[Keith Millea]

" Solnit says. "Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender."

Could someone explain to me what the hell that statement means?Does Solnit think all violence is gender based?Does Solnit think violence is only perpetrated by males?

Solnit is a faux progressive democratic Obama-bot.Her next vote will certainly be for Hillary the Killer because what a great day for America when we finally elect a woman for President. She is regularly thrashed on Commondreams for her elitist views.

[R.K. Locke]

Probably not green-screen - there's a minute shudder of both the picture and the audio track circa 35 seconds (along with a tell-tale internal audio mic rumble from wind) which is typical of setting a camera on a tripod outside and just letting it film. That said - if the footage was green-screen, it proves absolutely nothing whatsoever, other than that the subject or a friend of his knows how to green screen video footage. (Hint - subscribe to Adobe's Creative Cloud for $30, download After Effects, layer two video tracks, add a matte effect to one and use the second for a background). Pretty much anyone can do a green screen video effect and as the footage here is simply of a person talking outdoors I'm not sure what 'faking' this footage would suggest about anything else.

The thing that did strike me as odd without even watching the entire clip to completion was the seemingly oddly rehearsed tone of the young man's narration. For a person about to commit a massacre he seems pretty laid back and aloof. Perhaps I'm missing something from later in the video.

All that said I think the USA is possibly unique at the moment in that it seems able to maintain both (probably) CIA-sponsored 'false flag' shootings for whatever purposes, and - elsewhere - genuine lone-nut psycho gun massacres, and the root causes of each will continue to be ignored.

I agree with pretty much all of this. Even if the footage is green screened it proves nothing in and of itself.

I can certainly think of ways that you could read this event as an op of some kind, but a lot more evidence will need to be presented before such an argument becomes credible.

[Peter Lemkin]

To me, the oddest thing about both the video [I only saw part of the last one - couldn't bear to see it all the way through, nor his earlier ones] and the 'manifesto/autobiography' [again, skipped around through it] is the strange almost fake emotion/bad acting/over-acting in the video and the highly dramatic tone of the paper. Yes, both are misogynistic - but they are more, as well - they are a worship of Thanatos. In one way or another this person was deeply disturbed psychologically - and no one was apparently giving him any help with his problems. It isn't an 'Op' unless we find that someone was actually creating or exacerbating his problems. One thing is for sure, I don't think someone as disturbed as he should have guns and ammunition - although I'm aware that most of my fellow citizens disagree with me on that. Here in Europe, in most countries, very few people have guns - few use them; yet people feel that if they had to, they could overthrow their governments. I think the Cowboy 'thing' has been overblown in the USA as a rationale for unlimited gun ownership. That along with a deeply sick 'Government', Society, and many within it also deeply sick [plus false-flag ops and copycats] = the near epidemic of mass shootings; primarily of people one doesn't know or has no good rationale to kill [the only rationale in my book is last-resort self-defense] - but this is just as the Country does, in setting the example, through the Police and Military; though TV and Film, etc. America has a very long and sad history of the worship and aggressive practice of death and killing; of mass murder and even of genocide and other Crimes Against Humanity. I'd personally like to see the elimination of weapons by the Military, Police and Citizenry, Worldwide....dream on....

I don't yet have a feel for if the faux and overly dramatic quality of emotion in his video and paper is something really stemming from his personality, or induced/helped by outside forces. Those who knew him would be better able to judge and so far I've heard almost nothing from them on this.

[Dawn Meredith]

I saw a guy interviewed on CNN last night who had met Rogers on a handful of occasions and pegged him as a "serial killer". He said, when asked why he did not intervene that he barely knew the guy and did not feel comfortable expressing his views. I caught it in channel surfing so did not catch the time frame of when the guest made this determination. It was odd. And I understand. Decades ago I knew a guy from college who I believed would eventually kill. He even bragged that he would and get away with it due to his history of mental illness. But he never went on to kill. So I understand that man's reluctance to intervene based upon his hunch.

Dawn

[Keith Millea]

May 28, 2014

A Shameless Rush for Meaning

The Media and the Santa Barbara Shooter

by RUTH FOWLER

Here's how it goes: a shooting. Multiple deaths. Words like loner' pop up and bob around on the surface. The phrase: Didn't fit in'. Outsider'. Deaths confirmed. Terrorism? Not mentioned. OK then. White male, gotta be.

We ask ourselves the question Why?' even though, in this day and age, if we don't know why, we soon will. The serial killer rarely performs these days without an arrogant digital imprint somewhere. We find it. Devour it. Tweet it. Retweet it. Come up with grandiose statements which sound like they've come straight from a really bad daytime TV show. Journalists and twitter commentators swarm into overdrive. "How could this man fly under the radar?" they bleet darkly. Of course, we know why. Because he's male, intelligent, from a nice family, educated, affluent, relatively innocuous, even under different circumstances attractive looking, and, to all appearances, white.

