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I read a view diverse mainstream articles to see what is reported about UH-shooter suspect Mangionis, and it seems he is not connect (yet) to any right/left identity, instead vague statements that he was interested in video games and interned/worked as a software-engineer.
The BBC mentions his review of the unabomber manifesto, but selects two balanced quotes which are pro and anti Kaczynski.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9nxee2r0do
I had to laugh about this:
Technically the police did not promise to not arrest him if he said his real name, but what does one expect?
I'm a pessimist so take with a grain of salt, but it seems like the Eye of Sauron is moving towards rightish rat-spaces.
As people start correlating info, articles like this are beginning to suggest pegging Mangione as specifically right-grey tribe: "If we describe Scott as representing the more liberal flank of the Grey Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to folks closer to the right-wing side of things."
Whether larger publications go with that angle as time goes on I guess we'll see, but given Thiel and Musk's influence on the incoming administration, this seems like the perfect angle for the story to go in the same way EA got dragged for SBF's clusterfuck.
One of the things I saw with people like RFK, I thought his "endorsement" of Trump was so nakedly self serving that it couldn't possibly achieve anything, and indeed would paint his whole campaign in a negative light.
Instead what we saw was that some portion of RFK followers went over to the Trump camp.
So with Mangione, I expect that some people who were pro-executive-assassination will drop him after his politics become clearer, but others will become interested in his politics precisely because of this assassination.
It was exactly what it appeared to be; a quid-pro-quo where Trump got the endorsement in exchange for RFK getting a role in his administration. Why wouldn't (some of) RFK's followers be OK with that?
Such arrangements, while globally common, have been very rare and seen as sleazy in the US.
They're not rare at all in the US. Doing it across party lines is unusual, but a primary opponent getting a cabinet post in exchange for their support is common.
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I think CareFirst (?) backtracking on limiting anesthetic time did more to legitimize the assassin than anything his post realignment right wing-ish politics might reveal. Also the fact that women immediately couldn't stop talking about how hot he was and how much they wanted to fuck him. I'm sure in time, public perception of his politics will morph into whatever people want it to be, either to valorize him or condemn him.
I’ve only seen one or two examples of this on X, but nothing to indicate it is as rampant as posts are suggesting, whereare people getting the sense of this?
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I don't see this being usable fuel, at least. The shooting of an insurance company CEO codes edgy left comparably hard as "transport-oriented teens" Facebook meme groups that pivoted to violent fantasies towards landlords. Any Cathedral cleric with the slightest social spidey sense (which is something that the job actually requires) will see that "the CEO shooter was actually a rightish rat" is much more likely to make right-wing rationalism attractive to edgy left-wing youths than it is to galvanise further opposition to right-wing rationalism.
More likely that the 3D-printed weapon angle will be played up significantly.
Agree on all accounts. Back when it was assumed the killer was some sort of leftist class warrior, he was getting praise heaped on him.
I saw this on Twitter and thought it was funny: "Beloved murderer canceled after old Tweets discovered"
Of course, reality is boring. He is neither right-coded or left-coded. He's just another crazy person. We honestly need to stop obsessing over the politics of lunatics as if what they say matters.
It is by no means clear that the killer is not some sort of leftist class warrior. Certainly other leftist class warriors are quite visibly lining up to support him in significant numbers, while rightist culture warriors are lining up to condemn him. If nothing else, how the wider public perceives the act is quite informative.
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Just because he was crazy doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem. Crazy people tend to respond violently to intense political and social pressures first, meaning that they are often the canaries in the coal mine of revolution and civil war. Their acts of flying off the handle also often end up raising the temperature of already tense situations to the point that sane people can begin to take up arms. John Brown was kind of a loon if you actually look at the things he wrote and said; and I suspect the guy who lit himself on fire in front of the Tunisian parliament building in 2011 wasn’t that sane either. But you see what happened after them.
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Getting injured and dealing with the medical industry was probably the motivating incident, but was frying his brains on psychodelics also a factor?
https://x.com/PepMangione/status/1750216347836145914
Book "How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics" shown as currently being read on his Goodreads:
https://x.com/AlexBerenson/status/1866251493839397270
But other than one book on a very long reading list and a single post about psychedelics, is there any evidence that he was actually using drugs heavily?
Some more circumstancial evidence:
https://x.com/AutismCapital/status/1866232250284834818
https://x.com/AutismCapital/status/1866285127602679853
https://x.com/BigHam24/status/1866285400110629095
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Some are suggesting the "Breloom" pokemon in his twitter header is a reference to shroom culture, but i am not in that space and can't confirm
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Wait, the X Account was reinstated? I guess Elon intervened? I just skimmed his tweets (always wild) and he shares Luigi memes (even wilder, I would have guessed he doesn’t like assassins!):
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1866389839362359790
Edit:
I know marijuana can cause for some paranoia, I never heard much about negative effects with psilocybin. I am sceptical about the drugs-fried-his-brain explanation. But I don’t have experience with drugs.
Really though, why would the account be taken down? It breaks no rules. He wasn’t using it to spread his manifesto. It’s just reflexive that online platforms take down the accounts of shooters. Good on Elon for having the guts to leave it up.
Maybe his parents or someone close to him asked for it to be taken down.
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Maybe this is part of a template I’m not familiar with, but doesn’t seem to be pro assassin, just making light of a guy named Luigi being in jail.
