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Comment by honkdaddy | Hacker News Reader

Discord had a major role in this shooters radicalization. The logs are available on KF, you won't gain anything from reading them, but I'll tell you that he'd been talking about this plan for a long time and that other individuals were extremely encouraging. There's a big difference, IMO, between watching low-budget white nationalism content on YouTube and having long, daily, hate-filled discussions with people who share your anger.

People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards and was much more active on reddit and Discord.

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If Discord had "a major role" then wow - you'd put a huge burden on everyone who enables any kind of communication. All of them would have to implement a heavyhanded manual and automated censorship, with banning discussion of certain topics outright, use of machine learning to analyze sentiment... It would be the end of encryption (because if you don't combat encryption, you have a 'major role' in anything bad that happens).

Of course Discord has no responsibility in what people talk about on their system. Otherwise they should claim partial ownership on all good ideas that come out of it too.

I blame a divisive society pitting people against each other and allowing no middle ground, leading to radicalization, and the availability of guns that allow people to immediately act on their hate.

What does it mean to blame something as abstract as "a divisive society"? That's bit of a cop out, don't you think? There are real people, coming from conservative think tanks, conservative politicians, etc., that put these ideas into the shooter's head and allow guns to be so available. Lay the blame there.

The "divisive society" is a cop out insofar as it doesn't lead to a simple solution. But it is the ultimate problem in our society preventing any kind of progress.

We used to have a neutral ground of, say, a respected newspaper or TV show which had the ability to reign in radicalization, and would present issues by weighing both sides in a fair and representative way. This does no longer exist. It's us-vs-them, the other side is evil. Additionally our competitive society has no issue with creating and vilifying classes of losers and accepts a growing divide between rich and poor.

There you have your shooters. There you have Trump 2024 or who else comes along (what kind of politician can only thrive in this climate?)

My solution? I'd recommend everyone to smoke or drink some of your favorite drug or play some peaceful music and meditate over why the other side from your perspective is human, and what valid arguments they could have, or what made them think the way they do.

This is false equivalence when you see conservatives, via, among other avenues, the biggest cable news network, pushing, for example, white replacement theory and other bits of society are not.

> We used to have a neutral ground of, say, a respected newspaper or TV show which had the ability to reign in radicalization, and would present issues by weighing both sides in a fair and representative way.

No, we didn't.

We used to have oligopolistic media with a fairly uniform set of biases and actively-pursued agendas across all outlets. Even farther back, media was more diverse and often hyperlocal, but still not “fair and representative”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

Similarly in Germany we used to have only had 3 state TV channels, ultimately controlled by the ruling parties. Thinking about it now, I'm sure it was quite biased in all kinds of ways. And yet, people got their vaccinations without rioting.

It wasn’t perfect but you're far too quick to reject the point about radicalization. Mass media had to be, well, mass and that meant that there was more of a centrist bias because advertisers didn’t want to be associated with fringe viewpoints. Before personalized advertising, if you sponsored something objectionable everyone knew it – quite different from where nobody sees the same ads and they can usually blame the marketplace for placements which attract criticism.

That doesn’t mean it was perfect but it absolutely did temper things a lot - they had to setup their own network to host a voice like Carlson for a larger national audience than Stormfront.

The U.S. also had a legal requirement to fairly present multiple sides of an issue until Republicans removed it in 1987. It is probably not a coincidence that this was around the same time that a handful or very wealthy people started pouring money into building highly-partisan networks.

> People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards

From the shooter's diary:

> "I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts that they were intellectually and emotionally inferior," he wrote on May 5, referring to Black people.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffalo-shooting-supermarket-67.... See https://archive.ph/0Nnj7 for a non-paywalled version.

I don’t think shooter diaries are terribly authoritative when the shooter is crazy. We definitely have an unreliable narrator.

If the goal is to prevent future shooters, I think log files of the shooters behavior is more important than what they say is most important.

There's no evidence that the shooter is crazy.

Don’t you have to be at least a little bit more detached from reality than the median person (“crazy”) to shoot up a supermarket?

I don’t think crazy in a blank check to get away with whatever you want, you can definitely make yourself crazy in entirely foreseeable and avoidable ways that are your responsibility. This can still render you unreliable when it comes to your own motivations.

