"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Friday, December 14, 2012

Ace Nails It Re the Connecticut Shooter

Ace makes an important point about how the media can either play up or help put down the kind of narcissistic nutjobs who do things like the Connecticut school shooting:

I think it would do at least something to dissuade the next potential mass murderer to know, for example, that coverage on him will not focus on the Evil Menace part of him (which is a self-conception he finds flattering), but the Sad, Lonely Pathetic Guy Who Has a Small Dick and Couldn't Keep a Woman or a Job and Just Couldn't Hack It part of him. The part that's actually much more relevant to his crime -- masterful men do not have to kill people to let the world know "I exist" -- and the part that he's actually afraid of other people knowing about.

If I were the media, I'd allow myself to get very personal in publishing accounts of these guys. Personal, and nasty.

And not only is this a bit of a public service, but, as I said, this is much more relevant to the actual reasons for his crime than this puffed-up faux-heroic claimed motivations. The maniac in Colorado did not shoot up a theater because of Batman, and to even say that credits his self-conception as true and puffs up his fantasy connection to Batman.

No, the maniac in Colorado shot up the theater because he was a pathetic weakling unloved by women and incapable of satisfying them and so retreated into a twisted babydick world of power fantasy.

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