RoR: Forum

Post 20

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 5:11pm

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Thank you, Sweetie-Bear. *S*

Maybe this might turn the tide. It never hurts to have a pretty girl on your side.

Post 21

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 6:04pm

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Hong: I believe that there was also an incident in recent years at San Diego State U.

As far as why these kind of incidents might come more often from Chinese or Asian students, I'm not at all sure that the premise is correct to begin with, but I can say that Chinese traditional culture is one of the most torturously convoluted examples of altruism, far worse than the Judeo/Christian ethic. A Chinese person brought up in the neo-confucian culture only exists as a part of a family, in the same sense, ideally, as my hand is a part of my body. Being forced to live in such an unnatural state is bound to produce all manner of psychic distortion and hostility.

Post 22

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 6:20pm

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Teresa,

One thing that confuses me about some of these people who are now so keen on labelling dissenting voices as "mentally disturbed", is that a number of them are of a persuasion that was not too long ago labeled as "mentally distubed" simply because it was a dissenting voice of sexuality: namely, homosexuality.

In plain English, a number of the people slinging around this "mentally disturbed" label in order to discredit dissenting voices, are themselves homosexuals... a dissenting voice of sexuality that was, until somewhat recently, formally classified as a "mental disorder" by the psychiatric profession. They themselves have known the brunt and brute force of political psychologizing and authoritarian propaganda and you would think that they, of all people, for these reasons,would at least be tolerant of -- if not outrightly support -- conscientious dissention. Yet, clearly, they do not. Apparently they only apply it to their own special interests.

It's ironic (horrible, really) that these same folks are militantly quick to uphold their right to practice their own dissenting voices of homosexuality without it being labeled as "mentally disturbed" by various folks such as Reginald Firehammer and others while, at the same time, they then turn around and desire to silence other sorts of dissenting voices.

That these same people do now resort to such Orwellian tactics is very depressing and quite disconcerting.

(Edited by Jeremy M. LeRay on 4/18, 6:25pm)

Post 23

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 6:33pm

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Jeremy sorry I guess I'm not privy to whatever past conversations you've had on Solopassion or here but I don't know what you are going on about. Who has labeled you mentally disturbed and why?

Post 24

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 6:56pm

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John,

Well, *L* my past conversations are a whole Icelandic saga in itself.

Suffice it to say that a number of high-level people -- such as Barbara Branden and Chris Sciabarra -- who were part of the mob of angry villagers, were themselves also, in time, added to the very same "list of enemies" that they so eagerly and self-servingly wrote me onto.

In essence, a few years ago I started coming to SOLO and was on quite a roll, making some very good points about a number of things but, over time, my thoughts and feelings on what Lindsay Perigo so rightly calls "Islamo-fascism" quickly became, in the minds of certain anti-emotion, hot-house orchids, too "extreme".

In essence, I was reacting emotionally to the endless and horrifying Arab chants of "Death to America" with all due terror and harshness and started chanting my own "Death to Islam" (just as Lindsay Perigo himself has also done on numerous occasions, and received no flak over it) and "Death to Pan-Arabia". And, in truth, what red-blooded creature doesn't at least have some spirit of commensurate counter-attack in the face of its own, imminent dismemberment?

But, for some mysterious reason, certain members of the previous SOLO gang decided to pretend like I was totally alone in these emergency emotions, and started agreeing amongst each other to say that I, and I alone, was calling for "genocide" and decided to make it the official party line.

Well, since then (and especially since Lindsay Perigo himself has so vociferously started chanting "Death to Islam" and, to his limited credit, has defended me to a limited extent on several occasions since then), they don't throw around the "genocide" term any more. I suppose I can only thank Lindsay for that.

However, apparently Lindsay still feels the need to placate his throng somewhat, and has now decided to settle on a "mentally wacko" label for me instead. And the other Dogs Playing Poker seem to feel pretty good joining in on that, so that's where we are today.

