I think it is important to focus a bit not so much on the specifics of today, but rather on the larger phenomenon within which it fits. I’ve mentioned in comments to other posts that I’m working my way through a research project on the process of radicalization, specifically for those that self radicalize into terrorism. Specifically I’m trying to lay out a process rooted within existing empirical theory rooted in what we’ve been observing over the past couple of years with the anti-police incidents in Baton Rouge and Dallas; the Munich attack; the Pulse Nightclub attack in Orlando; the Nice truck attack; the Brussells airport and metro attacks; the San Bernadino attack; the Colorado Springs attack; the Paris/Saint Michael’s attack; the Bundy meshugas; the Charleston shooting; etc. While I won’t be ready to start doing my drafting until next week, it seems that what I’ve got percolating is, I think, pertinent to the larger dynamic that has everyone concerned today.
Hashtag Radicalization and Terrorism
Hashtag radicalization refers to the process that leads to terrorism, as well as acts of mass violence, that may not have a specific political objective, undertaken as a result of what is learned through the 24/7 news and social media. In this way it is a variant of G2Geek’s stochastic terrorism:
… the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.
What G2Geek posited is really a definition of radicalization – a preliminary delineation of the general result of what happens when there is significant, mass coverage in the news and social media of messages promoting extremism, terrorism, and violence. Whether he knew it or not, G2Geek’s offering was rooted in and built on those of other scholars into how mass hate and mass communication, and the changes to it with the advent of wireless and the Internet, drives terrorism and mass violence. Where hashtag radicalization goes farther than the original and insightful definition put forward by G2Geek is that hashtag radicalization follows a specific social behavioral pathway of radicalization.
Tom Nichols of the Naval War College has also begun to address this question with his exploratory article on Lost Boys back in July. Nichols posits that the combination of young men that can’t seem to get their lives to take off, the disappointments and discontents of that failure, and the ready access to 24/7 mass social media has created a large pool of lost boys that are now lashing out. Their actions, whether it is ranting and raving on social media in the attempt to intimidate and threaten, egging others on to take action, or taking action themselves is the result of their failure to achieve. What Nichols is describing here is general strain. Agnew has theorized that the modern form of anomie – societal disconnection – is general strain. General strain occurs when one fulfills all the requirements to achieve a valued goal, but either has the reward withheld or receives a negative/noxious reward (punishment) instead. There are three responses to experiencing strain: 1) devaluing the strain, by devaluing the withheld reward, 2) internalization of the strain leading to self destructive behavior, or 3) externalization of the strain leading to externally oriented destructive behavior. Nichols lost boys fit into the third response. They externalize their disconnection and disaffection and engage in externally directed deviance, crime, delinquency, and/or terrorism.
But not all of Nichols lost boys are actually boys. Robert Dear is 57. Major Nidal Hasan is in his 40s. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel is 31. The common denominator for all of these men, as well as for Dylann Roof, Micah Xavier Johnson, Rizwan Sayeed Farook, and others from even farther back in time such as Timothy McVeigh, Eric Robert Rudolph, Shelley Shannon (a woman), and Ted Kaczynski, is the need to alleviate their strain. Regardless of the source of the strain and regardless of whether their grievances are objective, subjective, or a combination of the two. The real question is how does one go from being socially** strained to externally directing one’s response to their strain. The answer, I think, is hashtag radicalization and terrorism. And this type of radicalization and terrorism has an empirically definable pathway.
In the 195os Sykes and Matza put forth a variant of social learning theory called neutralization and drift. Their intention was to clarify the social behavioral pathway that leads to delinquency, deviance, and crime. Sykes and Matza theorized that delinquency, deviancy, and crime are based on justifications that are used to rationalize behavior. And they called these justifications the techniques of neutralization, which allow one to drift into crime, deviance, and delinquency. Or in the cases we’re interested in extremism, terrorism, and/or mass violence. They are divided into five types of neutralization: 1) denial of responsibility; 2) denial of injury; 3) denial of victim; 4) condemnation of the condemners; and the 5) appeal to higher loyalties. The first three justifications all deal with denial. They allow the offender to rationalize his behavior as outside of his control. He or she is not really hurting anyone. And even if someone is hurt they may have deserved it. The fourth justification allows the offender to invert the knowledge of her wrongdoing back upon those criticizing it by asserting that the condemners are hypocrites, do equally bad things, or are out to get her. Finally, the fifth rationalization allows for the justification of behavior on the basis of loyalty to one’s group rather than one’s society.