"What does it reveal about our society?" now this is the big one. It could reveal a need for gun laws. It could reveal the dangers of video games. It could reveal the futility of America's police. It could reveal rampant white supremacy. Entitlement. Elliot, conveniently, ticks pretty much all the boxes and reveals an obnoxious personality which manages to span pretty much all unpleasant ideologies over a 141 page manifesto. Reams of endless hate and self pity are dredged up from the young killer's blog, vlog, manifesto and transcriptions of everything in between. The liberal media quickly decide that the angle du jour' will be misogyny.

Jessica Valenti in The Guardian makes the fatuous point that Elliot Rodger's California shooting spree is "Further proof that misogyny kills", as if the feminist movement and history has been lacking ample evidence up until this moment. She bolsters her argument by quoting her friends' tweets, as if they too are the "further proof" that White Feminists have needed that they're a peculiarly oppressed and tormented species. Delving onto twitter, other feminists resort to bad drama: When you are an affluent man who benefits from white supremacy, knowing how to talk to the police gets you a free pass… TO MURDER. @thetinavelazquez writes. In fact, everyone from Salon to The Guardian to The Atlantic to The New Statesman to The Huffington Post to Twitter, all basically say the same thing: Elliot Rodgers killed because he hated women, although they all seem to be conveniently missing each other's articles and acting as if they're the only ones drawing such a radical' conclusion.

Let's cut the crap. Killers are not usually attracted to nonviolent philosophies, peaceful ideologies and challenging systemic oppression. Quit fucking acting like it's a surprise Elliot Rodger was a misogynistic, racist, sex starved, white male privileged fuck either formed by, or attracted to, the kinds of ideologies expressed in his disgusting manifesto.
[URL="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0143115650/counterpunchmaga"]
[/URL]

It's of absolutely zero surprise to me that Elliot Rodger's blog, vlog, manifesto and everything in between reveal a singularly unpleasant screwed up hateful little fuck that embodied everything that could possibly be wrong with society today. The dude murdered a bunch of people. What were we expecting? That he adopted stray cats and rehoused them? That he had Hello Kitty bedsheets and sponsored a Nepali girl through Christian Aid? Cried at The Bachelor'? Fuck's sake, people.

Intersectionality there, I said it! But don't dismiss it for a headline, folks. Elliot Rodger hated women because he had never had sex. He despised people of color. He played World of Warcraft and had no friends. Society rejected him or he rejected society. He jerked off a lot. He was a virgin. His parents had paid for him to have social skills counsellors. He had a shrink who had expressed concern about his behavior more than once. He had a stepmom Soumaya who has a reputation for being a kind, loving, gentle woman with a ferocious talent for acting, a woman who loved her only biological son and was deeply concerned about her weird stepson. He planned to kill both his stepmom and her son on his rampage. His family called the cops on him (who does that?! I read online somewhere. People who think their kid is a killer and have no other fucking option, moron, I thought in response). But let's not forget the insane can make any ideology fit their madness.

The urgency to krank out an important Op Ed an essential opinion, a lesson to take home, something to digest about our society is nonetheless pervasive. Killers only get about a week of airtime (Poor Kim. Worst time to get married.) Something pompous and important must be declared! We'll pretend it's the first time we've written it. We'll pretend we care, but really, next week, we will have forgotten. Remember the names of any of the Sandy Hook victims? Columbine? Of course you don't. They're news. Political points. They're opinion pieces, soundbites, tweets. Sandy Hook wasn't misogyny, it was all about gun laws. Columbine too. Elliot he changed the dialogue a little. Got the woman angle in there. Throwback to Damini. Remember her? Of course you don't. You're part of the problem. How could this happen? How could we let this happen? How could we ignore this man's marked misogyny, racism, tendency towards violence…. already composing the next Op-Ed, one eye turned to the incoming wire declaring the next grand tragedy.

Of course we fail to see the obvious. Too busy counting how many retweeted us, how many likes we got.

Ruth Fowler is a journalist and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. She's the author of Girl Undressed. She can be followed on Twitter at @fowlerruth.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/28/t...a-shooter/

[R.K. Locke]

There are some very valid points in that Counterpunch piece but what she misses - unsurprisingly - is just how many of these events have been black ops. If people really cared about tragedies such as this and really wanted to understand them they would do their own investigation and critical thinking, rather than blindly accepting the first thing CNN tells them that reinforces their existing worldview and gives them "closure".

The sad fact is that the vast majority of people simply don't care enough to do that.