Basically, it's the "looney bird" label that I'm now having to correct for the record. At some point -- maybe by the year 2525 (if man is still alive) -- it might finally read correctly, once and for all. Of course, by then, the Earth will either be inhabited by glowing gods or talking cockroaches, so nobody will probably care except arcane historians, and it won't serve me any good at that point, which is all I really care about.

(Edited by Jeremy M. LeRay on 4/18, 7:00pm)

Post 25

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 8:16pm

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And Sciabarra has told me that he has basically given up on on-line forums.

In the discussion of the killer's nationality, I would like to remind everyone that Harris and Klebold were "regular Americans." So was Charles Whitman.

Post 26

Thursday, April 19, 2007 - 3:26am

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Oh, sure, Chris. As if every other person in America is a Harris, Klebold, or Whitman.

Post 27

Thursday, April 19, 2007 - 7:01am

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There was an interesting commont on National Review Online by one philosopher: our evil killers strike out in isolated incidents while in other nations, such as Nazi Germany or Pol Pot�s Cambodia, these kind of people run the country. I thought about that today when I was reading about the aspiring Hitler who heads Iran. Such killing is seen as heroic in Iran. A court just freed a group that stoned to death young lovers.

�According to the Supreme Court�s earlier decision, the killers, who are members of the Basiji Force, volunteer vigilantes favored by the country�s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, considered their victims morally corrupt and, according to Islamic teachings and Iran�s Islamic penal code, their blood could therefore be shed.

The last victims, for example, were a young couple engaged to be married who the killers claimed were walking together in public.�

Post 28

Thursday, April 19, 2007 - 2:27pm

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Oh, sure, Chris. As if every other person in America is a Harris, Klebold, or Whitman.

I believe he was speaking to the psychoanalysis of Asian culture that has resulted...

Post 29

Thursday, April 19, 2007 - 8:21pm

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I believe he was speaking to the psychoanalysis of Asian culture that has resulted...

That is exactly what I was referring to. I was disappointed to see that this would lead to finger-pointing on a person's ethnicity or speculation about his sympathy for Islam. But considering what I have seen her, I am not too surprised.

The only common denominator is that such people were effectively living outside of society--separated, detached, alienated. People offered to help Cho. But it was pretty obvious that he didn't trust anybody.

A good NLP practitioner would have done him some good maybe. I naturally wonder Milton Erickson or Richard Bandler would have done with him.

Post 30

Thursday, April 19, 2007 - 9:05pm

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Now that I've issued my umpteenth (and probably yet again totally futile) defense of my poor, battered reputation, to get back to the discussion at hand -- this gunman, Cho Seung-Hui -- I've lately begun to form a model in head of what I think happened at Virginia Tech:

1) It strikes me as odd that this student was a senior English major at a polytechnic institute. That fact carries a lot of important "tells" to me. Who goes to a polytechnic institute to study English? Well, in my mind, no one. Having seen how high-presssure universities work, I think that this Cho simply ended up there, after most likely not being able to hack it in some technology-based track at Virginia Tech (VT). I'm not saying he wasn't necessarily smart; I think he just probably didn't have the proper preparation and perhaps it didn't suit him for whatever reasons.

2) Since his older sister graduated from Princeton, since his parents own a dry-cleaning business, and since he spoke with a bit of an accent, I think he was probably the child of struggling, very ambitious immigrants, with a strong sense of "duty" to doing his parents proud and helping the family by succeeding in a high-prestige, high-stability, high-income field such as engineering or something. Very likely his parents raised him to believe that he had "a superior calling" to those around him, so he probably had the "bar" set very high for himself in the first place, and may have had some considerable degree of grandiosity.

3) When he couldn't cut it, I think he very likely suffered an enormous ego blow and felt great shame. It's also possible that his family might have been very openly disappointed, if not downright condemning and even disowning, with him.

4) In an effort to find blame while, at the same time, maintaining the ultra-high sense of personal expectation that he was groomed to have, he retreated into messianic delusion and almost exclusively blamed those around him on the most damning of levels.