Drawing justifications for one’s externally directed destructive behavior from what one sees, hears, and/or reads from our 24/7 news and social media environment, provides the impetus for individuals with no group affiliations to lash out – often violently. It also allows extremist, radical, and/or terrorist groups to leverage news reporting, their own and other’s social media platforms and messaging to reach strained individuals and provide them with the justifications for taking violent actions. This is hashtag radicalization and terrorism.
For a group like the Islamic State hashtag terrorism is part of their PSYOPS strategy. DAESH doesn’t have the ways and means to actually achieve their ends of defeating the US, its allies, and its partners. As a result it has to leverage terrorist acts to get the US, its allies, and its partners to overreact and provide it those means and ends – clamping down on civil liberties; targeting Muslim Americans, Anglo-Muslims, French Muslims, etc; and engaging in an actual ground war in Syria against the Islamic State, which would fulfill the Dabiq Prophecy.
The extremist anti-abortion movement, specifically the Army of God, that set the theological/doctrinal conditions for the radicalization of Dear, Shannon, Rudolph, and others is similar to the Islamic State. They do not have the ways and means to achieve their ends – the criminalization of all abortion in the United States, the legal recognition that life begins at conception, and that the developing fetus in utero is a fully articulated human from the moment of conception with all the rights and protections as any other person. In order to try to scare Americans into capitulating, it needs subjective and objective adherents to the Army of God’s theology and doctrine to engage in terrorism against abortion providers.
The process for radicalizing these adherents into actors, whether by the Army of God, the Islamic State, other groups, or specific elites and/or notables, is hashtag radicalization. If you’re a Muslim American or French or English or German Muslim, etc DAESH is trying to reach you by telling you that non-Muslim Americans, French, English, Germans, etc don’t want you in the US or their states (condemn the condemners). They want you gone, so you have to strike first (denial of victim). True Islam, adopting the doctrine of radical unity of the deity (tawheed), demands that the true Muslim (muwaheedun) strike at the apostates and the unbelievers (appeal to higher loyalties). The Army of God’s doctrinal messaging is similar. Abortion providers are murderers (condemn the condemners). Stopping them at all costs is what God wants (appeal to higher loyalties and denial of victim).
Even the mass violence that we’re seeing that doesn’t seem to be rooted in a specific extremist or radical doctrine has these characteristics. For instance, the Munich shooter was fascinated with mass shootings in the US and despite being a first generation German of Iranian descent, he had internalized the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the German and European extreme and nationalistic right, and admired Hitler and Anders Breivik. Here too we have strain – the son of immigrants that hates immigrants. And we have the denial of victim as he believed that immigrants were a blight on Germany and needed to be forced out. This is not unlike the justifications (neutralizations) presented by Dylann Roof for the shooting at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston. “You rape our women, you are taking over our country, and you have to go“. Here too we have the denial of victim and the appeal to a higher authority.
What is so dangerous about today’s statements on the campaign trail, whether they were an intentional coded appeal to violence, an unintentional riff that was supposed to refer to the power of a block of single issue voters flexing their power at the ballot box, or a poorly phrased attempt at being funny is not what Trump actually meant. Rather it is that those who are already primed to (inaccurately) believe that Secretary Clinton has gotten away with several murders, has escaped responsibility for the deaths of US personnel, been allowed to evade criminal responsibility time and time again, and is rigging the general election to steal it from Trump and the real Americans that are backing him will hear what they want to hear in the message. And what they want to hear is an appeal to a higher authority. In this case a historically inaccurate understanding of the 2nd Amendment, specifically the meaning and application of the militia clause. They are already condemning Secretary Clinton and denying that she would be a victim, almost always based on inaccurate beliefs perpetrated by a too credulous and antagonistic news media. All that’s needed is that final neutralizing justification to allow the drift into extremist action all done in defense of the US Constitution (appeal to higher authority).
