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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17403 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Some guy in China killed 35 people by driving a car around a running track.

Not that I'm complaining, but why doesn't this happen more often?

Much is made of the fact that US has more guns and many more mass shooting incidents than other wealthy nations, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that guns make it easy to kill a lot of people. But so do cars, and those are widely available in most wealthy nations.

So why is it that the US has a lot of mass shootings (yes, I know that they're a tiny percentage of total homicides), but running cars into crowds is fairly rare in countries that don't have such easy access to guns? Are Americans just especially prone to running amok? Are mass shootings a meme? Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?

I don't have any good theories; I'm just noticing my confusion.

Yes, American and Latin American societies have very high rates of mass violence(although so does China).

Is there a continental-scale societal category that historically does not have high rates of mass violence?

Just to look briefly at Europe- football hooliganism, muslim riots, public-targetted terrorism, Russian border wars, Paris lighting itself on fire every presidency or so...

It seems to me that at some times and some places large-scale murder-suicide becomes a meme in a specific oppositional culture (see this Hanania essay for what an oppositional culture is). The best example is the cult of the "martyr" (i.e. suicide terrorist) among Salafi Jihadis in most places, but not in Saudi Arabia or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan where Salafism is not an oppositional culture. This started with the use of suicide terrorism as a not-obviously-insane tactic by Palestinians against Israel, but nowadays it is mostly copycats copycatting other copycats Four Lions style. As pointed out downthread, homegrown Islamic suicide terrorists in Europe were using cars for mass killings often enough that authorities are putting countermeasures in place and "diversity bollards" has become a meme.

Something similar has happened in US Red Tribe, with Columbine being the thing that the trails of copycats lead back to. If you are a disaffected Red Triber then shooting up your school or workplace is something the exists in the range of culturally conceivable options, in the same way that blowing yourself up on public transport or driving a van into a crowd is something that exists for a disaffected Muslim in western Europe.

Are we seeing the formation of an oppositional youth culture with a form of memetic murder-suicide in China? I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Uh, are mass shootings a red tribe thing specifically? It seems like they’re pretty spread out among Americans.

BreadTube would call this "sigma-coded" behavior, and they believe failsons from Red Tribe are more susceptible to it than Blue's failsons. Whether that's true is hard to say. I don't know if anybody has done the work to sort out whether Harris & Klebold were Red or Blue. That's not polisci I personally want to touch.

And then, most mass shootings that make the news & get talked about are also not most mass shootings. So many news consoomers get a slanted view of who's really doing the shooting.

Mass shootings that make the news are whiter than average but mass shootings in general are blacker. It’s possible that this points to red overrepresentation- like in the military- but my impression is that while one or two of the well-known mass shooters were meaningfully connected to gun culture but not staunchly political, most of them were just mentally ill people from broken homes who are hard to place.

And, uh, breadtube isn’t a reliable source.

The best example is the cult of the "martyr" (i.e. suicide terrorist) among Salafi Jihadis in most places, but not in Saudi Arabia or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan where Salafism is not an oppositional culture.

Eh. The Taliban made plentiful use of suicide bombers, and the Saudi extremist wahhabism had plenty of 'die for the cause and call them martyr' extremists over the last two decades. You saw more suicide bombers in conflict zones because conflict zones are where you get more desperate / angry / 'I don't care if I die / what do I have to live for' types.

What changed the cultural value of suicide bombers was when suicide bombers started getting associated with targeting muslims as opposed to Jews / Christians / outsiders. I think it was around 2009 round abouts, but even before the rise of ISIS or the Arab Spring there were surveys noting that regional support for suicide bombers as a valid form of resistance was dropping. When suicide bombings transitioned from more associated with the anti-israeli intifada and more associated with civil wars and targetting other muslims, it became less heroic and more problematic.

It's very rare anyone cares about being competent and effective at mass killing. Anyone sophisticated enough to potentially do that is sophisticated enough to have more useful goals (and also is probably embedded in modern social structures that think killing people is, like, bad). If you're a mass shooter who wants to kill people as a form of revenge, killing 100 isn't going to communicate much that killing 5 didn't. https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror

It's loosely analogous to 'why are so few suicide attempts successful'? I can't imagine it's difficult to effectively kill yourself if you prepare well, it's just that most people who want to do it are doing it for reasons that don't fit well with effectiveness

There were a spate of these kind of terror attacks in Europe in the mid-2010s. ISIS-inspired, invariably; some 2nd generation disaffected Arab rents a U-Haul and drives it into a crowd on some holiday. The first one was the Nice truck attack in 2016; there were a bunch of copycats and as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.