5) I then suspect that he fell in with the local Islamic groups, representatives of a religion which specializes in extreme narcissistic ego-repair and maintenance (most others do, too, but Islam is uniquely violent about it). I suspect they may have helped him out with attack coordination, weaponry, and all that. I also think that, as investigators dig into this case, that's what they'll confirm.

This is my tentative guess for how it all went down. But, then again, you're hearing this from a nonconformist abnormal so, by all means, dismiss it entirely.

(Edited by Jeremy M. LeRay on 4/19, 9:12pm)

Post 31

Thursday, April 19, 2007 - 9:10pm

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I was disappointed to see that this would lead to finger-pointing on a person's ethnicity or speculation about his sympathy for Islam.

Really? You don't think these things play a factor? Curious.

I mean, I'm glad to see that you are offering an alternative approach to understanding Seung-Hui, but I think you're being too exclusively individualistic in your analysis, as though he existed in a vacuum. He didn't. He lived in a society... he had a family. Everything. There were forces around and upon him, constantly.

These things matter.

Post 32

Thursday, April 19, 2007 - 11:53pm

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Apparently, the killer was picked on a lot in high school, because he was quiet and shy, which reminds me of the Columbine massacre, in which the killers were also picked on by school bullies. In his book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, psychiatrist James Gilligan cites cases in which people who felt powerless to defend themselves from personal humiliation resorted to violence.

The Virginia Tech killer was described as a "loner," who evidently had few if any friends and was probably severely alienated from his peers. His anger and resentment probably festered over many years, before coming to a head. It's a shame his disaffection couldn't have been dealt with before exploding in this kind of senseless carnage. I wonder what his relationship was like with his parents -- if they were sensitive to his psychological problems and tried to get help for him.

- Bill

Post 33

Friday, April 20, 2007 - 3:09am

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It strikes me as odd that this student was a senior English major at a polytechnic institute. That fact carries a lot of important "tells" to me. Who goes to a polytechnic institute to study English?

Once upon a time, you would have been right. However, Tech is now no different than any other major university. To be sure every school has certain areas which they excel at, and Tech may excel at engineering etc, (although that could just be a misconception because of the name, I really don't have any facts on that), but the fact is, there are only two major universities in the state of Virginia: Virginia Tech, and UVA, and I know a slew of people who have studied liberal arts at Tech.

Post 34

Friday, April 20, 2007 - 4:18am

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Regarding Cho's religion: Ishmael (or Ismail) is indeed a significant figure in Islam. However, he is also a Biblical figure, appearing in Genesis, and "Call me Ishmael" is of course the opening line of Moby Dick. Does this mean Cho was a crazed Melville fan? More significantly, however, is the fact that Cho said :

"Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

According to the Qur'an, Jesus never died at all. Rather, God made it appear that he did and took him up to heaven. It is therefore very unlikely that any Muslim would have said this.See : Wiki

In the light of this, it would be, to put it mildly, presumptuous to assume that Cho considered himself a Muslim let alone that he had any contact with Islamic groups. I am unaware of any evidence for this beyond the "Ishmael" reference, which is a textbook example of weak circumstantial evidence.
(Edited by Jeremy B
on 4/20, 8:07am)

Post 35

Saturday, April 21, 2007 - 11:45am

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In my post #30 I speculated that Cho Seung-Hui (CSH) may have started out in some engineering-type major and then had to switch out to something else. I speculated that this played a factor in his wounded ego.

Well, this is from today's MSNBC online article on Seung-Hui:

Another mystery: Why did the English major target Norris, a building dominated by engineering and foreign language classes? Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who went to high school with Cho, said he remembers seeing Cho on campus a lot freshman year, and concluded that Cho, like him, started out as an engineering major.

�If he started in engineering and had to switch to English that might be a reason why he�s angry at the engineering department,� Davids said.

Now, all this could mean that CSH started out as an engineering major or that, perhaps, freshmen normally see a lot of each other the first year, no matter their eventual track of study. But I get a feeling that my hunches just might pan out.

