By David Futrelle
More than a few observers were surprised, as was I, by the news that the “active shooter” on the YouTube campus today was not another young man angry at the world, but a female YouTuber who blamed company policies for a drop in her channels’ views who shot and wounded three others before taking her own life. [Note: This paragraph has been corrected; see bottom of post for more details.]
Naturally, a bunch of Twitter dudes decided to respond to the tragedy with jokes about women being as bad at shooting as misogynistic idiots insist they are at driving.
Can't drive. Can't shoot. 👀
— Chris Redfield (@Gen_Vengence) April 3, 2018
https://twitter.com/AnthonyChannin2/status/981308137549500421
Good thing the YouTube shooter was a lady, or someone might have gotten killed.
— Greg (@gregvegas) April 3, 2018
https://twitter.com/Mason0010/status/981277110831431680
Looks like there's less female shooters for a reason:
Competence Gap! https://t.co/Jg2mS9BPjl
— Edwardo Deendrow (@elderindro) April 3, 2018
Others made inane “ironic” jokes about glass ceilings being broken, welcoming the female shooter, whose name has not yet been released, to the boys club.
I'm hearing rumors the Youtube shooter is a girl. If so, congratulations, ladies. You've proven once again you can do anything a man can do. #girlpower
— THE KING OF NIHILISM (@amazingatheist) April 3, 2018
https://twitter.com/WeWuzVikings/status/981308119904083969
Hey! Latest shooter is a female! Way to break that glass ceiling ladies!#Equality
— Nerd Jared (@Knighticus) April 3, 2018
Others made jokes about sandwiches and how this means women should stay in the home lol lmao #AmiriteFellas?
https://twitter.com/sinndustries/status/981303664160706560
https://twitter.com/bk5950/status/981306476147937280
https://twitter.com/pvrgist2/status/981296657655529473
Then there were these dudes:
This female shooter has clearly perverted the peaceful teachings of the Holy Book of Womon and isn't a real womon. And before all you womonophobes jump in, the passage about 'kill all men wherever you find them' is taken out of context and is actually a peaceful message.
— Arthur Pewbglount QC (@Tigzy_J) April 3, 2018
Congratulations, fellas! Amazing work all around. Really doing your gender proud.
NOTE: This post has been corrected. The initial news reports suggested the shooting may have been related to a domestic dispute, and I said something to that effect in the first paragraph. The police later released the name of the shooter, Nasim Aghdam, a YouTube creator. NBC is now reporting that she was angry with YouTube for allegedly discriminating against her and filtering her channel in such a way that she lost a lot of her audience.
@Steph Tohill (and Feministguy)
(I sort of go off the rails in this one, mild content warning for me getting angry. Sorry!)
Apologies for the terseness. Every time there’s an article about someone being violent; someone in the comments goes all “what a shame about their mental illness” in some manner, and we have this same discussion every time. It’s practically clockwork. So we tend to be a bit short and snarly in responses. Mea culpa.
This isn’t a court of law, and legality is not a substitute for morality. “Psychopathy” is a criminal justice term, not a psychological term; its presence or absence is irrelevant.
Frankly, our society treats “mental disorder” as a magic charm when it comes to the legal system. It’s how white boys and men get away with rape and murder with almost no consequences: Affluenza-boy just got out of jail for breaking terms of probation on his laughably light sentence for the negligent murder of four, as a prominent example. He went to jail for cheating on his probation, not for the murder, might I point out. Rapists can get out of trouble by claiming they were “out of control” or what-the-heck-ever; now he’s a good boy who goes around talking about abstinence or avoiding alcohol, and isn’t he wonderful now. Mental illness as ashield against consequences, used again and again by these monsters.
White people get light sentences by claiming momentary mental infortitude; white murderers get called lone wolves and mentally unwell instead of being tied to the history of abuse and their deeply violent, racist organizations.
