Category: Uncategorized

As might have been predicted, it appears that one of the primary motivations for the VTU killings was not religion, the lack of religion, Sudden Jihad Syndrome or anything else, merely the sociopathology of modern mass schooling:

Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.

“As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China,'” Davids said….

“There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him,” Roberts said. “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.”

While it’s extremely unjust that Cho chose to unleash his revenge on those who didn’t mistreat him, it’s not hard to understand that source of inner rage that years of constant abuse at school produces.

Being nearly a year younger than most of the people in my school class and too socially clueless to hide my intelligence, I was unlucky enough to be one of those on the bottom of the social totem pole for most of elementary school and junior high. It was a combination of three things that changed my social fortunes and my subsequent outlook:

1. Because I developed open contempt for my teachers before anyone else did, I was somehow classified with the rebels and budding criminals instead of the complete losers. When the bad boys and delinquents divided themselves into two “gangs”, I was supremely mystified to find myself invited to join one of them. It’s hard to remember everything that long ago, but it may have been the first time I was invited to join anything at school.

2. Scoring six goals in one game against our archrivals earned the respect of the jocks, who afterwards refused to pick on me, with two notable exceptions.*

3. The kindness of one of the most popular guys in our class, who not only came over to my house one weekend in eighth grade but also mentioned it to others the next week. (It also helped me realize that I had absolutely nothing in common with any of the popular people in my class, but even at that age I recognized it was an extraordinarily decent gesture on his part.)

It’s almost embarrassing, in retrospect, that such a small thing could make such a big difference, but what it gave me to understand was that my social isolation was not intentional on anyone’s part, it was simply the natural and inevitable result of inherent differences between me and the normal kids. From then on, I viewed each point of friendly contact as a small victory for foreign relations and each social setback as a minor border skirmish. My hatred began to rapidly fade until by the latter half of high school the only remainders were a) a distaste for dating girls from my school, and, b) a complete lack of any need for social approval.

This background is the reason for one of the more important points of The World in Shadow, which is how we are often given the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others who are at a crucial nexus, and how our inability to see this usually causes us to miss the opportunity. I don’t know if anyone ever had this opportunity with Cho, perhaps he was simply too screwed up or too narcissistic for anyone to make a positive impact on him, but if they did, we can be sure that they missed it.

The connection between being victimized at school and unleashing violence isn’t imaginary, in fact, it is so strong that I recently read how police in some states are beginning to ask administrators who the bullies are so that they can keep track of their victims! Now, if that is not sufficient indictment of the public schools for you, then I’d be very curious to know what, if anything, would be.

Cho’s words seem to echo that point from Shadow, which was written after Columbine: “You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off…. You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I died, like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.”

Unfortunately, Cho is likely correct and he surely will serve as an inspiration for the victimized and the bullied, just as Harris and Klebold of Columbine fame have. And this isn’t necessarily an entirely bad thing, because there’s absolutely no need or excuse for the abuse of the weak by the strong or the victimization of the unpopular by the popular.

* For those of you who’ve read Shadow, Kent Peterson was real. Although in real life his name was Clark and it was a junior high problem, not a high school one. By 9th grade, we’d reached an accomodation of sorts.

The Regression to the Mean doesn’t seem to have learned anything from the Holocaust or any other violent incident in world history:

I have to dissent, in the strongest possible terms, from John Derbyshire’s shocking posts on Virginia Tech. The notion that a human being or group of human beings holding no weapon whatever should somehow “fight back” against someone calmly executing other people right in front of their eyes is ludicrous beyond belief, irrational beyond bounds, and tasteless beyond the limits of reason….

Everyone who wants to know the actual facts of the matter should read David Maraniss’s account of what happened inside the classrooms.

I read it and it seems to me that people were hiding under desks, hiding behind lecterns, huddling by walls and generally behaving like terrified sheep, the two professors and the three guys who held the door in the computer class being the obvious exceptions. (The article doesn’t say, but the word choice leaves the impression that the ex-military professor may have made the mistake of trying to talk to the guy.)

Don’t hide behind the lectern, throw the damn thing! Break a chair leg off, hide behind the door and stab him in the throat if he pushes through while the others throw desks at him. If the gun shots are pops, not big booming cannon sounds, you know it won’t kill you unless you get hit in the head or the heart.

