Today in The Times of London, Camille Paglia and others take a shot at explaining Cho, citing a feminized culture and the sterile patriarchy of the campus, all at the same time. It’s the best written piece on Cho that I’ve read to this point, and I’ll be interest to hear what Dr. Helen has to say about it if she decides to weigh in. Meanwhile, I’m wondering what you all think.
Search
Archive Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
Archives
Categories
- A Government That Can Force You to Buy Health Insurance Can Make You Do Anything (3)
- a protein wisdom philosophy primer (3)
- academics (25)
- armadillo (8)
- Friday Fiction 100 Word Challenge (51)
- from the protein wisdom conceptual series (136)
- identity politics (33)
- If Republicans Win the Senate in 2014 (1)
- in which celebraties comment on current events (67)
- language / intentionalism (88)
- legal (6)
- My brief conversations with inanimate objects (130)
- NSA / FISA (46)
- One Term to Serve, the 2012 Revival (6)
- Overheard in a Fallujah bunker (27)
- Poems from 196x, Revised by the Ghost of Richard Brauti (27)
- protein wisdom's DNC coverage (30)
- protein wisdom's RNC coverage (29)
- protein wisdom: the movie Lists (20)
- Provocateurism (16)
- real-time empirical observations (51)
- red pills found behind the sofa cushions (42)
- Scenes from my driveway (61)
- Talking back to 80s music (41)
- The Martha Stewart Chronicles (58)
- The protein wisdom interviews (10)
- The protein wisdom original poems (142)
- Uncategorized (20,046)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, abridged (34)
Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
Man, this democracy shit is hard.
He was insane.
All of his personal problems were due to the actions of others. None of it had anything to do with him. His actions had no effect on how others treated him. Every failure was because of others, not chance and not himself. He was malignant narcissicism. He was the great I Am, and those who failed to recognize that, thwarted that, deserved to die.
There isn’t anything to add.
And up yours, first commenter. I’m happy to see the left doesn’t want democracy, they just want dictatorial bastards as long as they are the correct bastards. That confirms what I figured out when I was seventeen.
And again, these media incompetents can’t tell the difference between a normal pistol, and “semiautomatic” weapons fit only for “commandos” and the like.
Get a friggin clue, people!!
Erm, make that “can’t see that they are the same.”
TW: help34. Yes.
I think this explains it better:
I just got this in an e-mail, but it’s from 1999.
Some of Paglia’s ideas just seem crazy. But perhaps that’s appropriate, applying them to a crazy kid.
Mastiff, I can appreciate your disdain for anyone who would make excuses for Cho, however I didn’t feel that that’s what this writer was doing.
They are simply trying to understand how someone might end up in the position where commiting mass murder is a justified act, and their psycho-analysis seemed plausible.
I actually can relate to a lot of the resentment Cho had for his schoolmates, as I think many many people can. In the article they mention how sex is an important part of the college culture and many girls long to express their sexuality in a very debasing and demeaning way. When you don’t have friends, let alone a girlfriend, this can seem completely unfair. You see women as whores basically, however the fact that they’re not giving you any sort of reinforces the idea that for all your good intentions and sincere love and respect for humanity, you get ostracized and labeled “weird”.
It’s useless to apply this social commentary in respect to Cho, but if it makes any people question their motives/outlook/worldview, individually or collectively, then maybe something good can come of it. I think we’re too superficial as a culture, especially around that age. We’re pampered all our lives and reach adulthood with still no idea of what character is or why principles are so important or even why life is so valuable.
I don’t think any pundit’s hobbyhorse is going to get us to an answer, here. A man-made mystery is unraveled at last, but a natural mystery is a mystery forever.
And up yours, first commenter. I’m happy to see the left doesn’t want democracy, they just want dictatorial bastards as long as they are the correct bastards. That confirms what I figured out when I was seventeen.
Protein Wisdom’s got my back. These clowns are gonna suck my Unitary Executive member all the way down to politcal irrelevance. Heh.
Of course it wouldn’t be a British news article without a fair amount of American gun-law-bashing, to which I reply:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/19/commentary.nugent/index.html
These clowns are gonna suck my Unitary Executive member all the way down to politcal irrelevance. Heh. Harry Reid, is that you? And here I thought you were spending your Sunday shopping for a white burka and practicing your “I, for one, want to welcome our new Islamist overlords” speech.