* Hashtag radicalization and terrorism is a variation on a phrase – hashtag terrorism – that Mnemosyne recommended in the comments to one of my posts on terrorism.
** Social here is doing a lot of work. It’s standing in for social, political, economic, religious, and/or ideological.
redshirt
TL/DR: Dumb asses like to be bullies; also suicide bombers.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Don’t make me cancel your Netflix privileges so you can’t watch your favorite Marvel tv shows…
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: I’m leaching off my Wingnut Dad’s Netflix account. It’s truly a trickle down economy.
Thanks Reagan!
The Dangerman
To me, the wild thing is that there is an element (a.k.a. stupid fuckers) that look at the 2nd Amendment as a “remedy” against “tyranny”. As Bush said in one of his stupider statements (so many to choose from), bring it on; it’s time for a Darwinian solution to getting those genes out of the pool.
Amaranthine RBG
Adam – thank you for this post.
I skimmed it and am going to go back and read it carefully and look at the links when I have the time.
Again, just thank you for this work.
Mike in NC
Never underestimate the violence that can be done by losers who can’t get laid.
Miss Bianca
Well, shoot…you’ve put up a nice long thoughtful post that requires close reading and attention just when I’m ready to shut down and watch “The Wire”. Will try again tomorrow.
btw…speaking of Netflix…*I* may have to break down and get it after all because of the FUCKING AWESOMENESS that is Luke Cage, AKA Power Man!
Omnes Omnibus
I am in the middle of watching tiny women do bounce-bounce-flip-bounce-flip. I will give it attention when distractions are gone.
Mnemosyne
Yay, I get my own shoutout! ?
@redshirt:
He can’t remember where he originally read it, but G saw a theory that bullies are people who think they’re enforcing The Rules. And I think that fits with what Adam is saying here (though I’ll have to read it again more slowly). Terrorists are trying to force other people to conform to their rules, upon pain of death or injury.
John Weiss
Interesting Adam.
That’s a pretty good analysis.
I was an outrider and still am. However, I was almost as good as I thought I was and was thus alarmingly successful in several ‘careers’. So I didn’t have to suffer self-inflicted mortification and was thus not a knot of smoldering anger. I was never tempted to pick up a gun.
I suppose the cure for alla this violence is to make life for everyone better. (Where did I hear that?)
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: That was a great trailer. I was impressed.
debbie
The protection afforded by anonymity has to figure in all of this somehow.
Adam L Silverman
@srv: That’s an interesting case study. I wrote part of my comparative religion master’s thesis on Aum Shinrikyo. And I don’t have the oomph left tonight to answer it. So if you don’t mind, and even if you do, I’m going to come back to it in a future post. But Rudolph, Shannon, and both the Pensacola abortion clinic shooters made do with much more conventional, 1980s and 1990s forms of mass communication.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: i dvred that and am getting ready to watch it.
Joel
@Miss Bianca: You watch the Wire when it’s time to shut down? Might I suggest lighter fare?
I still can’t believe that Wallace is the biggest actor to come from that show.
Adam L Silverman
@John Weiss: Like most people you devalued your strain when you’ve had it.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: You should publish at TL/DR for today’s Millennials. They can only process information in web formatted bytes.
cynthia ackerman
This is spot on. We truly are primed for events for which casual comments may have the effect of those radio broadcasts in Rwanda which directed genocide. And our media will still tell us that both sides are responsible.
Amir Khalid
@John Weiss:
And then, what do you do with the bigots who are upset because life for those people is also better?
Adam L Silverman
@Joel: I watch Ancient Aliens when I can’t sleep. As soon as the narrator says “according to ancient astronaut theory…” I’m out like a light.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: I’m not sure I deserve this today.
redshirt
@Mnemosyne: I can see that. They’re “Order” types but their own sense of order has been so scrambled by a lifetime of abuse they in turn abuse. Hurt. Torture. Just following orders.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Maybe explain it by Pokemon Go!
