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I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the

I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the forest from the trees. But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here.

solipsism 7y ago
But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them Don't go there. Don't say mass shooters aren't at fault. The thing is, you don't need to. Both things can be true -- life is hard and unfair for certain people in certain ways, and that in the aggregate is bound to lead to more mass killings and other negative effects like suicide.. and the ones who decide to kill innocent people are to blame for their disgusting choice. Only the most simplistic and naive ways of thinking try to boil down complex problems into black and white.
- codingslave 7y ago
  I never justified mass shootings or said it wasn't their fault. I was just stating that things are objectively bad for young men in America. Any kind of therapy or "support", proper raising, etc isnt addressing the issue. Have some introspection and look at your response, you attacked me right off the bat. What was so repulsive in my post? Are these men not allowed to recognize that their life sucks and its societies fault?
  - csydas 7y ago
    Well, since I still go to a lot of secret-handshake-style message boards that get a lot of crossposting from the *chan boards and have such guys, my perspective is a bit different. I will not claim you don't and are wrong, but here's my perspective from what I see daily, both personally and professionally (as I offer as much advice as I can to help these guys get out of the spiral they're in) >...And its societies fault? [sic] Well, that's the problem as I see it. There is a huge issue where a lot of young men do not have healthy outlets for their frustrations and were sold a dream from the 90's-2010's that just doesn't really work anymore. The traditional path of high school > college > job + family isn't the norm anymore, as it just doesn't work well in a lot of regions of the US anymore (I'm from the US, so I'll focus on the US). But, the issue I have with the conversation that tends to happen when these message board groups pop up is that it results in a large number of posters completely removing their own agency from their lives and letting some extremely vile groups of persons tell them: - You're worthless - No one cares about you - You're a low-roll of genetics, and forever a failure - Society values everyone else above you - Corollary to the above point it's the fault of $minority_group_poster_dislikes that you are devalued - There's nothing you can do about it The list goes on. When I do manage to get a chance to talk to some of these guys, when the memes stop and the copy/pasta has run out and you just start getting their own words and responses, you start to realize that what you have is a bunch of people disappointed with themselves, lacking a positive support structure and proper guidance on things that employers, friends, potential partners, and society in general has weird quirks on. The biggest complaint I see is that "no one will hire me because I'm an adult white male", but when we get past the rhetoric they've been spoon-fed and finally get a look at their resume or do a mock interview, the problem is clear, and not to put the blame squarely on them, but it __is that they don't know how to present themselves__. They're shy, they're embarrassed, and they curl up defensively as a result. The message of "it's everyone else's fault but mine" is convenient, and again, this isn't to put the blame squarely on the individuals. US society has failed us in a lot of ways. I stupidly took a literature major in University, and midway through went to a few career fairs focusing on how to get a job because I was getting worried on how I would ever convince someone to hire me with a literature degree. The advisor, while quite nice and pleasant, gave me some awful advice about keyword spamming, phrases that are "guaranteed to work", and so on. Talking with actual recruiters and hiring boards later on, I found out that all of that stuff was non-sense, and instead I just needed to learn how to sell myself and show what I could do, without wasting the recruiter/interviewer's time. Now that I handle interviews as one of the main components of my work, I can see how badly in this area we set __all__ young people up for in this respect. I got lucky, because I could see the forest so to speak, figured out quickly how to talk to employers, how to talk to interviewers, and how to up-talk what I've done without coming off as arrogant. Others are not as lucky. This is just one example, but the core problem is the same; you have a group of young people (men in this case) that just don't know how to both protect (or even have) their own self-identity while still participating in society at large. The communities online that spew this stupid rhetoric and vitriol are the Jim Jones' of the 21st century, and they're just as toxic, and now dangerous apparently. So yeah, society has some failings, but we also have a group of people who are diving head first into a dark spiral that just reinforces the negative feelings and they give away their agency over themselves willingly to some ass who wants to sell them something, or even worse, just wants to make people miserable. At some point these people need to realize that they are doing a lot of this to themselves needlessly, and they can learn to handle the crap hand that society gives all of us. We won't all be millionaires, but it's got to be better than being broke and unemployed posting pictures about how miserable and worthless you are while someone feeds gross propaganda into your head.
    - ardani 7y ago