There are a couple of other similar cases elsewhere; here in Toronto in 2018 an incel hired a van and killed a bunch of people with it.

Terror attacks very much seem to follow specific trends, and it seems to take certain people to think of novel ways to go about it. No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it. Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack. I'm not sure why this is, but it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.

No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it.

Tom Clancy did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor

Edit: roystgnr beat me to it, that's what I get for not reading downthread first.

Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack.

As a ramming weapon, yes. But there was a spate of using them in bombings in the '90s. The 1993 WTC bombing and 1995 Oklahoma City bombing both used Ryder rental trucks. But I suppose that just proves your point that people crazy enough to commit mass homicide are rather derivative in terms of their methods.

No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it.

Tom Clancy, "Debt of Honor", wasn't too far off. Disgruntled pilot rather than hijackers, one plane into the Capitol building rather than 4 planes into assorted targets, but it obviously conveyed "a jumbo jet full of fuel is a dangerous missile", and it was the 7th book in a best-selling series that had already been adapted into 3 blockbuster movies.

Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack.

It was the weapon delivery system in the OKC bombing, but yeah, not the weapon.

as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.

I've always half-wondered why truck attacks didn't become a more serious threat. It seemed so trivially easy and moderately effective that in the wake of Nice I expected it to become just another Thing that happens regularly. Wikipedia doesn't even list more than a handful of copycats.

it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.

IIRC this still holds even if you have a very loose definition of "terrorist"; the "contagious" timing of school shootings suggests that the kinds of assholes who try to become infamous for shooting up a school are much more likely to do so if there's been another famous school shooting recently, as if even though the idea is hardly a secret at this point they don't really take it seriously until they see a de-facto commercial for another one on the news.

I do also think there might be something to the theory

Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?

The black trench coats and guns at Columbine were like an evil echo of The Matrix protagonists superhumanly fighting The Man, whereas simply running people over feels like something that could be accomplished by an elderly person confusing the gas and brake pedals. They say that "nobody thinks they're the villain of their own story", but also nobody even wants to think they're just a half-competent mook in their own story, so perhaps when they do slip into villainy they try to make it dramatic. The sort of utilitarian who deduces that you can massacre more people with a car than a gun might also generally be the sort who deduces that massacring a bunch of people doesn't actually accomplish any of your real goals anyway.

The X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen had an episode in early 2001 about the government perpetrating a fake terrorist attack by crashing an airliner into the World Trade Center, in order to have an excuse to go to war with half the Middle East. It’s on YouTube, but interestingly it has never made it to any streaming platforms.

Its harder to commit suicide with a car

Turn off airbags, unfasten seatbelts, enjoy.

I still think the risk of ending up permanently maimed but alive is significantly higher than from taking a bullet to the brain or a hail of bullets.

Bring a gun along then?

Partially it has to do with urban design and crowdedness.

For you to really kill a lot of people you need people who either incredibly packed together or otherwised trapped in some kind of mixed use area where you can get with a large car (preferably a truck). Street festivals are a good target for this kind of thing.

Getting an automatic weapon into some sort of enclosed space where you can gun down trapped people is often easier and enables you to better target some specific group of people, making it a much more attractive option IMO.

I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade. There was also the Unite the right rally in Charlottesville where a guy drove his car into a crowd. So it does happen sometimes.

Maybe people who go on these killing rampages often want to make it a murder suicide event. Guns make the suicide part easier at the end, whereas the car murderers tend to get caught.

Mass car murder also seems like a crime of opportunity, you need the right circumstances to actually pull it off. Most sidewalks are full of hard things that will wreck a car, including up to concrete barriers that are specifically designed to stop a car. Larger vehicles are necessary. And crowds of people in a flat non barrier area that are not so dense that the vehicle will be immediately stopped, and not so sparse that they can easily see what is happening and move out of the way.