Mnemosyne
@John Weiss:
When the Tsarnaevs bombed the Boston Marathon, my husband (the abovementioned G) tried to explain that, when you’re a 19-year-old guy, it can make sense in your mind that you will take a big, public action to Make A Statement, but then no one else outside your head will understand it. I am not now and never have been a guy, so I can’t say I entirely understood what he meant.
marduk
Bruce Sterling envisioned the concept of stochastic terrorism in his 1999 novel Distraction, where one of the many plot devices is a way too-plausible assassination spambot.
Adam L Silverman
@srv: They have him on occasionally.
Mnemosyne
Adam, here’s a weird thought: would the Columbine killers fit into this “Lost Boys” paradigm? They seemed to have some neo-Nazi ideation, but I don’t know how developed it was.
Adam L Silverman
@marduk: Never heard of him. The first documented use I’ve ever seen of the term was at G2Geek’s DKos diary.
robert thompson
When males cant find work that validates their self-perception, when the society around them says that men should still the hunters among the gatherers and popular entertainments never let you see the intestines spill out from a M-60 machine gun casualty much less smell the blood and offal then you have the perfect seed bed for these psychopaths to grow. And every other reason mentioned above, too.
nutella
Adam, you’re mostly talking about domestic terrorists, who attack people in their own countries. I was interested to read somewhere that international terrorists, like the people who get recruited into ISIL from western countries, are more likely to be people with (apparently) solid futures: medical students, engineers, etc. (Sorry I don’t have a link.) I found it surprising. Presumably that group of people has some sort of strain that pushes them, not just to violence, but right out of their own country.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Luke Cage trailer looks quite compelling!
Hate talk radio/print and other media are all guilty of fomenting radicalism which, as you say, is statistically to be anticipated. Of course, no purveyors of that sludge ever see themselves as complicit.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: Based on my reading, I think Nichols would probably include them in his formulation.
What I think your comment points towards though, which I didn’t address in the post as it is tangential – for now, is that a number of these acts fit into more than one category. For instance, Kaczynski’s acts fit within both terrorism and serial murder. The DC/cross country spree killers murders fit into both spree killing and terrorism. Nidal Hasan and the San Bernadino shooters both fit within terrorism and workplace related violence/murder. A number of these folks also are identified after the fact of having an untreated mental problem: Kaczynski, Roof, one of the Columbine shooters, the shooter in Munich last month, etc.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@redshirt:
Yes, this would have been much more effective as a stream of 800 tweets.
Manyakitty
Wow, this is fascinating. I hope you will continue to share this as your research develops.
redshirt
@West of the Rockies (been a while): A bullet proof black man? It’s the Authority’s greatest fear, I think.
Manyakitty
Also, I feel like this directly applies to the MRA/gamergate crowd.
Adam L Silverman
@nutella: Its the same process. In these cases what they’re getting pitched is the second half of the tawheed doctrine: one can only be a true Muslim if one lives where tawheed has been established, so immigrate to the caliphate.
redshirt
@Steeplejack (tablet): Hashtag #IKNORITE
Adam L Silverman
@Steeplejack (tablet): I got “it’s” right. I expect huzzahs!!!!
max
@Adam L Silverman: I wrote part of my comparative religion master’s thesis on Aum Shinrikyo.
Please do: I do not know enough about the dude, although he’s a very interesting figure.
OP: Rather it is that those who are already primed to (inaccurately) believe that Secretary Clinton has gotten away with several murders, has escaped responsibility for the deaths of US personnel, been allowed to evade criminal responsibility time and time again, and is rigging the general election to steal it from Trump and the real Americans that are backing him will hear what they want to hear in the message.
Yes. Unfortunately, the collective freakout about Trump’s comments today (considering the ‘Second Amendment remedy’ meme has been making the rounds for awhile) is basically delivering the message for him – much like the dark valorization of mass shooters is spreading their message. Which is not what we actually want here.
max
[‘But you go to war with the media you have, not the media you want.’]
Mnemosyne
@nutella:
I saw a really interesting article about Mohammed Atta that said that he was an intelligent guy who was a trained engineer, but he had a really hard time finding a steady job, in part because he was difficult to get along with. That would fit in with the “Lost Boys” theory — he lashed out because his life was not turning out the way he was told it would, and it must be someone else’s fault.
slag
Sorry, Nichols, it’s hard to hear you through all that sexism.