Or you could be that dog-food troll we toy with on occassion.
We can’t just play the whole thing off as if he’s just insane. Because Cho’s frustrations come from real social ills that beset our community. The most dangerous insane people are those who have enough sanity to see something hurting them and react in a disproportionate manner.
Paglia is spot on. The best way to address a “strange benevolent and tyrannical paternalism” is to recognize that “Cho’s use of semi-automatic
weapons” – which “have no use except for commandos, swat teams and paramilitary organisations” – “can ultimately be traced back to gangsta rap.”
Ummmmmm…..you should probably refer to a dictionary before you start using big words you don’t understand. And I’ll add that your chosen discource for political discussion is clearly representative of your intellectual capacity. I think some warm milk and cookies and an afternoon nap will clear you right up little guy.
Yes, it’s certainly a well written piece and presents a lot of factual detail I’d not been aware of.
I do have to wonder at the Times of London though. With hundreds of mental health professionals out of work, why are they asking a professor of humanities and media studies (Paglia) and a political scientist (Fukuyama) for psychological analyses? Feminized culture? Sterile patriarchy? Gansta rap? Puleeze.
Not to mention that he imagines himself President, eh happyfeet?
Back on topic, Cho was nutty as a squirrel turd, crazy as a shithouse rat. But more importantly, he was mean, through and through. Some people are irretrievably defective and ugly, and Cho was one of them.
My only regret is that he didn’t go alone.
We’ve gotten to the point in our culture where we cannot bear to make any judgments about crazy behavior. For chrissake, some people are insane. That’s it. But no, we have to blah blah blah about “root causes,” and “society’s impact,” and the sadass fact some chick wouldn’t lay this insane loser.
He was insane, appallingly and obviously so, but gee, wouldn’t do to judge him as such, now would it?
and back to the topic at hand
IMHO Pagilia is on the wrong course in attributing Cho’s murdering rampage on American culture. We now know he’s been this withdrawn since he was a very small child back in S. Korea.
I would point to a fascinating interview I heard on the radio of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner
Oooohhh, baby, you know just the way I like it…ohhh, yeah, that’s good….keep licking the shaft…and, every now and then, look up at me and say, “Victory in Iraq!”…oh yeah, that’s good…
Dark
So, explain why he was the same monosylable, mean, friendless being when he was a child in S. Korea?
Rightwingsparkle nails it. I like Paglia and the article is interesting. As most academic theoreticians do, she keeps reality on a long tether. Her comment that it was impossible to fight back is absurd. Difficult and terrifying, long odds? Hell yes.
In 1995 a disgruntled soldier opened fire from a wooded hill on 1,300 unarmed soldiers. A small group of unarmed special forces soldiers maneuvered on the shooter, rushed, and disarmed him. Total casualties: 1 dead, 18 wounded.
Besides, “sterile patriarchy” is so 1970s. We all know global warming was the real root cause.
As a college student, let me just say that the hook-up culture thing is very much exaggerated, a prime example of the parental paranoia likely to lead to a more infantilizing atmosphere for students in the long run. There are still very strong stigmas against promiscuity, especially of the “don’t even know your partner’s name” variety. This is encouraged by the university to some degree, whose crusades against rape turn every male into a suspect.
Lohan should not be cited as an example of the mainstream view of sexuality–she is a reality-detached etcetera, and the common view of her is as object of ridicule.
College students aren’t the caricatured, over-sexed representation you see in the media.
I’m afraid that Paglia, a dimwit’s dimwit if there ever was one, misses the point: Some people are just fucking evil.
They’re like snakes. You shoot them and move on.
Of course, saying so doesn’t benefit you if you’re being paid by the word, so maybe she’s not quite the dimwit she appears.
Sounds like Islamists.
Sounds like Islamists.
Sounds like Islamists.
Not saying Cho was an Islamist, but that the same impulses can explain the Islamist rage against the rest of humanity. They’re failures, despite everything they’ve ever been taught telling them they should be masters of the world. They’re barred from relationships with women, despite the sexuality of modern global culture, and their frustration leads them to treat every woman as a whore.
In the end, they latch onto the escape taught by their faith: eternal sex and wine with eternal nymphettes, if only they die in the act of murdering others.
Oh, and everyone, ignore the troll.