      I think part of the problem is software that encourages continuous streams of soon-to-be-discarded information. Procedural/AI content is part culprit here - every piece of information on the Internet comes with a bunch of chaff around it. For all I know, the only human input into modern news articles comes from the computers' entropy collector (/dev/random) picking up on network disturbances caused by human interference. To quote Mao Zedond, "the streets are littered with dried faggots, ready to be lit aflame". 8chan is like that, being on 8chan turns your mind into that and the software model causes it. Who's "smoking all those faggots"? The OS developers, the browser vendors and the server hosts. There's a reason we don't burn books! Reversible computing is underway but we don't have to wait for that. The zero-energy aspect - awesome, but what's much more important is the "no unplanned data loss" aspect - every bit is accounted for.
    - KONAir 7y ago
      Last two paragraphs might as well be definition of internets-religion.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      The movie Romper Stomper [1] shows accurately how someone can get sucked into violence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romper_Stomper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romper_Stomper
      - rightbyte 7y ago
        It does? As I remember all the main characters are already violent at the begging of the film.
        Fnoord 7y ago
        They're already on a path of hatred but in different degrees. I'd say one of them, the leader, drags them down into misery. The girl is a daddy issues 101. I felt she got dragged down the most, perhaps because I resonated with her the most as being clever.
      - brokenmachine 7y ago
  - solipsism 7y ago
    It... seems like maybe you didn't read my post.
- dkersten 7y ago
  Why would you equate "young men" to "mass shooters"? You literally took the quoted sentence out of context.
  - solipsism 7y ago
    That's what we're talking about... It's in the title of the article.
    - dkersten 7y ago
      Right, but this comment thread is clearly talking about a general problem, ”I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed.”, it seems rather uncharitable to ignore the context of the conversation and focus purely on the title.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  > Only the most simplistic and naive ways of thinking try to boil down complex problems into black and white. Ironic with the username "solipsism" ... no?
- dang 7y ago
  "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - solipsism 7y ago
    Just saw this, guess I should check more often. Anyway, that's a very poorly written rule. I can only respond to the strongest interpretation I am aware of or can imagine. People read things in different ways. If I had read it the way you apparently did, I would've responded to that. I didn't attack or demonize. I responded civilly. If he or she had clarified, I would've been happy to accept. There's got to be room for honest misunderstanding in civil discourse.
darawk 7y ago
I think it's essentially draws back to the incel/hikkomori phenomenon. You never see young men in relationships doing these kinds of things...whether it's a white right wing mass shooter or an Islamic suicide bombing. People seem to want to pin these things on ideology, because that's the reason the perpetrators themselves give for what they do. But it seems more likely to me to be a reaction to a life they view as having no future, by which I mean no prospect of a successful romantic relationship with the opposite sex.
- s9w 7y ago
  The whole incel think was made up rather recently in a coordinated effort. Just one of many counter examples: A couple of days ago an African tried to kill three Germans, succeeding in killing one child. He was the father of three children. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/getoeteter-junge-im-frankfurter-hauptbahnhof-mutmasslicher-taeter-ist-vater-von-drei-kindern/24852136.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/getoeteter-junge-im...
  - darawk 7y ago
    I'm not blaming the incel community. I'm actually essentially taking their side. Our society doesn't help men in that situation very well, and treats them exceptionally poorly. And sure, counter-examples exist, though that particular one isn't really in the same space as this. Certainly people kill each other, and sometimes crazy people kill random strangers. But that was not a mass killing in the sense that this El Paso situation was, or that 9/11 was.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    He was in therapy for mental illness. I'm not sure why you're bringing this case up, but it can't be good.
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
      What does that mean? A lot of people are in therapy and almost everyone could benefit from therapy. Was it some really serious mental illness? Or merely mental health issues when compared to shooting and killing people.
watwut 7y ago
Have you read those manifestos or about shooters themselves? Cause lack of opportunities ain't the issue in specific cases I read about. Lack of opportunities is not case of Roger Elliot, Sandy Hook massacre nor columbine. Not in the mail bomb case either nor that one with skater brother (can't recall name now).
Phlarp 7y ago
So young men are murdering people by the hundreds in mass shootings, but you don't think it's the young men's fault? surely it is the guns or the Nazi manifestos then?
rejschaap 7y ago
> But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here. I read this in Jordan Peterson's voice.
brokenmachine 7y ago
I heard it said that young people were "the canaries in the coalmine" for the larger problems of society.

