> Reforms were made, and there hasn’t been a postal shooting since 2006. Why don’t we ask the same questions of schools? What is it about those environments that leaves vulnerable kids demoralized, alienated, desperate? Instead, we fixate on SSRIs — which was also a major object of fascination during postal worker shooters, by the way — missing the environmental conditions that may quietly feed the problem.
What I find interesting is that you are one of few thinkers who still thinks that the reason for school shootings is because shooter *lacks* something. Current "woke" thinking is that white male school shooter is lashing out due to "aggrieved entitlement". The problem, the argument goes, is not that they have too little but that they have too much privilege and feel entitled to more.
Such thinkers have been awful quiet since the wave of trans shooters, tho. Because under their logic trans people are privileged now, too.
The most remarkable thing /leftypol/ produced was the tape of the board owner sucking off a /tv/ janny which got leaked and overlaid with the national anthem of the Soviet Union.
If you haven’t heard of the video game “Postal,” you might find it interesting. I remember playing it when it came out. I feel like it was the precursor to the edgelord nihilistic worldview in some ways.
Good points on how this field needs to be studied with precision, but you’re definitely in a bubble if you think the online is the new every day. Go to a rust belt town and see how many people are online outside of watching TikTok videos and scrolling their FB feeds. They just want to do their birthday parties and weddings. They are not plugged in and spend less than an hour online a day, if even that.
Then there are the rich who pay people to do all their online chores for them so they can be fully embodied in the physical. This is becoming more visible daily.
the entire economy is digital. you cannot function without a smart phone in hand. try going to a foreign country. lose your phone you don't exist. in the 90s when the post office shootings.. look. I don't know if any of the folks up down this thread are writers. or readers trolls what. anybody attacking this. the fuck. I was on a real world alt weekly news desk in santa barbara for the post office shooter the kid who mowed down students with his car. remember. the internet barely. how does anybody not get this. let me explain. before twitter. have you seen zodiac for fuck sake. sociopaths killers asshole trolls bullies. they wrote letters. thousands of what are now crazy fuckhead with an opinion on twitter or chan where the fuck ever. those letters. we published the ones that said something. something we had not or something that mattered. published one or two nutters if they were funny or worth noting. dropped the thousand other nutters assholes weirdos in a box. the real nutters the manifesto vibes the ransom notes might get passed to somebody up the chain. the back page classified ads, now. they were paid. were terrifying if you analyzed the shit. all the dark shit was yeah happening. the criss cross the interstate highways truck stops the car culture all of it perfect for murderers etc. it was much easier to disappear. now the psychos assholes weirdos are yeah congregating on twitter. twitter is not the. twitter is the bathroom wall. journalists on fox, fucking tucker carlson moved all over the political map from. please fucking get it. I don't have time for this shit. when journalists in the 90s saw what rule 34 meant. what the fuck it meant on the ground. pay the fuck attention. if you're a troll fuck off. if you're a writer. please get it.
《There’s no such thing as “very Online” or “not Online.”》
I refuse to participate in this ethos and I believe I still can. I believe we dont have to live this way, and Ill do my best to be in the real world more.
Im not insulting nor am I mad at you here (I like your writings) nor am I disaproving of internet studies at all, I just read that paragraph and found the idea of life centering around the online world repulsive.
I was about to write almost the same comment as Strabo, but more nitpicky: it's not like I refuse to believe internet shapes our world; it's that I see it shaping people at different speeds, suggesting exactly that there are very online people and not online people.
My view of this is that being very online (or perhaps "very disembodied") affects the brain via simple neuroplasticity, prioritizing a development and hardening of analytical/systemic thought networks (executive network) at the expense of several different networks, in particular the salience and default networks that depend much more on embodied experience.
This is, IMO, one of the reasons behind radicalization or even the rise of incelism and nihilism.
Or not just this, but the fact that giving just "one type of food" to the brain makes this process become a feedback loop, and the individuals experiencing it lose a ton of soft skills, in favor of (yep) conspiracy theorizing, nihilism, "black-pilling". All stuff that comes from basically over-analyzing things and *wanting* to conclude that "the system is winning" and there is no individual agency. This because that neurological network is not about agency despite being called executive. It's about theory only. So if the brain uses it so much that it's the only "trained" one, it will also try to paint reality in such a way that it's always about theory and collective systems, because otherwise it would feel utterly useless.
Obviously, people who are not online or at least retain a moderately sane embodied life in the real, don't fall into this trap as much. Bit are then victims of those who do, who desperately try yo confirm their views, even if it means killing someone.
Used to spend a lot of time on /leftypol/, and this is bang on. However, I think its other predecessor that gets (deservedly) forgotten was left-wing Facebook group culture. The thing leftypol had, which is highly specific to its being lefty, was that unlike its predecessors it wasn't controlled by a microsect.