> Don’t you have to be at least a little bit more detached from reality than the median person (“crazy”) to shoot up a supermarket?

I would say, "yes," but this is crazy in some type of modern-day social sense of the term. If we're to consider the long, rich history of human violence it looks a bit pedestrian.

He's not a member of your tribe, your tribe attacks his tribe, he attacks yours.

He played by an older, darker, less civilized rule-book.

So he's not "seeing things schizo crazy" and so in some sense, no, he is not crazy.

I take your point. I think I was just reacting to various flavors of “he’s not crazy” as having a potentially normalizing effect but that may not be what was intended, or what other readers focused on.

> as having a potentially normalizing effect

I find virtually all mainstream discourse around mass-casualty attacks to be either normalizing or to just simply sweep the issue under the rug and ignore it.

There is no deep discussion on the topics, just further fiddling.

The perpetrator in events like this is almost always written off as "crazy." Often the purpose of that is to dismiss the premise that any systemic factors may have been at play. If he was just some random loon, there's no need for the society that created him to examine itself, much less attempt to resolve its own issues.

This is what a lot of people are afraid of in the US, because these shootings exist at the nexus of first and second amendment rights. The first allows people like the shooter to be radicalized using the most powerful communication platforms ever created. The second allows them to be armed to the teeth. And then there is the systemic, deeply rooted racism in American culture that feeds the hatred behind these events, and intersects with the US Constitution, government and society in numerous ways the country still isn't capable of discussing rationally.

So "he was just crazy" starts to sound like "nothing to see here" after a while. Because if it's true, it's weird that so many people seem to be crazy in the same way. If they aren't crazy then there is a pipeline of radicalization and violence - an "extremist industrial complex" if you will - that's working as intended to maintain its own status quo... and a lot of Americans are fine with that.

His motivations may be horrible and his logic may be flawed but that doesn’t make him crazy.

Good point, but it's not like there's a diagnostic definition of "crazy" anyway. Replace that language with "deluded, ignorant, and sociopathic" and the statement you replied to makes more sense.

> Replace that language with "deluded, ignorant, and sociopathic"

I really wouldn't call him any of those terms, he simply has a completely different "tribe," value system, and morality than yours.

To simply throw some high-brow insults at him and walk-off is intellectually lazy, and blinds you to someone becoming what Buffalo boy became.

I live down the street from a pre-Revolutionary fort, a real facet of the settlers lives was dealing with Indian raids. They would sneak in and, under cover of darkness, kill as many as they could. This attack, ultimately, makes me think of a modern raid.

>Indigenous groups breaking into the forts of literal colonialists, for whom racism was a matter of religious doctrine, to try to force them away before they perpetrate another massacre

>A white supremacist walks into a public space and shoots the descendants of people brought to this country in bondage by, get this, the aforementioned colonialists

The situations seems somewhat different. Less a modern raid than a modern massacre.

He was previously put on psych hold after threatening his classmates: https://nypost.com/2022/05/15/payton-gendron-was-hospitalize...

That’s a good point. I’m assuming he’s off his rocker because he killed 10 people. He doesn’t seem to be acting rationally in the sense that having such deep-seated racism as to plan and execute a mass killing is insane in and of itself. So anything he says is not trustworthy.

But I guess he is very different insane than the Son of Sam guy who thought God spoke to him.

That's exactly what I said, no? The top of the pipeline. Millions and millions of people from all over the world browse 4chan. The number of people who sit in Discord chats actively discussing plans for how to efficiently kill others is much, much lower. That's what I'm getting at.

Seems like that may simply be reflecting a gradual migration in which social platforms are being used.

He was also sporting the same black sun as the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, so considering the timing should we blame Ukraine as well? I mean all we've been hearing in media is how they're hero's and this guy was wearing their same insignia..

https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Buffalo-Shoo...

The black sun used by both azov and the shooter are from nazi germany:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(symbol)

> There's a big difference, IMO, between watching low-budget white nationalism content on YouTube and having long, daily, hate-filled discussions with people who share your anger.

But what is the actual end-goal here, have a "probe" and say "we did what we could" as did the NY police when they investigated and passed over the Buffalo shooter for his prior threats?

Oh I have no idea. I expect very little productive to come of this investigation. I think the only main point I'm trying to make here is that the true radicalization often happens in private, which sadly makes it all the more difficult to disinfect.

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