Agreed.
And I can appreciate your skepticism
I do think it’s well established that he came from a right wing family, and nothing to suggest that he departed from that ethos before he committed his murder.
Which has me relieved, as I feared retribution towards already aggrieved groups, and somewhat hopeful, as it might be a needed wake up call on the right.
Trump himself was shot by a right-winger and it didn’t lead to any sort of reflection, I’d say this is even less likely to do so.
On reflection, I’d like to expand on this a bit.
The things this guy (apparently) wrote on his casings, and much of the emerging evidence about his interests and activities, suggests a guy steeped in shitposting culture. The mainstream coverage, unfamiliar with this, looks at it from the outside, and they see people sharing memes and making references that are, by design, meaningless. “It doesn’t mean anything. That’s the joke.”
So the conclusion is that this is “nihilist.” Things have no meaning. QED. Nihilism.
That’s wrong.
This is not nihilism. Shitposting is dada.
Dadaism is frequently compared to nihilism, and there are certain similarities. But there is a critical distinction to be made.
Nihilism is a sober philosophical position which argues that our perception of meaning is false and misguided. Life has no inherent purpose and any argument to the contrary is delusional.
Dadaism is not a philosophy per se, but rather an artistic critique of the passivity of nihilism. Nihilists, say the dadaists, accept that nothing means anything and efforts to create meaning are doomed. The dadaists mock and challenge this acceptance by embracing meaninglessness to an absurd degree.
Or, to put it another way:
A nihilist will tell you that there is no meaning, and will try to convince you of the correctness of this belief.
A dadaist will tell you that there is no meaning, and will laugh at your angry reaction.
To be sure, there is anger underlying dada. The world sucks and the systems and institutions we’re supposed to trust have failed. A nihilist will tell you that failure was inevitable and it was pointless to expect any different. A dadaist ridicules our surprise at the failure.
The stuff on those bullets feels to me like shitposting ridicule, not a coherent ethos.
That isn’t where I’m going with it. It’s that if she thinks her use of such rhetoric is helpful to her cause, she’s a damn lousy debater. Based on that, I’m not impressed. Getting too hung up on “further Left,” forgetting how to argue well.
I guess some people just want the world to burn. The internet can fuel that desire
(My emphasis)
That’s fine. You can support interlocutors that do things the way you prefer, and I’ll support interlocutors that do things the way that I prefer, and we can see who convinces more people to vote Democrat at the end of the day (assuming that is both of our goals). That’s how these things are supposed to work.
Every time this thread title appears at the top of the page, I’m reminded of the SNL Generalissimo Franco gag.
ETA: Not sure why this post tagged Moriarty
Literally the worst most extremist version of the “heckler’s veto”.
I really really really hate these right-wing, Joker-esque, edgelord, violent, nazi, memers. From 4chan to whatever algorithmic fringefest, hellhole they search, find and radicalizes them. Ugh. Kirk was apart of this too. Nobody forget that. He fed off of their excitability.
“Where did all of these monsters come from???” - Victor Frankenstein
As I noted before, I thought it was likely to be a “disgruntled” partizan that found too late how it was not going to be beneficial for many members of his group. I do think that there was a Mormon factor on this.
I know it is hard to find a non Mormon in the region, and I guessed right that he was one:
A good number of Mormons did notice how bad it would be for them if the Christo Fascists were going to control the government.
Most of the Mormons did in the end vote for Trump:
Trump, in 2016, won Utah — the church’s world headquarters — with 45.5% of the vote. Clinton received 27.5% of the vote in the state, while McMullin won 21.5% of the Utah vote. In Utah’s next presidential election, Trump won just over 58% of the vote share, while Biden won 37.6%. Trump’s margin increased slightly in Utah in 2024, when he garnered 59.4% of Utahns’ votes.
I also noted a split from older Mormons voting for Trump but among younger Mormons there was less support.
And, many Mormons are not amused to see Christian Nationalists tearing down the separation of Church and state with the addition that it looks to benefit only specific Christians, and no wonder, I do think that they fear that they would be next after Trump gets rid of most Hispanics.
Latter-day Saints have “a unique responsibility to uphold and defend the United States Constitution and principles of constitutionalism,” as Dallin H. Oaks, a member of the church’s highest governing body, said in 2021.