It's a messed up person in the first place that wants to commit mass murder. But I think they usually want more choice in their targets, they want to be dead afterwards, and while cars and trucks are ubiquitous they are actually more expensive than guns and ammo. There are ways to get large vehicles, like theft or working a job site with them. But those are still a little harder to pull off than just buying guns.

I think there is a steady supply of crazy and crazy mixed with the wrong meds that if we magically banned all guns in the US you'd probably see more car based killing rampages. But guns have a specific purpose and they are good at that purpose, so I think they will remain in use.

guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade.

This was a popular method back when ISIS was still called ISIS; some guy in France managed to kill over 100 people doing that a few years ago. It's possible to do this serially to random people in crosswalks as well; some guy in Quebec did that a while back, too.

There are ways to get large vehicles, but those are still a little harder to pull off

It's easier, trivial even, and this works in all countries. To get a large vehicle, you go to a U-Haul or your local car rental desk (which is where at least one of the vehicles used in the events described above came from, if not both). Worst case, you need a driver's license and don't have one.

Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?

Probably. These people are more interested in Sending a Message (and simply picking targets of opportunity) and basically just screw around lighting rounds off in the general direction of their targets until the cops shoot them (body count rises as the cops delay); things like "raw body count" and "the suitability of one's firearm to this task" tend to be secondary considerations, to put it lightly.

You might be thinking of Darrell Edward Brooks Jr -- you will note that there is not a picture of him in the Wikipedia article, and For Some Reason nobody has heard nearly as much about him deliberately driving his own SUV into a Christmas parade and killing several as they have about the Charlottesville guy. (who killed one person in a hostile crowd of counterprotestors, arguably semi-accidentally)

I remember this, the infamous "a car" which drove into a Christmas parade. Cars typically have drivers, don't they? Did a self-driving car experience a HAL-9000 moment?

Was that a deliberate attempt to kill pedestrians (terrorism) or just complete reckless disregard in the heat of the moment? The degree of premeditation wasn't clear to me from what I read of the press coverage at the time.

There was also the 2014 incident at SXSW that killed 2 and injured 23, although that seemed to be reckless disregard while fleeing police, rather than ideologically motivated.

Not sure if it makes a difference to me in terms of the relevant criminal punishments, but it seems like it would be relevant for trying to categorize similar events.

It appeared to be both. He'd just had some violent confrontation and was likely in a state of mind where he just wanted to break things (and children and grannies), but also he drove through parade barriers with people waving for him to stop, and on video both swerved into people and sped up into them.

I didn't follow the trial livestream, but seem to recall testimony indicating that he was deliberately swerving at people trying to get out of his way (also IIRC there was no police pursuit until after he drove through the parade?) -- seems more like 'going postal' than terrorism to me, but well beyond reckless disregard.

(with the additional spice that the Waukesha Christmas Parade is probably the whitest thing ever, so if one decided to go postal on white people specifically it would be a sensible target -- I don't think 'hate crime' enhancements were pursued though?)

will note that there is not a picture of him in the Wikipedia article,

Edit history suggests that it's a licensing issue. If you can find a photo with an appropriate license you should add it.

It seems like a mug shot meets the criteria in other cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump

This image has an extensive licensing section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_mug_shot.jpg

That seems extremely unlikely -- there are numerous mug-shots, as seen on many news sites (including one linked in this very thread).

What is the licensing issue with a mug-shot?

"Wikipedia editors make up excuses to justify ideological narrative shaping on hot-CW related topics" on the other hand... would not be a big surprise to me.

What is the licensing issue with a mug-shot?

The licensing issue with the previous photo appears to be that there was no license on it.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&logid=355493040

Yes, police departments do not typically license their mugshots -- this does not mean that they aren't in the public domain.

Mugshots probably don't even meet the requirements for originality. It's a low bar, but it's not zero.

It is not generally the case that works of state and local governments are public domain.

State and local governments usually do retain a copyright on their works. 17 USC §105 only places federal documents in the public domain.[11] However, laws and/or court decisions in some states may place their work in the public domain.

Even if the photo in question was in the public domain, it's still required to indicate this on the photo (example). Having no license on a file is not the same as having a PD license on it.

The equivalent article for Charlottesville uses a the work of a newspaper photographer who literally won a Pulitzer for it -- reduced in resolution, relying on fair use I presume. Does WM really think that the Waukesha Sheriff's department is more likely to sue for infringement than an actual news photographer?

