On May 28 2014 01:47 Xiphos wrote: He hates those men with the skills available to get girls and he hated how those attractive girls fall into those men's laps. He doesn't want to become those men with "game". That's why he murdered people from both camps.
A lot of people in similar topic threads, on internet articles, and over there at social media blamed "misogyny" for this incident. So the question is: how could we as a society solve that problem?
So far, I'm 60 page into the manifesto. From what I've seen so far, I would not say he is a "misogynist" at all. In fact, I would argue he wasn't misogynist. What nobody mentioned is the girls he hated were all attractive girls. He didn't hate the plain or ugly girls. He just didn't talk about them. The reason is it was the attractive girls were with the guys who constantly bullied him. He associated the attractive girl as reinforcement to the bullying as they just watch it happen or sometimes enjoyed it as their boyfriend showed off in front of them. From there, any guys who were good with girls such as PUA, correlated to his bullying. In short, he hated attractive girls and guys who girls were attracted to.
However, calling it "misogyny", pushes feminist agenda better.
On May 28 2014 01:47 Xiphos wrote: He hates those men with the skills available to get girls and he hated how those attractive girls fall into those men's laps. He doesn't want to become those men with "game". That's why he murdered people from both camps.
A lot of people in similar topic threads, on internet articles, and over there at social media blamed "misogyny" for this incident. So the question is: how could we as a society solve that problem?
So far, I'm 60 page into the manifesto. From what I've seen so far, I would not say he is a "misogynist" at all. In fact, I would argue he wasn't misogynist. What nobody mentioned is the girls he hated were all attractive girls. He didn't hate the plain or ugly girls. He just didn't talk about them. The reason is it was the attractive girls were with the guys who constantly bullied him. He associated the attractive girl as reinforcement to the bullying as they just watch it happen or sometimes enjoyed it as their boyfriend showed off in front of them. From there, any guys who were good with girls such as PUA, correlated to his bullying. In short, he hated attractive girls and guys who girls were attracted to.
However, calling it "misogyny", pushes feminist agenda better.
Its an age old thing. Using tragedies and events to further push whatever you stand for. Nothing new. So, I'm not surprised to see the feminist bloggers all in arms about this.
What people really should be talking about is the responsibility about the media coverage about this. Isn't it coverage like this that attracts mentally ill people like him?
I find some of the usage of this for various agendas at times distasteful and at times plain incorrect but really? Mentally imbalanced or not, I don't see how you can tag his views as anything other than misogynistic.
On May 28 2014 07:58 Wombat_NI wrote: I find some of the usage of this for various agendas at times distasteful and at times plain incorrect but really? Mentally imbalanced or not, I don't see how you can tag his views as anything other than misogynistic.
He killed more men than women so he must have been a pretty shitty misogynist.
But see I don't understand that logic. If he hated both men and women, how does it follow that his motivations were misogynistic and not misanthropistic or even misandristic?
On May 28 2014 05:25 ComaDose wrote: He said it is an injustice he would not let stand that the women he deserves are with lesser men than him. This feeling of entitlement is misogynistic. He then said/implied that because of this he's gonna kill his roommates then go to the sorority and kill women then drive around killing randoms. Then he did that.
What does that have to do with my question? A feeling of entitlement that you deserve more women than lesser men (which, let's be quite frank here, in his view included pretty much everyone), is just as misandristic as it is misogynistic.
no it isn't... i don't even know how to respond to that. We agree that feeling like you deserve or are entitled to women is sexist and bad right?
Obviously. But you are missing the point. Do you understand what the words misandry and misogyny mean? "Hatred of men or women" respectively.
So if there is a person that hates both men and women (for whatever reason) they are both a misandrist and a misogynist by definition and more specifically (or I guess more generally actually) a misanthropist.
He didn't hate all men, he said he was going to murder every woman. you understand that a fully adjusted person can hate a man and a woman and not be a misandrist and a misogynist. His warped sexist ideas against women are why he hated anyone.
Which is complete and utter nonsense on his part, because he himself was only ever concerned with girls he thought to be attractive, he didn't even consider hooking up with a fat girl or a girl that in his eyes wasn't attractive.
a lot of things he did were complete and utter nonsense, like when he said
I started to hate all girls because of this. I saw them as mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering
or when he said
All of those beautiful girls I've desired so much in my life, but can never have because they despise and loathe me, I will destroy.
edit: i got to go but it seems so obvious to me how all his hatred bread from his sexist views and hatred toward women. Considering he got it out there that that was the case as many times in as many ways as he could. You can call that w.e. you want.
Right, I mean he is in a way contradicting himself there anyway. First it's all girls, then it's just beautiful girls he's focusing on (fatties and uglies may live, they don't matter anyway.... justice in the eyes of "king" Elliot the crazy, first and hopefully last of his line).
well according to Xiphos fatties and uglies are the only ones that have a chance of being liked for anything but their looks so i guess they are doubly blessed. But Elliot contradicting himself doesn't lessen my point in anyway.