I would argue that beliefs in the country’s divine purpose and potential, and the close relationship between faith and patriotism, may illuminate Latter-day Saint sympathy for Christian nationalist ideas. Yet the church’s previously fraught relations with the federal government, and with wider American culture, help explain why a majority of Latter-day Saints remain skeptical of Christian nationalism.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, hostility against the church was so high and widespread that if the U.S. had declared itself a Christian nation, Latter-day Saints would likely have been excluded – and around one-third of Americans still do not consider them “Christian.” According to a 2023 Pew survey, only 15% of Americans say they have a favorable impression of Latter-day Saints, while 25% report unfavorable views.
Latter-day Saint leaders believe they have a right to exert moral influence on public policy. But the church’s awareness of its own precarious position in U.S. culture has made it wary of policies that put some people’s religious freedom above others.
The Guardian says otherwise:
The Guardian is citing an anonymous “friend from high school” who they talked to by telephone.
There’s a probably apocryphal story of a Zurich Dadaist who put on a makeshift officer’s uniform and firing into the crowd. The reasoning being at that time it was realistic to shoot people on the battlefield, it was surrealistic to shoot them anyplace.
Andre Breton recalled the incident in the Surrealist Manifesto "The simplest Surrealist act… consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.”
Breton was also recalling his friend Arthur Cravan, who had punctuated his poetry readings with pistol shots. An art form later perfected by William S. Burroughs collaborator Brion Gysin.
Chris Burden went wholesale and shot (blanks?) at a 747 taking off from LAX. Not lacking the courage of his convictions, he’d already done a performance piece where he himself was shot at close range.
Nihilism is easy. Dada is hard work.
I’m sure there will be messages/posts from the source that better explain his current political views that come out over the next few weeks.
For now, if someone where to ask me, I’d immediately hang up because there is no way I’d want to get near this. But if I did talk, it would definitely be anonymous. I also think it’s not uncommon for your friends, hell even strangers, to know more about your politics than your family. Certainly at that age.
I imagine there will be enough political ammunition to go around for everyone.
Discordians are the mindfuckers of that group.
Alternately characterized as a religion and a philosophy, Discordianism is a belief system that promotes chaos as a path to creative and spiritual liberation. It was co-founded by Gregory Hill (1941–2000) and Kerry Wendell Thornley (1938–1998) through their text Principia Discordia, which was conceived in the late 1950s and first published in 1965. Working under the pen names Malaclypse the Younger (Hill) and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (Thornley), the pair introduced Discordianism to the 1960s American counterculture.
Discordianism went on to enter the mainstream via its prominent place in Illuminatus!, a popular satirical trilogy of speculative fiction written in the late 1960s and published in 1975 by authors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Observers have also noted crossovers and similarities between Discordianism and other anti-establishment movements, including Situationism, Dadaism, and the Beat culture of the 1950s.
Background
Hill and Thornley met in the 1950s when they were both students at East Whittier California High School. The pair first began discussing ideas that would later form the basis of Discordianism in the late 1950s. During their lifetimes, Thornley and Hill related anecdotes of sharing a profound spiritual experience while at a Whittier bowling alley in the spring of 1959, which cemented the philosophical bond between the two young men. Thornley went on to enlist with the United States Marine Corps, and after his 1960 release from active duty, he and Hill reconnected and relocated to New Orleans. There, Thornley began authoring experimental manuscripts, many of which focused on themes of cultural criticism.
In February 1962, Thornley wrote a work titled The Idle Warriors, which is believed to be the only book about Lee Harvey Oswald written before Oswald infamously assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Thornley’s anecdotes claim the distinction brought him in contact with Kennedy assassination investigators, who were scrutinizing possible connections between him and Oswald.
So this is not new, but it is interesting that one internet app that was named as being used by the perpetrator is called Discord.
This thread is becoming dangerously close to an Adam Curtis documentary
It’s a joke religion. My housemate at university used to be a Discordian; he ate hotdogs every Friday because it was funny.
Everyone uses Discord; it’s of no more significance than saying the killer used WhatsApp or Instagram.
Or Facebook Messenger or a text chat. Discord is incredibly popular in the US.
But that kind of leap of logic is perfect for the media.
Yeah, especially if playing video games is a major hobby of yours, you will be familiar with Discord and probably use it frequently. A lot of video game producers these days explicitly tell you that if you want information about the game, you want to find out the status of an online game server or want information on patches and the like, just go to Discord. It has almost replaced web sites for a number of games.
Being on Discord just confirms that this guy was a gamer (along with the Helldivers reference on one of the bullet casings).