People of colour, though? Troubled childhoods are given as a reason for severe punishment, right up to being executed by the police. I’ve lost count of the number of black people killed by police for the crime of having a mental illness in public. And no one bats a goddamn eye, and they talk about how the poor victim was unstable and dangerous, and the police needed to kill them because they felt unsafe.
By mentioning mental illness, the grisly, monstrous gears of this racist, sexist machine grind into action, rendering out the victims and the perpetrators by the colour of their skin and whether they wear pink or blue.
That’s why we don’t talk about it here. Let the demon-machine sleep while we pry off its gears.
(Not angry at you, just angry at the whole sodden mess)
EDIT: hi5 @dslucia
Public service announcement for anyone who does not like or is confused by the ableism portion of the comments policy:
The reason that the no internet diagnosing rule was put into the comments policy was because we kept having to have the same argument over and over again every single time someone new/newish came into a thread to pronounce that the subject of the OP is probably mentally ill. It got very exhausting. So, if someone points to the comments policy and asks you to honor it, please just fucking drop it.
You can discuss how crazy a shooter must have been on just about every other site. Why it is so important to people to do it here just continues to mystify me.
Not to mention that “insanity” is not the same as “mental illness”, and, per wikipedia, “According to an eight-state study, the insanity defense is used in less than 1% of all court cases and, when used, has only a 26% success rate.”
but WWTH, thats censorship!!!
@Troubelle what “suspicious circumstances” did I arrive under?
Commenting on this page – something I have done previously? What are the correct circumstances under which one is permitted to read articles written here and post?
@dslucia
“Then why are you okay with people using it as one, and skeptically disbelieving everyone except Feministguy?”
1) I’m not.
2) I have no idea what that means.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
I might be wrong and I’m most likely jaded but I think it often gets brought here because its WHTM specifically as a derailment tactic.
Its either that or eugenics is alive and well in the US and the gears of a eugenics movement turn unseen and the “mental illness=violent” thing is just the justification for atrocities to come.
@Schild
I was only taking issue with the assertion that mental health issues can never be a causative factor in somebody’s behaviour which is contrary to current accepted medical/legal opinion.
That’s all.
I’ve already updated my stance on feminist guy’s comment now that I was able to find it.
No problem, Steph. Like I said, I’m just angry at having to do this over (and over, and over). No one would argue that mental illness doesn’t affect behaviour. That’s not at all the point; that’s a distraction from the point. Our society steamrolls people with mental issues of all kinds, vilifies and denigrates them at every turn. That’s the point.
Oh, and a tradition: It’s Scild, not Schild.
I worry about this sometimes too. Last week I was watching the documentary Cropsey and it featured clips of the expose Geraldo Rivera did on the Willowbrook Institute back when he was occasionally doing actual journalism. It was such a horrifying reminder of a still very recent past in which mentally ill and neuroatypical people were left in overcrowded and unsanitary institutions and forgotten, left to basically rot. I think society as a whole has just sort of collectively repressed how treating mentally ill and neuroatypical adults and children with absolutely zero humanity was the norm for most of history. I think it would be all too easy to go back there if we aren’t careful.
@Steph
So you were only taking issue with a position no one ever took. Gotcha.
@Steph Tohill
Do I really need to do this?
Your second comment in this thread came in with this comment, initially taking mild umbrage with the comment policy of this website regarding internet diagnoses.
Here you made a comment which presented like you had read Feministguy’s post and also questioned whether people were actually correct in their assessment of Feministguy’s post, which begins a long chain of issues we’ll approach as we go through the rest of your comments.
Here you admit that you didn’t read Feministguy’s post, or at least that’s what you appear to be admitting. Assuming you saw Catalpa’s post as “the quoted piece”, that still provides enough context for one to extrapolate that Feministguy was ascribing the shooter’s actions to mental illness, which you have already claimed does not breach the comment policy here.