That Maraniss account doesn’t support what Podhoretz is saying, it makes Derbyshire’s point for him. Just looking around my office, I see glass frames that would make daggers, a lamp that would make an effective spear, two bookends that would smash a skull if thrown, chairs with heavy wooden legs and metal balls on the feet, a six-inch sharpened letter opener and an assault rifle with an extra banana clip… okay, so maybe the average academic office doesn’t have the latter.

The point is that you can turn nearly anything that has heft or length into an effective weapon. You may still be outgunned, but if you’ve got the benefit of numbers, you can and will win if you fight back. At the very least, you are giving yourself and those around you a chance to survive.

I’m only surprised that she will serve any time for murdering her husband:

A preacher’s wife who claimed her husband abused her was convicted Thursday of voluntary manslaughter for shooting him…. Prosecutors had asked that Winkler be convicted of first-degree murder, but the jury settled on the lesser charge after deliberating for eight hours. She faces three to six years in prison….

Prosecution witness described Matthew Winkler as a good husband and father, and the couple’s 9-year-old daughter testified she never saw her father mistreat her mother. Mary Winkler also said under cross-examination that her husband did nothing for which he deserved to die.

You see, women can’t be held responsible for anything they do or say, because they are children. And while you certainly can take offense at my assertion that women are not equal to adult men if you wish, I note that I am merely stating an obvious and easily observable fact of the American legal system.

There is an example of this almost every day. Consider the following:

The New York woman who told investigators two men stabbed her and her 3-year-old son, leaving the boy in critical condition, in a purported robbery last week was arrested today on an attempted murder charge in the attack, police said.

After questioning, Franca Gasperetti, 43, of Floral Park, N.Y., admitted she “snapped” and stabbed herself and her son, Anthony, with a 12-inch kitchen knife “in a fit of rage” after “her affair with her husband’s friend had been exposed,” according to her arrest affidavit.

Based on the results of the Tennessee murder – excuse me, voluntary manslaughter – one can only expect that she’ll get probation, the house and custody of the child after the divorce.

Only the police can commit mass slaughter. Fortunately, we all know that one can never find sociopaths on the police force:

Woo had an argument with his live-in girlfriend in the afternoon of April 26, 1982. Enraged, he left the house and went to the police armory, where he began consuming large amounts of whiskey. He became moderately drunk, raided the police armory of its weapons and built a personal arsenal. Woo then stole a single high-powered rifle and some grenades and left the armory. By this point it was around dinner time. He walked from house to house, and abused his position as a police officer to make people feel safe and gain entry to the home. Then he shot the victims, or killed the entire family with a grenade. He continued this pattern for the next eight hours, and into the early morning hours of April 27.

When Woo had shot a certain number of people in a village, he ran to another village and started killing. Eventually he had been through five villages in Uiryeong county. In the early hours of April 27, Woo took his final two grenades and strapped them to his body. He grabbed three people as he set the fuse of the grenades. They became his final victims, as he blew himself up, killing the three he had taken hostage and finally ending the world’s worst spree killing.

The utter lunacy of the gun control crowd is demonstrated by their trust in the armed police and government, when government is the single most murderous institution in the history of mankind and – if I recall correctly – police commit murders at a higher rate than the norm.

A commenter at Dr. Helen’s adds:

“Despite being technically a state of war for decades against North Korea, South Korea is a country where citizens are banned from privately owning guns and where no school shootings are known to have occurred.

However, the country has not been immune from shooting rampages.

In 2005, a military conscript believed to be angered by taunts from senior officers killed eight fellow soldiers, throwing a grenade into a barracks where his comrades were sleeping and firing a hail of bullets.”

I always find it interesting how an industry which claims it can save lives by showing action heroes buckling their seatbelts when getting into a car will simultaneously claim that violent movies cannot possibly have an impact on anyone:

In the chilling video Cho also appears to re-enact scenes from a film detectives say he had repeatedly watched in the days leading up to the massacre. The South Korean movie Oldboy has themes of obsession and revenge which also occur in Cho’s own writings.

Obviously, the vast majority of those who have seen that movie have not gone on to commit violent massacres. But it is downright dishonest to insist that there is no connection whatsoever between the influence and the act. This connection doesn’t mean that anything should be done about the negative influences, I don’t even believe in forcing movie producers to rate their movies.

But it does demonstrate that it is never a bad idea to pay attention to the influences surrounding you and those around you.

Here’s a link to that Libertarian Politics Live podcast in case you’re interested in listening to it. If it strikes you that I’m a bit slow, note that I was operating on something like four hours of sleep distributed over two nights at the time.