Most leftbook was secretly controlled by tyrannical admins who either picked up a 70s-vintage New Communist Movement ideology off a Wikipedia page or were actual cadre for a 70s-vintage microsect. In either case, they'd maintain a pretty strict dogmatic line and vandalize your actual Facebook for deviating and endangering the imminent revolution. You were replicating the dead real-life Marxist "democratic centralist" organizational structure online. Leftypol was only ever a book club/talking shop and avoided that - it didn't do that thing, for better or worse. That's what made it so valuable.
No idea why revolutionary communist Facebook groups happened. 2013 was weird!
“What we don’t need are more generalist ‘Internet Understanders’ chasing clout or running interference for whoever’s paying them. What we do need are researchers willing to map specific territories with care.”
Your blunderbuss approach isn’t exactly helping—your average article aspires to Hegelian sweep but lands like a parlor-room Nostradamus (or a sub-McLuhan without the quip smarts).
You keep coming into my blog to tell me I’m derivative. I’m giving you a response. You read like an LLM trained on negging & if you don’t like my stuff you’re welcome to leave.
I mean for me, esp then it was the only way I could try to pay attention as I was working outside so much. The whole Art Bell vibe worked very well, especially when I was driving a plow truck. 😂 It was like "company" while working.
I mean I am still working through a vocabulary list I got from like 3 episodes of computer room two years ago, so yeah more good ol' boots on the ground (in the ether?) reporting is needed. And for your sake, I hope others help with the lift in a sincere and serious way.
> Reforms were made, and there hasn’t been a postal shooting since 2006. Why don’t we ask the same questions of schools? What is it about those environments that leaves vulnerable kids demoralized, alienated, desperate? Instead, we fixate on SSRIs — which was also a major object of fascination during postal worker shooters, by the way — missing the environmental conditions that may quietly feed the problem.
What I find interesting is that you are one of few thinkers who still thinks that the reason for school shootings is because shooter *lacks* something. Current "woke" thinking is that white male school shooter is lashing out due to "aggrieved entitlement". The problem, the argument goes, is not that they have too little but that they have too much privilege and feel entitled to more.
Such thinkers have been awful quiet since the wave of trans shooters, tho. Because under their logic trans people are privileged now, too.
The most remarkable thing /leftypol/ produced was the tape of the board owner sucking off a /tv/ janny which got leaked and overlaid with the national anthem of the Soviet Union.
If you haven’t heard of the video game “Postal,” you might find it interesting. I remember playing it when it came out. I feel like it was the precursor to the edgelord nihilistic worldview in some ways.
Good points on how this field needs to be studied with precision, but you’re definitely in a bubble if you think the online is the new every day. Go to a rust belt town and see how many people are online outside of watching TikTok videos and scrolling their FB feeds. They just want to do their birthday parties and weddings. They are not plugged in and spend less than an hour online a day, if even that.
Then there are the rich who pay people to do all their online chores for them so they can be fully embodied in the physical. This is becoming more visible daily.
the entire economy is digital. you cannot function without a smart phone in hand. try going to a foreign country. lose your phone you don't exist. in the 90s when the post office shootings.. look. I don't know if any of the folks up down this thread are writers. or readers trolls what. anybody attacking this. the fuck. I was on a real world alt weekly news desk in santa barbara for the post office shooter the kid who mowed down students with his car. remember. the internet barely. how does anybody not get this. let me explain. before twitter. have you seen zodiac for fuck sake. sociopaths killers asshole trolls bullies. they wrote letters. thousands of what are now crazy fuckhead with an opinion on twitter or chan where the fuck ever. those letters. we published the ones that said something. something we had not or something that mattered. published one or two nutters if they were funny or worth noting. dropped the thousand other nutters assholes weirdos in a box. the real nutters the manifesto vibes the ransom notes might get passed to somebody up the chain. the back page classified ads, now. they were paid. were terrifying if you analyzed the shit. all the dark shit was yeah happening. the criss cross the interstate highways truck stops the car culture all of it perfect for murderers etc. it was much easier to disappear. now the psychos assholes weirdos are yeah congregating on twitter. twitter is not the. twitter is the bathroom wall. journalists on fox, fucking tucker carlson moved all over the political map from. please fucking get it. I don't have time for this shit. when journalists in the 90s saw what rule 34 meant. what the fuck it meant on the ground. pay the fuck attention. if you're a troll fuck off. if you're a writer. please get it.
the shift in visibility and form matters -- you're right
fucking wake up. how does anybody not understand this. you're typing into a box in the cloud.
《There’s no such thing as “very Online” or “not Online.”》
I refuse to participate in this ethos and I believe I still can. I believe we dont have to live this way, and Ill do my best to be in the real world more.