More comments

This is the go-to excuse wikipedians use when they want to memoryhole something. They also used it to attempt to delete the Trump Raised Fist photo. Of course, this is just a pretext, as the solution is widely used on wikipedia: reduce the resolution of the photo.

This photo continues to exist, so it seems that in this particular example the tactic is not working.

They still tried it and it appears to be working for Brooks...

There has been pretty well documented examples of the politicization of wikipedia. Why would it be different, in this case?

It's not "working" because the trump photo deletion attempt is for "invalid fair use" rather than a lack of a license. That's a totally different argument, and sure, I can believe that it's not always applied in good faith. A license being totally absent is pretty black and white.

For those who don’t know, this guy’s trial got live-streamed. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. He represented himself, made a gigantic fool of himself, and constantly interrupted the proceedings with insane legal theories. The best part was the judge couldn’t do anything about it. Normally you would hold somebody like that in contempt of court, but this guy was already in jail, and already facing down almost certain life without parole. Holding him in contempt would have done nothing except delay the inevitable, so everyone had to just sit there and take it for weeks.

He was a black supremacist sovereign citizen. I suspect, based on police statements that sovereign citizens are a major threat but also the relative lack of sovereign citizens in the news, that these ideas go together very frequently,

The judge did plenty, though granted him a whole lot of leeway. Eventually he ended up having to attend the trial from a separate room via videoconference so that he could be muted when he wouldn't behave.

This was a fun watch. The guy was a Soverign Citizen, and a small corner of Reddit went nuts with it. "Estoppel" became a catchphrase. I just checked and it's actually still quite active: https://old.reddit.com/r/DarrellBrooksJr/

“Grounds?”

I still audibly chuckle every time I hear the phrase “subject-matter jurisdiction”.

It's hilarious how some websites light up his picture as much as possible in an attempt to make him seem white.

RIP my retinas

The most famous version of this kind of attack that I can think of was the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice that left 80+ dead after a guy drove a dozen-ton small semitruck down a beachfront promenade.

Edit - whoops, sniped by @ArjinFerman

Are you thinking of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waukesha_Christmas_parade_attack?useskin=vector

Dont you mean the "alleged Waukesha holiday parade incident caused by an SUV"?

The headlines for that were beyond parody. I wonder if all the arguments are still on the wiki talk page, or stuck in an archive. There was a level of shamelessness in the propaganda reached in 2020-2022 that seems almost unreal now, like a fever dream.

The article still includes:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that the contents of Brooks' Facebook account, which contained "Black nationalist and anti-Semitic" viewpoints, and his crime were exploited by white supremacists in order to push racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, claiming Brooks' attack was racially motivated, that he killed his victims specifically because he hated white people, and that left-wing media were attempting to cover up the incident. Law enforcement did not give a motive for the attack.[109][110][111]

Through the "shamelessness", to use your accurate term, is so off the charts, it may have been added by trolls seeking to discredit ADL. It certainly lowers my opinion of this anti-antisemitism organization to see it defending an antisemitic murderer, by pining of the label of "antisemite" onto his critics.

Ya

I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade.

First case that brought this tactic into "public consciousness" I'm aware of is the Nice truck attack of 2016, it triggered a bunch of copycats to the point where, for a while, any European hearing "vehicle drives into crowd" would have "oh, another Islamist terrorist attack" as his first thought.

why doesn't this happen more often?

Gwern asked the same question years ago: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror

It looks like this classic low budget Finnish comedy skit from the 90s was really more of a documentary.

My understanding is that this sort of mass killing is actually fairly common in China though targeted at schoolchildren as often as not. However my source is "a bunch of youtube videos I watched on the subject last year" so I can't be of much help there.

Particularly I remember that vehicular mass-killings are on the rise and that some schools are training their staff and equipping them with mancatcher devices (sort of polearms) to take down knife-wielding assailants.

The gist was that these attacks are being perpetrated by young men who have failed economically and want to 'get back' at kids with futures ahead of them and society in general.

How true any of this is, I don't know.

I hear about mass-hacking attacks and vehicular homicide in China pretty regularly. I’m more interested in the conspiracy theory that casualty counts are massively understated to protect local officials.

Danger of killing yourself with a Car is very high

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