solipsism 7y ago

But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them Don't go there. Don't say mass shooters aren't at fault. The thing is, you don't need to. Both things can be true -- life is hard and unfair for certain people in certain ways, and that in the aggregate is bound to lead to more mass killings and other negative effects like suicide.. and the ones who decide to kill innocent people are to blame for their disgusting choice. Only the most simplistic and naive ways of thinking try to boil down complex problems into black and white.

codingslave 7y ago
I never justified mass shootings or said it wasn't their fault. I was just stating that things are objectively bad for young men in America. Any kind of therapy or "support", proper raising, etc isnt addressing the issue. Have some introspection and look at your response, you attacked me right off the bat. What was so repulsive in my post? Are these men not allowed to recognize that their life sucks and its societies fault?
- csydas 7y ago
  Well, since I still go to a lot of secret-handshake-style message boards that get a lot of crossposting from the *chan boards and have such guys, my perspective is a bit different. I will not claim you don't and are wrong, but here's my perspective from what I see daily, both personally and professionally (as I offer as much advice as I can to help these guys get out of the spiral they're in) >...And its societies fault? [sic] Well, that's the problem as I see it. There is a huge issue where a lot of young men do not have healthy outlets for their frustrations and were sold a dream from the 90's-2010's that just doesn't really work anymore. The traditional path of high school > college > job + family isn't the norm anymore, as it just doesn't work well in a lot of regions of the US anymore (I'm from the US, so I'll focus on the US). But, the issue I have with the conversation that tends to happen when these message board groups pop up is that it results in a large number of posters completely removing their own agency from their lives and letting some extremely vile groups of persons tell them: - You're worthless - No one cares about you - You're a low-roll of genetics, and forever a failure - Society values everyone else above you - Corollary to the above point it's the fault of $minority_group_poster_dislikes that you are devalued - There's nothing you can do about it The list goes on. When I do manage to get a chance to talk to some of these guys, when the memes stop and the copy/pasta has run out and you just start getting their own words and responses, you start to realize that what you have is a bunch of people disappointed with themselves, lacking a positive support structure and proper guidance on things that employers, friends, potential partners, and society in general has weird quirks on. The biggest complaint I see is that "no one will hire me because I'm an adult white male", but when we get past the rhetoric they've been spoon-fed and finally get a look at their resume or do a mock interview, the problem is clear, and not to put the blame squarely on them, but it __is that they don't know how to present themselves__. They're shy, they're embarrassed, and they curl up defensively as a result. The message of "it's everyone else's fault but mine" is convenient, and again, this isn't to put the blame squarely on the individuals. US society has failed us in a lot of ways. I stupidly took a literature major in University, and midway through went to a few career fairs focusing on how to get a job because I was getting worried on how I would ever convince someone to hire me with a literature degree. The advisor, while quite nice and pleasant, gave me some awful advice about keyword spamming, phrases that are "guaranteed to work", and so on. Talking with actual recruiters and hiring boards later on, I found out that all of that stuff was non-sense, and instead I just needed to learn how to sell myself and show what I could do, without wasting the recruiter/interviewer's time. Now that I handle interviews as one of the main components of my work, I can see how badly in this area we set __all__ young people up for in this respect. I got lucky, because I could see the forest so to speak, figured out quickly how to talk to employers, how to talk to interviewers, and how to up-talk what I've done without coming off as arrogant. Others are not as lucky. This is just one example, but the core problem is the same; you have a group of young people (men in this case) that just don't know how to both protect (or even have) their own self-identity while still participating in society at large. The communities online that spew this stupid rhetoric and vitriol are the Jim Jones' of the 21st century, and they're just as toxic, and now dangerous apparently. So yeah, society has some failings, but we also have a group of people who are diving head first into a dark spiral that just reinforces the negative feelings and they give away their agency over themselves willingly to some ass who wants to sell them something, or even worse, just wants to make people miserable. At some point these people need to realize that they are doing a lot of this to themselves needlessly, and they can learn to handle the crap hand that society gives all of us. We won't all be millionaires, but it's got to be better than being broke and unemployed posting pictures about how miserable and worthless you are while someone feeds gross propaganda into your head.
  - ardani 7y ago
    I think part of the problem is software that encourages continuous streams of soon-to-be-discarded information. Procedural/AI content is part culprit here - every piece of information on the Internet comes with a bunch of chaff around it. For all I know, the only human input into modern news articles comes from the computers' entropy collector (/dev/random) picking up on network disturbances caused by human interference. To quote Mao Zedond, "the streets are littered with dried faggots, ready to be lit aflame". 8chan is like that, being on 8chan turns your mind into that and the software model causes it. Who's "smoking all those faggots"? The OS developers, the browser vendors and the server hosts. There's a reason we don't burn books! Reversible computing is underway but we don't have to wait for that. The zero-energy aspect - awesome, but what's much more important is the "no unplanned data loss" aspect - every bit is accounted for.
  - KONAir 7y ago
    Last two paragraphs might as well be definition of internets-religion.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    The movie Romper Stomper [1] shows accurately how someone can get sucked into violence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romper_Stomper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romper_Stomper
    - rightbyte 7y ago
      It does? As I remember all the main characters are already violent at the begging of the film.
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        They're already on a path of hatred but in different degrees. I'd say one of them, the leader, drags them down into misery. The girl is a daddy issues 101. I felt she got dragged down the most, perhaps because I resonated with her the most as being clever.
    - brokenmachine 7y ago
- solipsism 7y ago
  It... seems like maybe you didn't read my post.
dkersten 7y ago
Why would you equate "young men" to "mass shooters"? You literally took the quoted sentence out of context.
- solipsism 7y ago
  That's what we're talking about... It's in the title of the article.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    Right, but this comment thread is clearly talking about a general problem, ”I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed.”, it seems rather uncharitable to ignore the context of the conversation and focus purely on the title.
mikelyons 7y ago
> Only the most simplistic and naive ways of thinking try to boil down complex problems into black and white. Ironic with the username "solipsism" ... no?
dang 7y ago
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- solipsism 7y ago
  Just saw this, guess I should check more often. Anyway, that's a very poorly written rule. I can only respond to the strongest interpretation I am aware of or can imagine. People read things in different ways. If I had read it the way you apparently did, I would've responded to that. I didn't attack or demonize. I responded civilly. If he or she had clarified, I would've been happy to accept. There's got to be room for honest misunderstanding in civil discourse.