There are a few problematic wiggle words in here-
“If Feminist Guy” is a big red flag to me. After having admitted to not reading Feministguy’s post and basing your position off of a disagreement with a post where somebody clearly stated that Feministguy was, in fact, breaching the comment policy, you are casting doubt that Feministguy did, in fact, say what people on this website are giving him the side-eye for.
You’re also shifting the argument by, as I already examined, misrepresenting the conversation at hand and by attempting to put an internet blog into a legal context.
Here you admit more directly that you haven’t read Feministguy’s post, while also directly lying about the post being deleted. You may not have intentionally lied, perhaps you just didn’t see the post on the first page, but you’re still doubting that everyone else in this comment section has a reason for commenting against Feministguy as they have.
Here, once again, you use that wiggle word “if“. As with the previous part about the not-actually-deleted comment, I’m not sure if you’re intentionally trying to do this, but you’re implicitly doubting that anyone has a reason to question Feministguy, while offering half-hearted non-concessions that maybe he said what we’re saying he said.
@Schild
Fairy Muff. I read the articles frequently but rarely read the comments / rarely comment so wasn’t aware of the frequency of such comments BTL.
Although I have noted and am frequently annoyed by the media tendency to leap to diagnose mental health as driving murderous behaviour. Well murderous behaviour by white people.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
We kicked hitler’s nazi ass and acted like the T4 program was something only a nazi could come up with,
if I recall correctly a lot of the eugenics movement came from the US hitler just pulled the trigger after we built the gun.
@kupo
“So you were only taking issue with a position no one ever took. Gotcha.”
No.
@dslucia
“Here, once again, you use that wiggle word “if“. As with the previous part about the not-actually-deleted comment, I’m not sure if you’re intentionally trying to do this, but you’re implicitly doubting that anyone has a reason to question Feministguy, while offering half-hearted non-concessions that maybe he said what we’re saying he said.”
My comments have already move on past this.
Here:
“I was only taking issue with the assertion that mental health issues can never be a causative factor in somebody’s behaviour which is contrary to current accepted medical/legal opinion.
That’s all.
I’ve already updated my stance on feminist guy’s comment now that I was able to find it.”
“If” because I didn’t see the comment and thought that was due to it being deleted.
Double post:
I’ll amend this; you accepted that internet diagnosing breaches the comment policy, but you were still shifting the actual argument toward “mental health can be a driver for behaviours” and doubting that Feministguy breached the policy.
@scild
Whoops! Sorry about the random “h”.
Both Kupo and myself have noted that this is not what anybody was actually arguing. Nobody here made that assertion, so your attempt to divert the conversation toward that is… well, let’s say “dishonest”.
And your first instinct was to give credence to a post you hadn’t seen and didn’t look too hard to find, while doubting that multiple other users on this website knew what they were talking about.
Also:
My initial comment was from before you stated that, and the meaning of what I said relied upon the comments you had made before I posted. Context matters.
I have a bumpy name, easy to mistype.
I’m not Schildfreja. I’m Scildfreja.
Scild
Sciiiiiillllldddddd
Seriously?
She just fucking told you that it’s Scild.
…and that’s a big part of why folks around here are side-eyeing you. It’s really not that hard to figure this shit out, so it’s pretty clear that it’s intentional.
Didn’t see your correction until after Steph! Mea culpa. I’m a bit too trigger happy tonight; need to cool it down a bit. AFK time! Nite nite my ducks.
There is a reason I copy past usernames.
@Steph
Yes. You’re going to have to quote the actual comment(s) you’re asserting took this postion. No one else here saw it.
And please use the blockquote feature; it makes it a lot easier to read posts. If you see a quote button, highlight the quoted text inside the message box and click the “quote” button. If you don’t see a quote button, wrap the quoted text with the following tags:
<blockquote>quoted text</blockquote>
The above will look like this after you post:
@Gaebolga
“Seriously?
She just fucking told you that it’s Scild.”
Yes. Hence my apology. You could have saved yourself a post.