
Virginia Shooting Gone Viral, in a Well-Planned Rollout on Social Media - aaronbrethorst
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/technology/personaltech/violence-gone-viral-in-a-well-planned-rollout-on-social-media.html
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themgt
I am a critic of a lot Steven Pinker says, but I still think this quote is
dead on:

"...Amok is a Malay word for the homicidal sprees occasionally undertaken by
lonely, Indochinese men who have suffered a loss of love, a loss of money, or
a loss of face. The syndrome has been described in a culture even more remote
from the West: the stone-age foragers of Papua New Guinea.

The amok man is patently out of his mind, an automaton oblivious to his
surroundings and unreachable by appeals or threats. But his rampage is
preceded by lengthy brooding over failure, and is carefully planned as a means
of deliverance from an unbearable situation. The amok state is chillingly
cognitive. It is triggered not by a stimulus, not by a tumor, not by a random
spurt of brain chemicals, but by an idea. The idea is so standard that the
following summary of the amok mind-set, composed in 1968 by a psychiatrist who
had interviewed seven hospitalized amoks in Papua New Guinea, is an apt
description of the the thoughts of mass murderers continents and decades away:

“I am not an important man... I possess only my personal sense of dignity. My
life has been reduced to nothing by an intolerable insult. Therefore, I have
nothing to lose except my life, which is nothing, so I trade my life for
yours, as your life is favoured. The exchange is in my favour, so I shall not
only kill you, but I shall kill many of you, and at the same time rehabilitate
myself in the eyes of the group of which I am a member, even though I might be
killed in the process.”

The amok syndrome is an extreme instance of the puzzle of human emotions.
Exotic at first glance, upon scrutiny they turn out to be universal;
quintessentially irrational, they are tightly interwoven with abstract thought
and have a cold logic of their own..."

The USA is increasingly productive at churning out people who feel this way.
It's time for some soul searching. Guns are a problem, but they like drugs are
also "solutions" to far deeper problems, and ... let's say there is in many
situations, a broader coalition to be built around dealing with effects,
rather than causes.

~~~
shalmanese
And from John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar:

"Background: 'mucker' is an Anglicisation of 'amok'. Don't believe anyone who
says it's a shifted pronunication of 'mugger'. You can survive a mugger, but
if you want to survive a mucker the best way is not to be there when it
happens. "Prior to the twentieth century the densest concentration of human
beings was almost certainly found in Asian cities. (Except Rome and I'm coming
to Rome later.) When too many people got in your way you armed yourself with a
panga or a kris and went out to cut some throats. It didn't matter if you were
educated in their use or not - the people you came up against were in their
normal frame of reference and died. You were in the. berserk frame of
reference. Background: the berserkers developed from communities who for a
large part of the year sat on their asses in Norwegian fjordal valleys with an
unclimbable mountain range on each side, a lid of horrible grey cloud on top,
and you couldn't get away by sea either because of the winter storms.

￼￼"There's a saying among the Nguni of South Africa that you didn't only have
to kill a Zulu warrior - you had to push him over to make him lie down.
Background: Chaka Zulu made it a policy to take his assegai-fodder from their
parents in early childhood and raise them in barrack-like conditions owning no
possessions bar a spear, a shield and a sheath to hide the penis, with
absolutely no privacy. He made independently the same discovery the Spartans
made. "Also it was when Rome had already become the world's first million-city
that the Eastern mystery religions with their concomitant self-privation and
self-mutilation took hold. You fell in behind the procession honouring Cybele,
you seized a knife from one of the priests, you cut your balls off and ran
through the streets waving them till you came to a house with the door open
when you threw them over the threshold. They gave you an outfit of women's
clothing and you joined the priesthood. Reflect on the pressure that drove you
to think that that was the easy way out!"

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aianus
Why do social networks take these things down when it drives so much traffic?
Is there a law against it or something?

He should have tweeted a link to liveleak or bestgore instead and made
everyone's lives easier.

~~~
ablation
I would imagine that in most cases it would violate the service's ToS/rules.
Content like this is clearly abhorrent to most people, and would quite easily
fall foul of the boundaries set around "offensive" content on most platform.
There could also potentially be legal issues in this specific case, like you
say.

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gjolund
Here come the copy cats.