darawk 7y ago

I think it's essentially draws back to the incel/hikkomori phenomenon. You never see young men in relationships doing these kinds of things...whether it's a white right wing mass shooter or an Islamic suicide bombing. People seem to want to pin these things on ideology, because that's the reason the perpetrators themselves give for what they do. But it seems more likely to me to be a reaction to a life they view as having no future, by which I mean no prospect of a successful romantic relationship with the opposite sex.

s9w 7y ago
The whole incel think was made up rather recently in a coordinated effort. Just one of many counter examples: A couple of days ago an African tried to kill three Germans, succeeding in killing one child. He was the father of three children. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/getoeteter-junge-im-frankfurter-hauptbahnhof-mutmasslicher-taeter-ist-vater-von-drei-kindern/24852136.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/getoeteter-junge-im...
- darawk 7y ago
  I'm not blaming the incel community. I'm actually essentially taking their side. Our society doesn't help men in that situation very well, and treats them exceptionally poorly. And sure, counter-examples exist, though that particular one isn't really in the same space as this. Certainly people kill each other, and sometimes crazy people kill random strangers. But that was not a mass killing in the sense that this El Paso situation was, or that 9/11 was.
- Tomte 7y ago
  He was in therapy for mental illness. I'm not sure why you're bringing this case up, but it can't be good.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    What does that mean? A lot of people are in therapy and almost everyone could benefit from therapy. Was it some really serious mental illness? Or merely mental health issues when compared to shooting and killing people.

watwut 7y ago

Have you read those manifestos or about shooters themselves? Cause lack of opportunities ain't the issue in specific cases I read about. Lack of opportunities is not case of Roger Elliot, Sandy Hook massacre nor columbine. Not in the mail bomb case either nor that one with skater brother (can't recall name now).

Phlarp 7y ago

So young men are murdering people by the hundreds in mass shootings, but you don't think it's the young men's fault? surely it is the guns or the Nazi manifestos then?

rejschaap 7y ago

> But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here. I read this in Jordan Peterson's voice.

brokenmachine 7y ago

I heard it said that young people were "the canaries in the coalmine" for the larger problems of society.