Combining book-writing mode with WoW is a bad, bad combination. But fortunately, amaretto-laced cappucino is the antidote and I just so happen to possess all the necessary ingredients in copious quantity.

One could reach a reasonable conclusion about the intelligence of Democrats and Republicans here:

Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot — with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.

Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly. Fox topped only network morning show viewers.

So, because Democrats watch Jon Stewart and Republicans watch Fox News, this means that Democrats are smarter than Republicans. QED.

Not so fast….

Men scored higher than women, and older Americans did better than younger, on average. Democrats and Republicans were about equally represented in the most knowledgeable group but there were more Democrats in the least aware group.

Remember, most people are idiots. So, since Fox News has loads more viewers than Comedy Central, a higher percentage of them are largely clueless… to say nothing of the fact that Fox News spends more time reporting on celebrity spawn and school shootings than it does on American politics.

Although I have no doubt that all those Media Matters Stasi are contributing to dragging the average down as well.

Regardless, I think it’s worth pointing out that knowing who the vice-president is does not qualify one as knowledgeable, it just indicates that you’re not quite as sublimely ignorant as my Viszla.

JD is either a wit or inadvertantly entertaining:

I must say that the arrogance throughout this blog is starting to become obnoxious.

Starting? Where have you been since 2003?

A few basic blog truths:

1. Most people are idiots who have no idea why they believe what they believe. This doesn’t make them any less valuable in the eyes of God, this doesn’t make them any less responsible for their own actions and this doesn’t give anyone else the right to make their decisions, however suboptimal, for them. It does, however, mean that there is no reason to pay any serious attention to what the vast majority of people say or claim to “think”.

2. Unless and until you prove otherwise, “most people” includes you.

3. Everyone is incorrect from time to time. This includes Internet Superintelligences, we’re just incorrect far less often than is normally the case. This isn’t merely because we are multiple standard deviations north of the norm, but because over the last six years, tens of thousands of attempts to find the flaws in our arguments have been made. Unless you have put yours through a similar refinement process, your kung fu is likely to be weak by comparison.

4. False modesty is an insult to all of the parties involved. And many a modest man has much to be modest about.

5. There is nothing arrogant about being correct. Nor is it arrogant to be conscious of the fact that you are correct. It is, admittedly, arrogant to expect others to be conscious of the high probability that you are going to be correct.

6. A dedication to avoiding issues of known ignorance is often confused with an assertion of universal knowledge. The two should not be confused.

7. This blog exists only for my own amusement. Any entertainment, enlightenment or edification that it might happen to provide anyone else is a happy, but accidental byproduct. If you derive insufficient value from this blog, there are thousands of other similar blogs that may provide you with more of what you are seeking and I wish you success in your quest to find it.

I’ve had a few thoughts about the general cowardice of the thin blue line before, but Crispy clarifies the reality rather nicely:

When I watch TV with some of my friends, we are amazed with how fearful “SWAT” teams react to situations. Let’s put this in perspective. These guys are wearing more body armor than American soldiers who are down range, they have bullet proof shields & a greater array of weapon systems than most Army infantry platoons. They are only facing one person, in most situations, and how do they react?

They don’t. They wait for hours upon hours and fearfully stand behind trees and become distraught when they find out the suspect has a bow & arrow with hunting tips inside the house because “that sort of thing can tear straight through our body armor”.

Now, in fairness, the very last thing you want is a gung ho police force. There’s a reason that police historically make very bad soldiers and soldiers make even worse police. So this, shall we say, reluctance to engage and put themselves at risk is not entirely bad.

But the complete inability of the overrated SWAT teams – who despite their faux militarization are apparently good for little more than scaring crack whores and killing innocent and unarmed people in bed late at night – to even begin responding substantively to situations when there’s nothing but a crazy kid with a pair of pop guns, really borders on the absurd.

And these are the very people you hope are going to defend you because you can’t bother to defend yourself? Good luck with that.

It’s just a first step. But it’s a step:

The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long- awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act “have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision pitted the court’s conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority. It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how—not whether—to perform an abortion.

Congratulations, Republicans. After 34 years, they have finally made a single step towards ending the national atrocity. This should prove the final nail in the coffin of the Giuliani candidacy, unfortunately, it will almost surely be undone in 2009 when the three-headed Democratic beast rules the roost.