Im not insulting nor am I mad at you here (I like your writings) nor am I disaproving of internet studies at all, I just read that paragraph and found the idea of life centering around the online world repulsive.
I think it’s less about centering and more that even if you don’t watch tv it still shaped your world
I was about to write almost the same comment as Strabo, but more nitpicky: it's not like I refuse to believe internet shapes our world; it's that I see it shaping people at different speeds, suggesting exactly that there are very online people and not online people.
My view of this is that being very online (or perhaps "very disembodied") affects the brain via simple neuroplasticity, prioritizing a development and hardening of analytical/systemic thought networks (executive network) at the expense of several different networks, in particular the salience and default networks that depend much more on embodied experience.
This is, IMO, one of the reasons behind radicalization or even the rise of incelism and nihilism.
Or not just this, but the fact that giving just "one type of food" to the brain makes this process become a feedback loop, and the individuals experiencing it lose a ton of soft skills, in favor of (yep) conspiracy theorizing, nihilism, "black-pilling". All stuff that comes from basically over-analyzing things and *wanting* to conclude that "the system is winning" and there is no individual agency. This because that neurological network is not about agency despite being called executive. It's about theory only. So if the brain uses it so much that it's the only "trained" one, it will also try to paint reality in such a way that it's always about theory and collective systems, because otherwise it would feel utterly useless.
Obviously, people who are not online or at least retain a moderately sane embodied life in the real, don't fall into this trap as much. Bit are then victims of those who do, who desperately try yo confirm their views, even if it means killing someone.
Thats fair. I dont deny the internets the new TV.
Used to spend a lot of time on /leftypol/, and this is bang on. However, I think its other predecessor that gets (deservedly) forgotten was left-wing Facebook group culture. The thing leftypol had, which is highly specific to its being lefty, was that unlike its predecessors it wasn't controlled by a microsect.
Most leftbook was secretly controlled by tyrannical admins who either picked up a 70s-vintage New Communist Movement ideology off a Wikipedia page or were actual cadre for a 70s-vintage microsect. In either case, they'd maintain a pretty strict dogmatic line and vandalize your actual Facebook for deviating and endangering the imminent revolution. You were replicating the dead real-life Marxist "democratic centralist" organizational structure online. Leftypol was only ever a book club/talking shop and avoided that - it didn't do that thing, for better or worse. That's what made it so valuable.
No idea why revolutionary communist Facebook groups happened. 2013 was weird!
I have an interview on those I’ve been meaning to publish for AGES. I met what’s his face Ross through one of those back before Trump 1
“What we don’t need are more generalist ‘Internet Understanders’ chasing clout or running interference for whoever’s paying them. What we do need are researchers willing to map specific territories with care.”
Your blunderbuss approach isn’t exactly helping—your average article aspires to Hegelian sweep but lands like a parlor-room Nostradamus (or a sub-McLuhan without the quip smarts).
And the woo-enabling needs to stop.
And yet you’re here! I think you don’t want to admit I’m better than you keep trying to neg me into believing
I simply hate wasted talent.
1. Pick 1-2 areas of interest
2. Treat with surgical precision (i.e., avoid name-dropping and performative digressions)
3. Become an actual authority
True systemizers are hen’s teeth; you are not one.
I think you’re just being rude
I think you are just dodging my arguments
You keep coming into my blog to tell me I’m derivative. I’m giving you a response. You read like an LLM trained on negging & if you don’t like my stuff you’re welcome to leave.
Aren’t you, though? You can just about parse the patterns, but you lack the will—or the perspicacity—to do anything interesting with them.
Your solution? Zeitgeist-gluttony as smokescreen.
You’re a pasticheur of thought, not a thinker.
And, sadly, the compelling particulars you do unearth (occasionally) always get buried beneath the buzzwords and received wisdom.
Also fuck you, I will woo
(U read like AI btw)
How is that germane to my arguments? I never claimed to be superior…
I mean for me, esp then it was the only way I could try to pay attention as I was working outside so much. The whole Art Bell vibe worked very well, especially when I was driving a plow truck. 😂 It was like "company" while working.
If your goal is to, like the leftypol memes you describe, draft me into checking out leftypol - it's working.
There's a part of me that's kind of sad I missed the window on becoming a theory nerd
I mean I am still working through a vocabulary list I got from like 3 episodes of computer room two years ago, so yeah more good ol' boots on the ground (in the ether?) reporting is needed. And for your sake, I hope others help with the lift in a sincere and serious way.
I wish people still listened to audio-only podcasts. I still have a lot of backlog episodes but it felt like a lost cause.
I pretty much am audio only, but I’m a Gen Xer