Gingrich has some interesting things to say over at Q&O
http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=5853
Even if you do not agree with him it is a beautiful thing to visualise not world peace, nor whirled peas, but moonbats’ heads exploding.
I’m having problems understanding how McCain-Feingold fits into it. His point is that it restricts the sort of speech that counter-acts all the speech that the first amendment protects, but that would assume that politicians are the ones who should be speaking on behalf of morality.
Or do I have this all wrong?
Not correct.
Cho’s insanity, and social ills that beset our community, do come from the same source, but one doesn’t cause the other.
Sir! Where is your empathy?!
Obviously, someone misses Clinton very, very, very much, and is experiencing a psychotic break.
We can only hope he’s been laid fairly recently…
Bullshit. Even a shy person such as myself could talk to people in class and strike up acquaintances. This guy wouldn’t respond. American university culture is pretty darn open, people will speak in class and exchange greetings. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t initiate a good-morning or respond to one. This guy was seriously whacked out and it was on him. He would do nothing to make anyone comfortable in talking to him.
Society’s fault, my ass. He was a sick, twisted mother and the only thing he did wrong that day was not point the gun at his own head first.
Find empathy elsewhere; I have as much empathy for him as I have for an SS man – none at all.
By the way, whomever is monitoring the place today – ban the first commenter and its ip address.
Some standards need to be kept.
So is Paglia saying that if the girls at VTech had just given the poor soul his fill of pussy, all those people would be alive?
Camille Paglia? And what on earth is this?
I’ll second that. In fact the language and attitude cause me to reminisce to last July. I have no idea why that might be.
Baby boomers grasping for every last entitlement dollar very much have an interest in impugning our pampered irresponsible youth. So good luck with getting any traction with observations to the contrary.
His Frogness, you are not missing anything. The article is more or less a swipe at political partisans blaming each other for VT. The real point is that 35 years of leftist politics have made a shambles of America’s moral fabric.
Mark Steyn has a better article at
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/351710,CST-EDT-STEYN22.article
the Pusan Pissant doesn’t even deserve this much attention. I put all these theorists in the same filthy bucket with Brian Williams.
GrantR
As a parent of a college student I would agree to a certain extent.
However, there are just enough students who hit college, first time away from home and parents, who go overboard in doing all those crazy things they couldn’t at high school … ie drink to excess, stay out to all hours and make choices the opposite of what would have been acceptable at home (including engaging in casual sex) … to give credence to the stereotype.
A exasperated quote from my daughter, an RA this year, “I was hired as an advisor, not a babysitter!”, in response to all the problems she’s faced with her floor … drinking, drugs, fights, domestic violence …
Hmm.
Perhaps, Darleen, the partiarchy had it right all those many decades ago with the loco parentis thing?
*grin*
I thought this was a good analysis.
Yeah, actually we can. Look, there are always pressures in society. There’s pressure to conform, to compete, to succeed, to non-conform, to pretend to non-conform, to get laid, to be celebate, to party, to abstain, whatever. And that’s true of any society you can think of. When a person is mentally ill, they can’t form a personality that is strong and nimble enough to pick its way through those pressures without breaking. The adolescent/early adult process of creating one’s identity becomes warped and broken.
Not everyone expresses this in violence. In fact, I’d say the amount of time and verbiage we spend on dissecting incidents like these is a testament to how rare they really are. Some people withdraw, becoming solitary failures and end up on the street or in an institution. Some manage to stay functional while living in a hellish private world. Many self-medicate with drugs and alcohol.
But the point is, there’s nothing intrinsic about society that makes these people insane. It’s simply that the problems with their brains and their minds make them unable to cope with the normal rigors that we all face. Life is hard. Society is hard. That’s simply the way it is, and NOTHING is ever going to change that, because if you take away one set of pressures, another will form somewhere else. It’s just the way life is.
We also have the problem that people assume it’s a modern phenomena, or a Western phenomena. The reality is, there have been spree killers and serial killers for all history; they just didn’t have the tools and the population density wasn’t high enough to give them any notoriety. Besides, people like Cho would have been dealt with locally—and often permanently.
He’s not just insane– he’s insane in a way that lets pseudointellectuals of all stripes use him as a ventriloquist’s dummy. Insanity-Plus®: All the homicidal goodness of regular insanity, and it makes a Statement too! Now how much would you pay?
Nor did they have the media to fuel their infamy.
