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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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The reason for the anger and resentment of the Magdeburg attacker is fairly clear. He was in contact with numerous people from his region of origin and felt that they were, in some specific cases, not treated fairly by German society.

I will never understand this thought process - he wanted the German state to expedite refugee claims for secular Saudi Arabians and to take a more anti-Saudi stance geopolitically, which would never happen due to the balance of power in the Middle East and energy/economic interests - so his solution is to select a Christmas market and kill random people shopping there? Why not stab someone walking out the Saudi embassy, attack a Wahhabist, Saudi-funded mosque or, heck, even travel to Saudi Arabia and attempt to do maximum damage there since it's the supposed main focus of his ire? Even attacking organs of the German state makes marginally more sense. Instead, he selected for a group of people that probably largely agreed with him and his cause.

It all seems somewhat convenient that after doing the deed, he allowed himself to be arrested without a struggle (maybe I'm wrong but I can't find a german-language article saying the opposite), will now face a fair trial in which he can argue for insanity and will most certainly be able to finish whatever sentence he gets before he dies of old age - and without fear of being targeted by muslims within the prison system, as might have been the case had he chosen Islam as his target. Maybe murdering Europeans has just become the most low-risk of political extremism with the least relative consequences?

Why do people get angry at some people and at not at others? I don't know, I'm not a psychologist. Anger is a natural and universal human emotion. I believe it has some adaptive purpose, like all other emotions. The logic is presumably that the threat of anger induces others to treat you better. Accordingly, it makes little sense to get angry at others when you cannot possibly influence their behavior. I think this fits the pattern of how people actually behave. Few people get angry at wild animals or natural disasters.

Obviously, that doesn't mean that his anger was, in this case, actually useful or sensible. He was simply executing an adaption.

I don't think there has to be a reasonable and coherent thought process. It's tempting to think something like "Islam bad and crazy, so anti-Islam ought to be good and sane", but the reality seems to be that being a sufficiently dedicated dissident against a well-entrenched ethno-religious memeplex is rather positively correlated with psychological issues. The n=3 most actively anti-CCP overseas Chinese I knew were so obviously schizophrenic that in one case even the generic soy-enjoying progressive mutual friend warned me about this before introducing them, and in the ideologically more integrated 1970s West one of the main streams of dissidents were people who took the Illuminatus! trilogy seriously.