Candid photo of Davis Aurini, white nationalist on paper

Wait–the book rec is The Goblin Emperor. I was just thinking of a certain other goblin king, and his tight, tight pants.

Tight pants.

Speaking of uncomfortable reading, I see your Davis Aurini and raise you Elliot Rodgers. I’ve been reading his “manifesto” which so far is a rather poorly-written autobiography consisting of a parade of names and houses and childhood obsessions. On my last read I went as far as the start of his adolescence where he assures readers that his happy childhood is over and the real tragedy begins, and it was a shock to realize that this is past the midpoint of his very short life.

One thing that struck me about the mundane details of Rodgers’ childhood is how, well, mundane his life was on the surface. It’s a life with more privilege than most, with homes in posh neighborhoods and celebrity acquaintances and nannies and travel overseas, but it’s also about divorce and family strife and childhood pastimes and wanting to belong, to stand out. Dial down the wealth level and this could be a lot of people’s lives.

It wasn’t until I’d taken a step back from the material that I realized what was missing: a discussion of any kind of inner life for any of the people who are in or pass through Rodgers’ life. He actually has positive things to say about women, from his mother to his nannies to his homeroom teacher, but only in relation to how they fulfill his needs and never as people with separate existences of their own. His mother always bought him whatever he wanted, his stepmother disciplined him in ways he thought she had no right to, his nannies and teacher were kind to him. That’s it. No thoughts about how the divorce affected his mother’s life, or about how his stepmother felt about her stepchildren, no details of any sort about the nannies or teacher outside of their names. Only how they treated him and how that affected him.

His discussion of male figures is not much better–he does go a little more into their individual characteristics in addition to how they treat him, but only so far as it makes them high-status or not. The only comment he made so far about how the divorce impacted his father was how soon he got a new girlfriend afterward and how that raised his esteem in his young son’s eyes. Still no inner life of any sort for anyone but the villain-protagonist.

Maybe it’s not surprising that Rodgers’ own inner life is curiously lacking. The only things he seems to care about as a child are comfort and status. He chases one childhood fad after another, from Pokemon to skateboarding hoping it’ll turn him into one of the cool kids. There isn’t even any indication of interest in these things in of themselves, outside of how they would reflect on his social standing.

And I think anyone would understand that desire to be cool and accepted, which is why the mass killer’s childhood seems so mundane. At the same time there’s a strange emptiness in a life where nothing and no one exists outside that very human thirst, which is what makes the account disturbing.

I have a depressing idea where all this is going, even aside from the conclusion that made it to headlines around the world. Girls and women will be Rodgers’ ultimate gambit for status, replacing Pokemon and hacky sacks. And when they fail to ”work” properly he will turn on them as he might on a defective skateboard–as things that have failed to fulfill their functions. The true horror of Elliot Rodgers’ narrative may lie in how drearily familiar it is.

The problem with trying to do any sort of racism metaphor in a fantasy world with races of completely different species is that it basically plays into the hands of the Davis Aurinis. The most important thing for men like him is the core belief that human races are fundamentally alien to each other. When they interbreed (and yes, they would think of it as interbreeding rather than just… breeding…), the results are treated as bizarre as half-orcs in fantasy.

No matter how good of a message you try to impart by likening race relations between people and between fantasy species, it will still boil down to reinforcing that idea that people with dark skin and people with light skin are fundamentally different, as different as elves and dwarves. It still fails to attack the underlying assumption that is crucial to their worldview.

Sociopath. Other people aren’t people, only tools to them.

@kirbywarp
nice wrap up about that sad white pride dudes (that wants so badly to be an academic but couldnt even get a bachlor) world view..

“Basically, he wants to everyone to live separate but equal, each to the country of their race, and to interact with each other as if interacting with an alien species. Trying to work together and learn things, but ultimately stay completely separated.”

I would say that this opinion from the pug-man comes from McCullochs hate theory about that humankind should be separted as completly different kind of species…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_McCulloch

@th1stle

“White nationalist” is such a cop-out term — he’s a white supremacist.

Agreed. His protestations to the contrary don’t work even under the terms he set himself. If he deplores the way white nationalists on more than paper (* snort *) are doin it wrong, then maybe he could take 5 seconds to think about why no one can seem to get white nationalism “right” on the actual Planet Earth, with the history we have and the way humans act. The obvious conclusion is that race separatism CAN’T be equal and humane in the real world as it exists and should be abandoned for the horrifying ideology it is.

It’s much the same for libertarianism on the right and Communism on the left, and all sorts of radicalism, cults and so on–philosophies that look nice on paper and could theoretically work out fine on some world that is not our own, but do not work in the actual world as it exists. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the reality others live in. This kind of reality-erasure has been a tool of abuse and repression for as long as human society existed, and is just as toxic when the stated motivation is clueless idealism.

I accidentally posted this to the wrong comment section, so I’ll try again:

Davis’ new look is based on Billy Zane’s character from Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, yea or nay?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuuYJ6pvl68&w=560&h=315%5D

@Film Runner

Does Rodgers at any point demonstrate empathy for someone else?

Surprisingly, I just stumbled on the first instance of it! It happened at 11 years of age and concerned James, his best friend from childhood. (I really wish he hadn’t named these people, because they don’t deserve to be scrutinized for their association with a mass murderer. I’ll redact James’ last name here, at least.)

Quotes from Elliot Rodgers’ manifesto below, use caution. There is nothing objectionable in the passage itself–in fact it may be the most humane and relatable part of the whole work–but these are still his words.