Y’all should be payin’ me royalties for using the same words I did back when I was still relevant. I mean, there’s a law about plagiarizin’…
TW: Depends on what the meanings of are59, are.
I don’t think you have to choose sides on this issue: (1) The kid was deranged. (2) Contemporary society, having lost its marbles vis a vis the rampant feminization of the country, among other things, has very little to recommend it.
In fact, in its staggering selfishness and myopia, it nurtures these issues—condemning Cho doesn’t deny Paglia’s point.
In the end, it’s natural and commendable to seek causes. But in the end it’s neither to completely substitute stimuli for responsibility.
Yeah, JH, and I made the same argument over at Bloody Scott with respect to the paradigms of evil and mental illness: not mutually exclusive.
Some will be attracted to evil because it gives them the power they crave. Some will be attracted to it because it explains/excuses their psychoses.
Partly I agree JHoward, but in this case, people thought he was a weird little kid in Korea. He was so withdrawn, he created a fantasy reality that caused his rage. If he could have opened up, and become a part of the real society through a support group of friends, he might have been OK.
In other words, I find it hard to blame society when he was so detached from it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if anti-depressants are sometimes triggers for violent behavior in some people, but it’s all we got til we allow principals to brandish the paddle like in days of yore.
In another thread, Mr. Supernatural ascribed evil solely to the other-wordly (either an entertaining denial or a remarkably ambitious charge, depending on how you look at it.) Mr. Supernatural therefore swung wide the gates for cultural scapegoating, and in that, the sizable tendency in modern culture to throw out the responsiblity baby with the environmental bathwater. When you’re a nuanced and politically correct collectivist, it’s all nuture and no nature.
Yet as both an abstract and as reality, “clinical evil” is interchangable with a certain segment of “mental illnesses”—or put another way, The Lie, whether intellectual or by act, denotes both evil and mental illness.
Without a moral anchor, “mental illness” becomes the diversionary handle it has, allowing the easy denial of responsibility and enabling our lovely psych drug culture.
’juramentado’ (Philippines), ‘amok’(Indonesia), and ‘mak’siccar’ (India) are all non-Western concepts with centuries of history behind them. In the case of amok and mak’siccar (massacre), it’s where we get our own words for the phenomenon. There is nothing new, uniquely Western, or uniquely American here. There is literally nothing special about the Pusan Pissant.
’Postal’ is pretty American.
We use “amok”, too.
Cho was crazy, that’s my opinion from what I have read. Seriously mentally ill. He should have been institutionalized a long time ago. Maybe chemicals could have given him a chance to normalize, maybe not.
I thought originally that this might have been puberty-onset madness. But it goes way back. He was nuts, and if he had survived, he never would have been executed. So, he did the right thing, on that one point.
Yes, in some ways, the scenario sheds some light on some issues we have in our society about sex, feminizing men, etc. But, bottom line, he was nuts.
The book “Yellow Rage” is just waiting to be written ….
Not really. National/International publicizing of “postal” is what is “American.”
Interesting. I’d say the rush to call him insane in the aftermath of his crime is a way to avoid judging him.
He was a flatliner in a world of spikers. I’ll take my chances with the latter any day.
Darleen, I meant the expression.
The idea that the modern university is a bastion of any sort of “patriarchy” is laughable. More like a feminised never-neverland where one never has to grow up.
What makes a monster is not experiences – he experienced, probably what a lot of people experienced (though he made it worse for himself with his actions) but what made him a monster is how he ultimately responded to those experiences.
In other words, his actions are what counted. Man cannot judge the heart, I.E, intent, since we really can only guess it.
I’m alarmed at how psychologized the whole thing is – a whole bunch of jargon is thrown out as though it is fact – even though it is just theory. Masculine self-esteem? How is working in a demeaning factory more ‘self-esteem building’ than being locked up in a school? Nostalgic mental masturbation again. Typical. Self-esteem does not exist, and neither factory work nor boring school would have a lick of an effect on it. School may be boring or meaningless, but you’ve got more future there than pulling a crank. What was the matter was the attitude of Cho – (and of many of us, in fact) regarding school, and the school’s failure to seek and teach truth.
Combine a monster with a mechanical horror and you’ve got a genuine atrocity on your hands. The horror isn’t the guns but the state of our educational system. And the monster is definitely Cho.
Well, Post Offices are ‘gun-free zones’, too, don’t forget.