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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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It seems unlikely Axel was an Islamist, Rwanda is only something like 2% Muslim and he’d likely have an Islamic name if he was born to a Muslim family. I suppose he could be a convert, but again that would likely have come out by now.

If only the United Kingdom had a free press that could have informed the people of that fact.

It seems unlikely Axel was an Islamist, Rwanda is only something like 2% Muslim and he’d likely have an Islamic name if he was born to a Muslim family.

All the reporting I've seen that mentions it says his dad, at least, was nominally Christian. (I've also seen a number of people on reddit gloating about it, as if it proved anything. "The child of African immigrants who murdered these little girls was a Christian, you bigots!" is not the W they seem to think it is.)

I suppose he could be a convert, but again that would likely have come out by now.

If he was radicalized by anyone other than right-wing Christian nationalists, I cannot imagine a world in which the UK government would allow that to come out under the current circumstances (though if sufficient evidence existed, of course, they may not be able to stop it)--but maybe I am too accustomed to the American approach to reporting such events.

Of course there's no need for him to have been radicalized by anyone, sometimes people do just go totally off the rails without provocation or even any evidence of motive at all.

I just found the Taylor Swift connection to be an interesting coincidence.

Is the American approach to reporting such events to broadcast things loudly? I just read a manga (Don't Call It Mystery) which claimed that America doesn't broadcast crimes that could invite copycats. Which seemed wrong to me.

I just read a manga (Don't Call It Mystery) which claimed that America doesn't broadcast crimes that could invite copycats.

American journalistic "ethics," when they are not being rode over roughshod by the rise of clickbait culture, has inconsistently but occasionally in the past taken a "don't promote this" approach to some topics. More often on suicide than crime, though.

These days what the corporate news media avoids reporting is anything that might damage the Narrative--but often they get dragged into reporting it anyway as "alternative" news stories get the scoops and start eating into their revenues.

The media cares more about clicks and keeping advertisers happy than about staying on message in this particular area, especially in these desperate times as ad revenue continues to fall and a lot of media brands are firing people and seeing valuations cut by large amounts.

It’s kind of like that impressive Trump fist picture taken by the NYT photographer after the assassination attempt, the photographer being presumably a Democrat - his job was more important to him than politics.

If a manga says anything about America or any country outside Japan, it is guaranteed to be hilariously wrong. Outside of the mechanical details of WW2 guns and tanks anyway, they nail those.

any evidence of motive at all.

I'm sorry but the idea that some dude lugged around a bunch of guns he didn't use without raising any suspicion and picked a specific venue with more security than average when he didn't have a discernable motive beyond killing people is still goofy.

The assassination attempt theory seems most parsimonious given the nuclear glow the whole thing is coated in. Few things look more suspicious than the Las Vegas shooting. JFK is an open and shut case in comparison. So using it as evidence for anything else is just a bad argument.

A much simpler explanation is that Paddock was simply a psychopath who relished the idea of killing people. Getting the guns into the hotel room was trivial, they do not inspect people's bags. As for whatever security was present at the venue, it did nothing to stop Paddock, so was it really more security than average in any meaningful way? The large number of guns that he brought is a bit weird, but can be explained simply by him having a gun fetish or him overestimating how long he might be able to hold out against police forces.

The idea that there are actual psychopaths who hurt people simply because they enjoy it is disturbing, but it is obviously true. I do not see why it would be so unlikely that Paddock was simply one such person, whether he had always been that way or whether something turned him into one.

Him being that crazy doesn't square very well with the rest of his life history.

My theory is that somebody (likely the FBI) set up a fake arms deal and he realized it a bit too early but equally too late to get out, so being faced with life in prison he decided to just lash out and went the murder suicide route.

The FBI, hid their involvement for the obvious reasons, which is something they've tried to do in the past in response to various fuck ups.

Is large illegal arms deal supposed to be better squaring with the rest of his life history?

Yep.

Lots of people commit crimes and scheme in various ways. Mental illness that would result in this behavior (like Schizophrenia) appears earlier in life the vast majority of the time. The personality structure we usually see with this kind of thing, outside of explicit ideology (ex: religious extremism) tends to boil over earlier in life, see: school shooters. Personality disorders of all kinds dial down later in life, in part because the people with the worst manifestations get killed, kill themselves, or end up more or less permanently engaged with the legal system.

He could be the exception that proves the rule of course, but the usual stuff is less likely given what we know about his life history and success.

He doesn't pattern match to a serial killer, someone struggling with psychosis, cultural bound attacker (or other ideologue/extremist).

It's very, very weird.

Well it's not unheard of for depressed people to decide to kill some random people on the way out. There was that kid who flew a small plane into a building (didn't kill anyone) after 9/11 who claimed to be inspired by islam but was probably just bullshitting.

Paddock was simply a psychopath who relished the idea of killing people

This is a possibility, but people like that don't tend to be effete accountants whose most prominent vice is gambling. He self evidently didn't have the low inhibitions that type of person typically displays.

There's various theories of how his increasingly erratic or depressed behavior could explain or motivate the shooting, but I haven't seen one that doesn't have a big hole in it.

can be explained simply by him having a gun fetish or him overestimating how long he might be able to hold out against police forces

The sheer amount doesn't square with either of those explanations. Or the fact that he killed himself.

A gun nut fantasizing about using his collection so badly that he feels the need to bring that much stuff around just shoots himself without actually using much of the hardware? How does that add up?

This is a possibility, but people like that don't tend to be effete accountants whose most prominent vice is gambling. He self evidently didn't have the low inhibitions that type of person typically displays.

"don't tend to be" does not mean "cannot be" and people for various reasons blow up lives own and of others.

The assassination theory also doesn’t add up if you spend more than thirty seconds thinking about it, though.

Not saying it's not also full of holes. But it's got the least holes in my opinion. This whole thing reeks of spooks being involved.

Something suspicious happened here. We don't really know what, I'll easily admit.

A gun nut fantasizing about using his collection so badly that he feels the need to bring that much stuff around just shoots himself without actually using much of the hardware? How does that add up?

Crazy people do things that make no apparent sense to outsiders.

This isn't the general purpose argument you're making it out to be.

It's like he's a badly written movie villain who's somehow both extremely competent when the plot needs him to be and insanely disordered when that's required.

There's no pattern of behavior, which, in the real world, would lead one to think that more than one person is involved.

Now it is possible that he was insane in the specific way that makes this whole thing happen the way it does, but how likely is that versus another explanation is all a reasonable person should care about. You can explain away any crime with convenient bouts of madness.

Who was Paddock attempting to assassinate in this theory?

The theory on the Las Vegas shooting is that Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was in Las Vegas at the time and that the concert shooting was a diversion to draw most of the law enforcement resources in the city to the other side of town in order to give assassins easier access to Mohammed. In this theory Paddock himself was a patsy who believed he was at the hotel for a large illegal arms deal, and was shot in the head just before the massacre started. That would explain the rather excessive amount of arms in Paddock’s room, but I don’t know if I necessarily buy that myself.

The initial theory was that Paddock was targeting MBS under contract or whatever, then when it was quickly shown that the Saudis were on the other side of town it morphed into this distraction thing. It all seems implausible - officers assigned to guard VIPs don’t go running when there’s a mass casualty event for precisely this reason; his security detail wouldn’t run if they got a report of this incident on the radio.

And what's the motive?

Oh, I agree! That link was included with a heavy dose of irony.

Another loss for my reading skills or the ability of text to convey irony. I'm going to blame the tool. As is tradition.

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