[My mother] told us [Rodgers and presumably his sister] the dire news. James’s mother, Kim [last name redacted], had just passed away from breast cancer. I cried for a bit. Kim was a very kind-hearted person, and the mother of my best friend. She had been suffering from breast cancer for several years, but I never thought she would die from it. I immediately thought of how James must be feeling. He just lost his own mother! It made me think of how horrible I would feel if the same thing happened to my own mother, just the thought alone filled me with pain.

There was to be a get-together of family friends at James’s house that night, in honor of Kim. On the way, I thought about how I would approach James on the subject. The amount of grief he must be feeling… I couldn’t even imagine it. The last similar experience was the death of my grandfather, and I was only four years old then. When we arrived, I looked for James, and found him sitting in his room. I gently offered my deepest condolences for his loss. He remained very strong, obviously hiding his emotions. He looked very sad, in an extremely stoic sort of way. He told me he fully accepted what had happened, that his mother was dead and that was the end of it. That was all we spoke on the matter. We tried not to think about it for the rest of the night, and later on I played tag in his backyard with him and some of his friends.

(quote from pp. 29-30 of Rodgers’ manifesto)

I extended the quote beyond the parts where Rodgers showed empathy toward James, because I think it’s a sad illustration of how men, even from childhood, are encouraged to hide their feelings and keep a “strong” front.

I’m honestly not sure what to make of this passage, because it’s such a contrast to his total disregard for everyone else’s feelings and inner lives outside of how they might serve him. I want to believe that it’s real, if only because it would make him all the more culpable if he were in fact capable of empathy and chose not to exercise it.

I wouldn’t put it past him to have retconned these feelings, of course, to make himself seem more human and sympathetic. I suspect this partly because there’s no follow-up to James’ loss and Rodgers’ feelings about it: Immediately after the above-quoted passage Rodgers goes right on obsessing about his popularity and standing, showing at best piss-poor organization and sense of narrative rhythm. However this odd treatment is also consistent with plain bad writing and with having no idea what to do with these feelings and just burying them, something he more or last admitted in the above quote.

If the empathy was genuine and the magnitude of James’ loss did break through Rodgers’ habitual self-absorption, it’s a tragedy on every level that he chose not to take the chance to develop his newfound empathy. Assuming he was being truthful about his feelings, it looks like Rodgers didn’t know how to deal with the pain and fear and chose to set those feelings aside. In no small part it looks like he did so because he was afraid of losing standing as a man, since that was the driving focus of his young life.

Oh God, he was still a young man when he died. They were all so young–George Chen, Cheng Yuan Hong, Weihan Wang, Katherine Cooper, Christopher Michaels-Martinez, Veronika Weiss. All these young people. If only someone could have reached out to the killer–if only he’d sought the help he needed. How many more people does this false idol of masculinity have to claim? When will it ever be enough?

@Wetherby

And this is the real damage that toxic masculinity does – it actively pushes men in the exact opposite direction from the goals that they claim to want to reach. Being a decent human being, treating other people as decent human beings (at least until they demonstrate otherwise), developing interests because you’re interested in them and not because they’re part of a fleeting craze – these are very very simple principles and they’ve done me no harm whatsoever. I love it when MRAs try to convince me that they’re right and I’m wrong, because what do they have to offer me that I don’t already have?

I remember how there was a discussion on another thread that the point of pickup artistry was not to help men get into fulfilling relationships or even to help them get laid a lot (though the latter is somewhat more feasible, especially if you don’t mind preying on someone who’s been abused and don’t care about consent). Rather the method itself is the point, i.e. upholding standards of toxic masculinity. I think the related phenomenon of MRM misogyny is much the same; the stated goal of helping men live better lives is obviously not the point, as Paul Elam admitted. The point is to hold on to a false sense of self based on patriarchal ideas about what it means to be a man. If those ideas make the followers miserable, well they’re obviously not manning hard enough and need to try harder. Or it’s really working and they don’t know it. It works much like faith healing that way, that is it doesn’t work at all.

MRA’s new hero ?

If you read the comments, which is of course a terrible idea, you’ll see the answer is yes.

I wish all terrorist plots ended this way!

Oh no, the Aurini-headed dog is back!

I can’t believe there are actually people on that article about the violent assault of the pregnant woman arguing that she should have said “thank you.” Because that’s the most important part, her not saying “thank you,” not getting beaten so badly she was put in th hospital. Because that is totally a reasonable response when a woman doesn’t thank a man.

Via the Against Men’s Rights (the “movement,” not the rights) reddit: men being oppressed by felines.

a huge white nationalist on paper

Yeah, and I’ll bet it has to be white paper, too.

How is this whole racial separatism thing supposed to work in practice? Let’s say we successfully get all the races to agree to relocate to their own area, then what? Who decides which race lives where? Who wins the lottery and gets to live in the oil and mineral-rich countries, the countries with the best farmland and fishing, the countries with abundant fresh water and temperate climates? Who gets stuck with deserts, poisonous snakes, and Chernobyl? Do they really think each race will be content to stay within its assigned borders, especially when population pressures loom and natural resources run out?

What about global problems like climate change, pollution, overfishing, extinction, and epidemics that know no borders and require international cooperation to solve?

“I don’t hate other races” rings pretty hollow when the next sentence is “…I just don’t want to ever have to see or hear or think about or interact with them”.