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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I don't understand why people would go to such lengths including making up terrible copyright law to hide a bog standard story of insanity.

I understand this is not exactly a fun time for the public figure here, but having been briefly involved with a person of the same sex that turned insane isn't some socially damaging high crime or something. We're not in the 1950s anymore.

Am I missing something? Is there something so damaging to someone that it was worth damaging the public trust and creating bad precedent over this?

From the school's and parents' point of view: this is the mass slaughter of their children. "Abusing copyright" to decrease grief or discourage copycats is a very small price to pay. Not that these school administrators and parents are necessarily concerned about unrealized gay mixed race sexual pairings.

I would guess that, if my loved ones were murdered in a senseless and insane attack, I would prefer that it not be discussed as a CW jerkoff game for people on the internet. Which was always going to be the inevitable result once it was released. We're even seeing the rhetorical Judo throw where people are turning it into a CW jerkoff game about how it doesn't contain any/enough CW material. I can understand the families of the victims, or the school community as a whole, feeling it was not worth the psychological harm of having the story in the news longer than it needed to be to have the manifesto made public knowledge.

Grief does not generally lead people to wisdom, definitely not in the short-term, but I think it would be pretty obvious that suppressing the document would ensure that it gained more attention and extending the misery. If they'd just let the stupid thing be released, people would've stopped caring ages ago.

The only way to prevent the "CW jerkoff game" that would be a full media blackout starting at the same time as the shooting. Once you're thrust into the public eye, you no longer have any ability to stop that, and anything you do in public regarding the tragedy ultimately plays to one side or the other.

As I say elsewhere, such sentiment is to be expected from victims, but judges and LEOs are not supposed to let such things cloud their judgement.

Indeed, while you dismiss interest in the concealed as a judo move, I find it quite reasonable to argue that concealment made this story stick, which is the opposite of the intended purpose.

We sadly have things to compare this to. Randy Stair was trans and had an even more insane and lurid justification for his killings, and yet that dropped out of the news cycle like a stone. Because, well, who's going to argue about someone that obviously deluded.

People here should be all too familiar with scissor statements. It is ambiguity that breeds culture war. Straightforward things don't produce the engine like reaction of one side to the other that ignites these flamewars.

I think a much more reasonable way of ensuring the interest of everyone would have been to release this diary as evidence and to redact the name and personal details of the people Hale was infatuated with instead of entertaining these absurd adventures in copyright.

There isn't anything damaging but if it came out close to the shooting, when everyone had their attention to it they would be all over Paige. Was it worth it? Probably not, but maybe it seemed so to the people who did it.

There's a 'copycat' theory that certain types of murderers (and a few other classes of bad actors) tend to attract other bad actors, intentionally or unintentionally, by their works, and as a result making publicly available. These followers are inevitably not-mentally-well to some extent, but the resonance gives them a way to formalize that and point it at their own interpretation of a 'class' of overlapping targets.

This is part of why I don't write shooters' names, whenever possible, instead identifying the location or target; it's also the charitable explanation for companies like LinkedIn purging spree shooter accounts. I'm skeptical that it applies for these sort of narrow details -- the shooter here comes across as a loser -- but I don't have a good mental model for the sorta crazy people that turn into serial killer fans, and it definitely has widespread adherents across the political aisles, many of whom directly evangelize to the victims of shootings and to judges around them.

Less charitably, there was a theory (or more often insinuation) that the shooter had been motivated by severe mistreatment by an employee or student at the school, on the level of assault or sexual assault rather than deadnaming. Progressives assumed that the writings were being hidden to obscure that; conservatives that they were being hidden to avoid exculpating the victims.

I think "my child has been murdered and I want all of the cruel, idiotic culture warring about his/her murder to end" is more than sufficient to explain the parents trying to block the release of the manifesto/diary. Perhaps not actually the tactically correct move to achieve that goal, but eminently understandable.

Except blocking it just made the culture-war aspect so much worse. People spent months thinking this was a highly premeditated act of political terrorism being covered up by a sympathetic politicized media, when with the diary it clearly just seems like an act of insanity by someone with serious mental health issues.

It made it much worse among a very small segment of people who became obsessed with it, as opposed to being front-page news the day after it was found.

It was front-page news when it was found, and now it's (local, mostly) front-page news again. Suppression ensured there would be at least two front-page events instead of one.

Now, it's local front page news that'll disappear in a day or two if nothing else new pops up, instead of part of the wider culture war and part of the Presidential election.

That I understand, I expect even, what I don't understand is the legal system cooperating with such behavior, especially to this degree.

It's the people whose job it is to be the cold monsters that remove emotion out of terrible situations to maintain justice and social cohesion even in the face of legitimate overflowing grief. I guess they too are human at the end of the day.

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