Check out my piece on the Atlanta spa shooter in the Washington Post.
As an explanation for mass murder, it’s a head-scratcher. According to police, after being arrested, Robert Aaron Long told them he carried out shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday because he’d been feeling overwhelmed by his own sexual desires. “He apparently has … what he considers a sex addiction,” a sheriff’s department official said, and viewed the spas he targeted as “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Long has been charged with the murder of eight people, six of them women of Asian descent.
Long evidently wants us to believe that he is the real victim here, a perpetually frustrated man with a “sex addiction” who could not help but lash out at the women he blames for his problems. As bizarre as this reasoning is, Long isn’t alone in embracing it. It’s a logic I often see among the misogynists I’ve been tracking on my blog, WeHuntedTheMammoth.com, for more than a decade.
Warren Farrell makes an appearance, along with The Thinking Housewife (remember her?).
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I don’t think a lot of the salt has to do with the discussion itself. I think it has more to do with past interactions, namely Ohlmann, PoM, and others routinely portraying Dalilama as some form of fascist and/or unapologetic bigot, usually for making harsh statements about the moral legitimacy of the U.S. as a state entity. This wouldn’t even be that bad but for the broader context of commenters regularly saying way worse things than the worst possible readings of Dalilama’s posts, and rarely getting anything worse than getting lightly told off and then continuing on without even acknowledging the harm done. Stuff like saying explicitly and flagrantly ableist things, or mistaking BIPOC slang for far-right slang.
And the rehashing of this shit is a large part of why I generally don’t really feel that it’s worth commenting on this blog anymore.
I’m super interested in all the ableist things I’ve said. If I do it routinely, then it shouldn’t take long to look it up, and I really want to know.
Dalilama is very, very, very confident, and that comes across as expertise, but she’s frequently incorrect and never admits it even when confronted with factual information. If she can’t deny the facts as presented to her, she just ghosts the thread. I’ve never seen her ask questions to seek knowledge, or qualify her statements, or present herself as anything but the undisputed authority on every topic discussed, bar none, which I find pathetic. I don’t engage with her, and usually she doesn’t engage with me, which is fine with me. But if she’s going to address me directly, I’m going to tell her that I find her pitiful. Because I do. She thinks she can hurt me with her insults, but she has no such power over me because what an angry and unpleasant internet would-be bully thinks of me has no bearing on my self-worth. I have nothing to prove. I’m happy with my life and my impact on the world, and I sleep very well at night.
But Impish, I am genuinely interested in where I’ve been ableist, so please direct me toward it. I don’t think I have been – if I did, I wouldn’t have done it – so if I’m wrong about that, I want to know it so I can correct that.
@Allandrei: I heard that one told about the racetrack denizen who was told by the physicist, “Assume the horse to be a perfect sphere”.
I don’t recall any examples of you specifically saying ableist things, but ableist comments in general happen on a fairly regular basis. If the comments policy is any indication, it’s been a problem even before I started regularly reading the blog. I don’t really care to collect receipts of these things, but at least it gets called out enough times that surely we can agree that it happens?
I also think this goes beyond Dalilama, and to me it looks like the main reason these things centre around her so much is that she’s seemingly stuck around the longest out of anybody with remotely similar politics. Maybe other people still lurk, and some still post very occasionally, but she’s definitely the most noticeable. So even if I agreed that Dalilama has been frequently incorrect (I personally can only think of two instances of her being potentially incorrect), I can at least imagine not wanting to hash out potentially being wrong, potentially with commenters who have been quick to consider her some kind of fascist or ideologically equivalent to fascists, or call her a hateful bully because she was sort of harsh with them about how racist they were being or whatever. I think other similar people have seen that treatment and don’t bother engaging at all.
Okay, I guess personal grudges boiling over makes a lot more sense than folks suddenly deciding they must defend the honor of mathematics to the most ridiculous extremes.
I haven’t been in the threads much for the past few months, and I guess I’m behind the curve on how folks are getting along and who the regulars actually are these days, outside the obvious.
For people who do like puzzling things out, this is the latest from GCHQ. I got stuck on the third one.
https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/turing-challenge