It kind of does. Because your point is that Elliot was a misogynist because he generally hated women. But that's not really true, when you look at what he said it is very obvious that he was only concerned with attractive women, he didn't actually hate all women (in fact alot of women he didn't even care about at all... fat, ugly and/or unattractive women, etc..), but pretty specifically attractive women. But that isn't misogyny.
Just in the same sense that hating some men, but not all men isn't misandry, an argument you yourself even made earlier.
You can't have it both ways, he is either a misandrist and misogynist or he is neither.
edit: And I hope maybe now you can see why I'm having such a hard time tackling your argument, because you keep shifting the goal posts. Hating a specific group of women (to you) qualifies as misogyny but hating a specific group of men (the men who get the attractive women) somehow doesn't qualify as misandry.
On May 28 2014 08:12 Wombat_NI wrote: You can have the worst kind of racist/xenophobic/sexist/homophobic views, as long as you don't kill anyone from that group they become irrelevant?
Do you not understand how "His hatred of women led him to kill more men than women" sounds silly?
I think we can all agree that he was batshit insane and hated a lot of people, the rest is just semantics anyway. I think the more important point is figuring out which pragmatical changes can be made so this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.
On May 28 2014 08:26 Nyxisto wrote: I think we can all agree that he was batshit insane and hated a lot of people, the rest is just semantics anyway. I think the more important point is figuring out which pragmatical changes can be made so this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.
After reading through most of his 'manifesto', here's what I came up with:
-Gun control. Prevent crazies like this guy from legally acquiring firearms. This wouldn't have prevented the stabbings, but lack of access to guns would probably have prevented his plan from being formulated in the first place. -De-stigmatize male virginity. Just because one male is has had sex and the other hasn't doesn't make the former superior or 'more of a man' than the latter, and virginity should stop being used as an insult. -De-emphasize the connection of sex with self-worth, and discourage sexual bullying. -Find a way to decrease sex drive? As a single male with a relatively low sex drive who is fine with being alone, I still think that my primal urges are just too strong for comfort sometimes. The human race would probably survive just fine if sex drive overall was toned down something like ~50%. We'd probably be a lot more productive too.
On May 28 2014 09:03 Psychobabas wrote: I'll just leave this here: + Show Spoiler +
The guy was 5'9", that can barely be considered short and would be well above average in some cultures. Just goes to show how shallow and insipid our culture can be. No wonder this guy felt the need to exact revenge on society.
On May 28 2014 08:26 Nyxisto wrote: I think we can all agree that he was batshit insane and hated a lot of people, the rest is just semantics anyway. I think the more important point is figuring out which pragmatical changes can be made so this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.
After reading through most of his 'manifesto', here's what I came up with:
-Gun control. Prevent crazies like this guy from legally acquiring firearms. This wouldn't have prevented the stabbings, but lack of access to guns would probably have prevented his plan from being formulated in the first place. -De-stigmatize male virginity. Just because one male is has had sex and the other hasn't doesn't make the former superior or 'more of a man' than the latter, and virginity should stop being used as an insult. -De-emphasize the connection of sex with self-worth, and discourage sexual bullying. -Find a way to decrease sex drive? As a single male with a relatively low sex drive who is fine with being alone, I still think that my primal urges are just too strong for comfort sometimes. The human race would probably survive just fine if sex drive overall was toned down something like ~50%. We'd probably be a lot more productive too.
California has some of the strictest gun control in the country, and yet thats where he lived and committed the murders.
Lack of guns may have just driven him to a more imaginative rampage.
Timothy McVeigh killed 82 with fertilizer after all. There've been a few spree killings in Japan where lunatics just drive through crowds of people.
Totally agree with the rest of it though.
I think he was a product of his environment. He was raised in the hollywood culture where all his role models can get basically whatever they want simply by being rich and famous. He learned that that's what it took to get girls, and when the real world said otherwise, he couldn't handle it.
^considering the lack of intelligence and creative thinking he displayed throughout his manifesto, I would be surprised to see him come up with anything more imaginative than simply storming a sorority house with a machine gun.
I mean, this is a guy who literally thought he would be able to win the lottery just by thinking about it really hard.
Gun control might not be the cure-all, but it would be able to prevent some spree killers from carrying out their plans, at least.
These 'this guy wasn't a misogynist' arguments are laughable.
If you hate men based on the fact that they are men, and so (you believe) are inherently responsible for or inherently possess traits that are commonly expressed amongst men, you are a misandrist
If you hate women based on the fact that they are women, and so (you believe) are inherently responsible for or inherently possess traits that are commonly expressed amongst women, you are a mysogynist.
If you hate people based on the fact that they are people, and so (you believe) are inherently responsible for or inherently possess traits that are commonly expressed amongst people, you are a misanthropist
These three things are not incompatible. You can be all three. And an asshole to boot. So the fact he hated guys also, doesn't prevent him from being a mysogynist. If he did not distinguish in his reasons for hating men/women/people, then we might have a debate on our hands. He did, very clearly, so we don't.
The fact he focused his hatred on 'pretty' women as opposed to all women doesn't matter at all. His hatred was still directed at women, and to be quite honest, the fact he made the distinction only makes it a more mysogynistic view, since the hatred was based upon a general attribute associated with women (contemporary standards of female-gendered beauty) rather than individual attributes of individual women (which would just be him being an asshole, not a misogynist, for the most part)
So the fact that he didn't actively focus his hatred in a perfect equilibrium across all women doesn't mean he was not a misogynist.