Post 36

Saturday, April 21, 2007 - 11:49am

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Jeremy,

The difference is that, in Judeo-Christianity, Ishmael is a mere footnote of history.

In Islam, however, Ishmael is basically the father of the Arab people, and their direct claim to lineage from Abraham himself. Basically, to Islam, Ishmael is of enormous importance. In a very real sense, he would have been Abraham's "ax" -- his "Ishmael Ax" -- against polytheists and atheists in Arabia and, eventually, all over the world.

This is why I keep harping on this.

Post 37

Saturday, April 21, 2007 - 12:35pm

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Just to accent the absurdity of it all, recall the recent case of that woman who was cut off, twice, and quite deliberately it seems, apparently forcing her off the road at least once, so she responded, in true mass executioner style, by throwing her cup of ice into the lap of the passenger of the offending vehicle. For which she, not the person who was assaulting her with a couple tons of lethal steel, was given a suspended sentence, for which she profusely thanked the court (or else), as she could have received five years in prison.

Not to defend this jerk who murdered all those people in cold blood, but when we have a society that has moved so far away from justice in the direction of legalism, then we can expect such results. Our schools are hotbeds of violence, our prisons are run by the very gangs who they are supposed to protect us from, our streets and homes are inundated with sonic assaults specifically intended to intimidate and make it impossible to sleep or do any serious thinking, but our legal system has the time to cost someone thousands of dollars in legal fees and probably a year off her life in terms of stress, because she reacted the way any normal person would to an ongoing assault.

Why? Because they can. Intent and functional purpose are two disconnected things. Means determine ends. When you have a legal system that is based, not on equity, but on imposing social standards according to a code of specifics, then the criminals and psychos will always game that system, and the system will find that the easy busts are those of innocent people who violated some code.

Post 38

Saturday, April 21, 2007 - 7:45pm

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Thursday evening, I got a call from my parents and learned that my second cousin once removed was one of Cho's targets. She is apparently getting out of the hospital today, having taken two bullets. One of her aunts happens to be a doctor, so I am confident that she will get good care.

As I ponder this case more, I consider the events of the day. He shot two people, went to his dorm to make a video, went to the post office to mail it, and then went back and shot more people. Considering how long I often wait at the post office, I figure he would have been caught there. How did he get away with this? Can someone tell me how this guy managed to do all this without getting caught? It is almost as if he knew that nobody was going to come after him after the first two murders.

As people in New Orleans also learned, if you depend on the "authorities" to protect you, prepare to die. Were all the pigs eating doughnuts somewhere? Were they arresting non-violent marijuana users? Were they handing out speeding tickets on Route 460? Just what were those stupid, incompetent, worthless morons with badges doing? If these idiots can't stop someone like this, what good are they? I've long believed that only people at the bottom of the barrel go into police work and believe it even more now.

(Edited by Chris Baker on 4/21, 7:46pm)

Post 39

Saturday, April 21, 2007 - 8:00pm

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I have to second JLR's emphasis on the Ismail Ax issue. And no non-m*slim influenced person would refer to Ismail rather than Ishmael.

But I would also assume that there was an element of sexual inadequacy or perversion. Consider the killer (whose name should not be mentioned) and his macho posing, very similar to that of mideastern suicide killers.

Sex was an obsession of many of the 9-11 hijackers. I got the very particular impression that a number of them were probably unhappy or latent homosexuals. The traitorous John Walker Lindh (may he die in jail) was a homosexual adventurer who slept around while studying Jihad. Of course, the press does not brin up this fact where homosexuality applies, due to political correctness and the high number of gays in the media. At least in the west, we do not force people to sublimate their sexual urges into suicide bombings. But the VA Tech killer was a stalker who took pictures up women's skirts. I can't draw any brilliant philosophical conclusions from these observations, but I do wonder (or, well, actually I don't wonder) why the press is so reluctant to brin up these topics.

I had to laugh when Mort Kondracke insisted that there was no link to isl*m on Fox News, and suggested that Moby Dick might be the source.

Ted Keer

The Virginia Tech Massacre