“A spokeswoman for Google, which owns YouTube, said the video had been removed because it violated the service’s guidelines against acts like stalking, intimidating behavior and making threats.”
Presumably they weren’t reuploaded for the sake of science, it’s an attempt to milk some advertising dollars out of the transient infamy. I had always assumed that Vimeo had slightly higher standards. The video will no doubt end up being passed around until the next atrocity overshadows it, and the whole thing is forgotten.
Imagine a scenario where a man commits murder in order to profit from the Youtube advertising revenue; where he uses that revenue to fund his defence. In the US I understand that murder sentences are generally very high, unless you’re wealthy already. It strikes me that the media is also using the video to make money, and at this point I realise that I’m just regurgitating the thrust of Natural Born Killers and countless antecedents. It’s all a big money-go-round.
Not that I’m an expert on AS, but autism (if he had it) seems to be the least of his problems.
By the time they reach his age, most kids with Asperger’s realize that they are the source of their own social difficulties. They may lack the ability to act “normal”, but they are not deluded. This guy seemed to be more narcissitic than anything else. In his mind, everyone else was responsible for his unhappiness. He was perfect, and thus he felt entitled.
Her question was quite reasonable. I had the same question myself, but you didn’t answer it either. I find it funny you call me out for having a hissy fit, and here you are throwing your own.
I didn’t really claim that he had a job. And there are many of people who suffer from Asperger’s Syndrome who are (marginally) employed. But point to you. Still, the guy was in school and active on message boards–two signs that he had some basic social skills. I would think someone with “no ability” wouldn’t be able to do these things because they’d be too fucking weird to function. “No ability” speaks to profound disability. I don’t think his parents would let a profoundly disabled child roam the streets unaccompanied. So I’m guessing he was more functional than either you or Rick Kitchen believe he was.
I guess I’m tired of people assuming that someone with Asperger’s Syndrome must be a drooling severely handicapped person. And if they aren’t like this, this means they don’t have it. This logic doesn’t help anyone. And I’m worried it is why people who do get labeled can go off the deep end. If you’re constantly told you have “no ability to relate”, why would you even bother trying to be like a normal person? Why wouldn’t someone with no FB friends have poor self-esteem if his whole life he’s been told that FB friends are an indicator of an individual’s worth and mental health.
To shout out to a previous IMHO thread, I’m so glad I’m not in my early 20s any more. The pressure to be like everyone else is at its peak during this time. I still don’t have any sympathy for fuckface, though. And fuck his parents if they are in any way responsible for how self-entitled he was.
Reports are still sketchy on the guns but they’ve said that he had three of them and that they came from three different cities. One was said to have been bought locally at a shop in Goleta just a few miles from campus. All were purchased legally.
Stop over-relating. If PUAs and MRAs and Aspies all led to psycho murdering, we wouldn’t be so fascinated with this one particular guy’s psyche. This guy was batshit insane from the beginning. No amount of psychoanalysis was going to make him a better human being.
He doesn’t seem to be a psychopath by the technical definition, nor obviously schizophrenic or paranoid. So what’s his damage?
MRA is looking in the wrong direction, in my opinion. There are millions of douchebags, most of them don’t get violent, and most of them get laid.
For those interested, the local blog posted below has a very good synopsis of what happened and has the most up to date and, I believe, accurate information.
Considering how little money most YouTube Partners actually earn from their videos, that’s not bloody likely.
And while it feels like I’m talking to a brick wall, I wish people would STOP TALKING ABOUT ASPERGER’S until someone bothers to confirm whether this jerk was actually diagnosed with the condition or not! :mad:
As gross as his video and manifesto are, fuckface’s attitudes are emblematic of the social pressures people are living under today. I find none of his angst particularly shocking given the premium we put on outward displays of status nowadays.
Social media has made the pursuit of popularity a competition sport. People can actually maintain a census for their friends. Your value as a person can be quantified by the number of “likes” and retweets your internet musings collect. This guy clearly wanted to win at all this, but he couldn’t. I don’t get the sense that he even knew he had the option of not trying. It was win at all costs to him.
No. This guy is not emblematic of anything except murder of innocents motivated by hatred of women. We all face social pressures, but 99.99999% of us manage it without going on a shooting spree.
Because most people aren’t narcissitic nutjobs with a total disregard for human life.
That said, studies have shown narcissism among youth is at all time high. Not that I’m trying to demonize young people, but I don’t think attitudes like Rodger’s are rare at all. I think there are a lot of crazy and not-so-crazy people who feel similar, and our macho culture is only exacerbating it.
We are averaging how many of these kinds of shootings a year now? The ones that kill are just the tip of the iceberg.
In one case, he did a citizen’s arrest on one of his roommates for stealing $22 worth of candles. The guy actually spent some time in jail - a matter of hours. And officers stopped by his apartment in recent days because they had been alerted to some of the content in his You Tube diatribes.
As for his ability to acquire guns (which apparently were indeed all legally obtained), he had no official record of anything that would have come up in a background check.
They’re the kind of guys who show no interest in their children until their wife finally walks out on them and takes the kids with her as a result, and then they think they’re going to sue her for full custody. People like this make things much, much harder for men who really SHOULD have primary custody.
Every stressor is going to affect some people much more severely than others. Peanuts aren’t harmful to the vast majority of humans, but there’s that tiny percentage that can die from them. And this is sad.
But what is the solution? I’m not going to give up my peanut butter OR my freedom of speech any time soon, and I don’t think I’m alone. So given this, the overly sensitives need to learn how to cope. Or just shrivel up and die already. But they can’t expect everyone else to stop the world for them. It’s a tough world. Grow up or blow it, as my father used to say all the time.
I’m starting to feel pretty nihilistic about stuff like this, I’m afraid. A person like Elliot Rodger is unfortunate. But maybe he and his ilk are the price we need to be willing to pay to have such breakthroughs as the internet and social media. For every lonely loner like Elliot, there are hundreds of others who have found social connectedness on the internet. If we accept fatal car wrecks as the price society has to pay for having cars, then we need to be prepared to accept homicidal maniacs as the price for having the world at our finger tips. So we need to stop acting like this is just a fad. Shit like this is never going away, and there isn’t much that society can do about it.
The guy actually spent some time in jail - a matter of hours. And officers stopped by his apartment in recent days because they had been alerted to some of the content in his You Tube diatribes.