The fact he did not only attack women is... I don't even know why I'm bothering, but I'll try anyway... not a way of determining how mysogynistic he is. Sometimes Justin Beiber makes me so angry I want to punch a wall. Does this mean I hate walls any more and Justin Beiber any less? Nope. His manifesto makes it very clear that his frustration and anger is centered around women, and in almost all cases he hates other things because they represent an obstacle or an unfairness to him gaining fulfillment with women. I'm not saying this was always the case, but it's clear that his fixation with his relationships with women was, at the time of the spree, his primary motivation.
So the fact that he lashed out in a pretty indiscriminate fashion at the end (in stark contrast to the very focused slaughter he planned of the sorority house, with the street spree as a kind of closing act) does not change his motivations, which were a sick mix of vengeance against and showing off to women.
Unless anyone has some major disagreements there, we can proceed to the next stage, which is 'how relevant was his misogyny to this tragedy, as compared to other factors?'
I think we can all agree that he was batshit insane and hated a lot of people, the rest is just semantics anyway.
Unfortunately, the people who actually want to actively try and stop this happening again, in whatever way they can and however small a part they can play, disagree. The rest may be complicated, but it is relevant. We live in a world of cause and effect. Saying 'he was insane so that's the reason' is pretty much the same as saying 'god did it, so that's the reason'. You break the chain of causality. Something caused him to go bonkers. Something caused that, too. Somewhere down the chain is a place where, if things had gone differently, we might have a few more innocent people alive today. I can appreciate your desire not to become involved in the effort of seeking that place. I cannot appreciate your attempt to label it as inconsequential.
On May 28 2014 08:16 SlixSC wrote: edit: And I hope maybe now you can see why I'm having such a hard time tackling your argument, because you keep shifting the goal posts. Hating a specific group of women (to you) qualifies as misogyny but hating a specific group of men (the men who get the attractive women) somehow doesn't qualify as misandry.
I'm shifting the goal posts? I said he hates women. You're goal post started on the other side of the field with "he couldn't because he killed more men then women." Then he couldn't be because we couldn't believe what he said because he was crazy. Then it was that he hated men just as much. Now its that he only hated some women.
I mean he said "I started to hate all girls because of this" The first line of the manifesto is "All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women" why are we arguing.
It kind of does. Because your point is that Elliot was a misogynist because he generally hated women. But that's not really true, when you look at what he said it is very obvious that he was only concerned with attractive women, he didn't actually hate all women (in fact alot of women he didn't even care about at all... fat, ugly and/or unattractive women, etc..), but pretty specifically attractive women. But that isn't misogyny.
Just in the same sense that hating some men, but not all men isn't misandry, an argument you yourself even made earlier.
You can't have it both ways, he is either a misandrist and misogynist or he is neither.
He did hate all women. Just because he talks about the pretty ones more doesn't mean he didn't hate the ugly ones. The sites he liked made fun of ugly and fat women. He says just "women" all the time like "as I burned with hatred towards all women for rejecting me throughout the years" I think a lot more then he hated men. I think he was just jealous of other men. Maybe just all men that were less wealthy than him getting laid around the same age and lower. Call it whatever you want.
On May 28 2014 09:03 Psychobabas wrote: I'll just leave this here:
On May 28 2014 08:26 Nyxisto wrote: I think we can all agree that he was batshit insane and hated a lot of people, the rest is just semantics anyway. I think the more important point is figuring out which pragmatical changes can be made so this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.
I think this immediately highlights a lack of mental medical care and awareness. If he had a friend or a family member pay better attention he should have got better help. He never should have stopped getting help.
On May 28 2014 08:16 SlixSC wrote: edit: And I hope maybe now you can see why I'm having such a hard time tackling your argument, because you keep shifting the goal posts. Hating a specific group of women (to you) qualifies as misogyny but hating a specific group of men (the men who get the attractive women) somehow doesn't qualify as misandry.
I'm shifting the goal posts? I said he hates women. You're goal post started on the other side of the field with "he couldn't because he killed more men then women."
I can stop you right there, because that alone is bullshit.
You really are in the business of quote-mining aren't you? Is it profitable?
We can safely say that his views on women and relationships were warped and twisted. It is unclear if he thought that women were inferior, but that isn't really relevant in the context that the guy was a fucking lunatic. And I feel confident in saying that any relationship he had with any woman, attractive or otherwise would have been warped by his views.
On May 28 2014 09:03 Psychobabas wrote: I'll just leave this here:
I don't really understand the point of posting this, or it's relevance....
It's to show there are mean girls on twitter. Really I thought that movie Mean Girls took care of that years ago, but apparently he felt we needed reminding.
Back in my undergrad days we used to always hang out there on the weekends with friends who went to school at UCSB. They had a house on del playa, and I've been to that one liquor mart many times. It's pretty fucked up to think that kind of shit could have happened to any of us had we graduated 10 years later than we did.
EPT