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Just because I have lots of experience in this department, I can understand your skepticism. However, drug and alcohol induced psychosis is absolutely a Thing, propaganda notwithstanding. My old roommate was recently dating a gal who reached the point of marijuana-induced psychosis during the course of their relationship, in fact. By the end of it she couldn't hold down a job and had been hospitalized a couple of times for her episodes, and IIRC her continued smoking despite all of that was a big factor in the break-up.
On an academic note we still aren't sure if the marijuana causes psychosis, reveals occult disease, or causes disease to manifest earlier etc (although researchers certainly have opinions).
We do see a TON of people who superficially seem to have driven themselves crazy (in the short term or permanently) with weed.
It's not a high percentage of people but a certain population absolutely needs to avoid it.
(Also tagging @Muninn)
Does weed - and, for that matter, alcohol - induced psychosis manifest all at once? rapidly over several days weeks? Or can it be gradual over months-years?
Seems relevant
So @Throwaway05 has answered this well and the point made about the cause vs. reveals debate is a good one with no clear, correct answer. For the anecdote in question, this gal had been a long-term recreational user and was well into middle age when she started exhibiting acute psychotic symptoms pretty much out of the blue. Fortysomething is pretty late in the game to develop schizophrenia, though it isn't unheard of, like 15-20% IIRC, and her case generally seemed to be more of the sudden onset variety that was slowly clearing after each episode until she used again. On the work front, again, I'd agree that we see folks that french fried when they should have pizzaed and as a result are having a bad time.
May not be relevant to this specific person, but one of the common teaching points for Schizophrenia is that most people develop it in their late teens to early/mid 20s. But there is also a big bump in the 40s - for women specifically, often associated with menopause.
Significant stressors seemingly can cause the illness, which altered consciousness or medical illness associated with advancing age can provide.
Clearly waxing and waning course is something a little unusual because we do usually see gradually worsening symptoms, but slow vs. fast onset is a thing that happens often enough to be labeled a prognostic indicator.
Sidebar: I tried briefly checking your posting history to figure out if I'm mansplaining at you and saw a post where you mentioned 12 Miles Below. Impeccable taste!
Yeah, for the record, when it comes to mental illness in general, while I find the entire field fascinating, and I've been told that I could absolutely do clinical work if I actually wanted to do it badly enough to get the sheepskin, but it's more like I know a thing or two because I've seen a thing or two, since I've never been formally trained. As a Mottizen I would request that you please err on the side of mansplaining/docsplaining/etc in the future since it's hard for me to hit information overload. And I will shamelessly admit that I've become a sucker for any half-decent LitRPG stuff so the world of 12 Miles Below turned out to be quite the pleasant surprise.
Back to the topic at hand! I believe I have inadvertently muddied the waters there since the thrust of my original post was really a more off-the-cuff and less elegant version of your saying that it's not a high percentage of people but a certain population absolutely needs to avoid [drugs and alcohol], ie that for some folks drug and alcohol use can lead to psychotic symptoms while under the influence of the substance in question and perhaps dealing with those symptoms for some time afterwards. Our crisis department deals with the fallout from that often enough. I was not, in that reply, intending to delve into the much muddier question of whether or not drugs, and particularly psychedelics and hallucinogens, can cause psychosis all by themselves. Since you've already covered that ground, I'll just add to that particular question that my personal suspicion is that for some folks, their long-term drug use does contribute to periods of or even lasting psychosis, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that drug use alone was responsible for the psychosis. While this shows my age, my go-to association there is the story of Syd Barrett. He was definitely schizophrenic and I personally believe from the obvious and fairly common progression in his case that he would have been schizophrenic regardless of his drug use, but as Roger Waters put it, his enthusiasm for, and frequent use of LSD certainly didn't help. In the case of my particular anecdote I think it's there's a good chance that schizophrenia was brewing but the symptoms started subtle enough to be dismissed, but of course it's almost impossible to separate cause and effect out given that she was smoking dope regularly at that time as well. It certainly didn't help her any, either, and I think that if she were able to lay off of the Devil's Lettuce, she'd certainly be better off than she otherwise would be.
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Weed appears to work a little differently from most other substances, most substances mostly cause drug induced psychosis - you take the thing, you act like a crazy person, you sober up, uhhhh whoops OR you get some kind of medical derangement that involves substances. People with bad alcohol withdrawal having hallucinations is the common example of that.
Some things appear to cause actual psychiatric illness. Marijuana and synthetic marijuana are the biggest culprits here. This can manifest as drug-induced psychosis that takes a long, long time to clear (or never does), or as generation of typical psychiatric illness (like Schizophrenia). In the former case the onset is rapid, you get high...and crazy and stay that way. In the latter you seem to have some element of increasing/worsening disease over a variable onset.
This is complicated by the fact that we know the psychiatclly ill like drugs of all kinds (which includes everything from nicotine to Marijuana). Are they treating early prodrome symptoms with weed and the weed is a sign of illness instead of a cause? Were they always going to become schizophrenic and the weed makes it happen earlier? Were they at risk of getting schizophrenia and then get it because of the weed? We don't know yet.
It's also possible that most or all drugs of abuse cause this and we are only having a clear picture with the weed because it's now popular and legal in most places in the U.S.
I'm sure their is some research out there somewhere that feels it has clarified some of this (maybe something like looking at schizophrenia rates in places with recreational weed and without) but I don't think we have an excess of clarity.
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