Mnemosyne
@slag:
Do you think he’s wrong when he says they’re emotionally immature? Because that’s what I got from the phrase.
Peale
@redshirt: 11 things about #radicals. You won’t believe what the government says about #7.
Mary G
Rebecca Traister wrote an article in NY Mag about the fact that almost every one of these guys starts out with domestic abuse.
Adam L Silverman
@Mary G: There is a lot of that. McVeigh had a terrible family life growing up, as did Rudolph. Its harder to suss out sometimes for some of the foreign born actors because building the biographic case is hampered because of place of origin.
slag
@Mnemosyne: Masculinity and responsibility/emotional maturity/restraint have nothing to do with each other in the world in which I live.
redshirt
@Peale: Number 6 is 666 Worship.
Can U Dig?
Mnemosyne
@Manyakitty:
Emotionally immature jackasses who lash out because they’re not getting what they think they “deserve”? What would make you think that? ;-)
A few months ago, I found a really interesting series of posts that posited that PUAs are seeking out women with personality disorders just like Mom (or Dad) had because, like many people from emotionally abusive homes, they were trying to “repair” that bad parental relationship by re-creating it in a romantic relationship. It almost made them pitiable. Almost.
Manyakitty
@Mnemosyne: That is the most sympathetic explanation I’ve heard yet. The PUA “community” and its auxiliaries are dangerously contagious, and they seem to have a platform.
Now I want to see where Adam goes and apply it to them.
Mnemosyne
@slag:
The problem is, what Nichols is discussing is primarily a male problem (Adam named one female exception up above). You can’t really discuss it in a gender-neutral way without losing the fact that males are the primary perpetrators.
Nichols is saying that “masculinity” is supposed to designate maturity and adulthood, but that somehow these guys are stuck in an immature male identity. Saying that women can be adults, too, is kind of missing his entire point about mature vs. immature males and how/why immature males lash out in violent ways.
Lizzy L
@srv: Ugly comment. Seriously twisted. I think I’ve had enough tonight. Goodnight all.
TheMightyTrowel
There’s actually been some really interesting sociological work looking at the radicalisation of engineers. Links to black and white, solutions-focussed thinking, as well as to heightened efforts at recruitment due to their skills.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: There are more women, but not too many. Even when you include the female cadre within the Black Tiger unit of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam. What we tend to see historically is that women are the transmitters of the neutralizations for extremism and radicalism, rather than those that accept them and then drift into extremism and terrorism.
MattF
Here’s something interesting. Using the Twitter API, analysis shows that Trump account tweets from Android are much more ‘Trumpy’ than tweets from iPhone. Hypothesis is that Donald himself tweets with Android and his staff tweets with iPhone.
Adam L Silverman
@TheMightyTrowel: Thanks!
Mnemosyne
@Manyakitty:
MRAs and PUAs are basically guys whose construction of masculinity means that they have to be dominant and manipulative of everyone around them, or else they’re not “real men.” I think that what Adam’s saying is that a lot of these hashtag terrorists have a similar belief, but it displays some serious emotional immaturity.
Can I say again how grateful I am that I managed to marry a guy who worked through all of this bullshit and doesn’t give a fuck whether or not some other dude thinks he’s a “real man”?
Adam L Silverman
@MattF: I saw that the other day.
Omnes Omnibus
Another related/unrelated factor is a tendency for young adult males to look for some outlet to prove themselves – not necessarily to others but to themselves. Hell, I joined the army because I wanted to see it I could do OCS and Airborne School – challenging but not out of the park. A couple of guys who were in OCS with me had drooped out of college to join the Special Forces because of a similar motivation. For a good number of young men, there are social acceptable methods to do that combo of thrill seeking and proving one’s self. Not everyone has that outlet. Even those of us who had that outlet sometimes found doing stupid and dangerous things appealing just to see if we could do it.
Chris
@nutella:
Yeah, I think this is a common observation – that a lot of terrorists have historically come from comfortable backgrounds, if not wealthy then at least middle class, be it the “red” Euroterrorists of the seventies and eighties, or a lot of jihadists today as you mention in your comment.
I don’t think there’s ever been a definitive explanation for this phenomenon. But one of the more common theories is that poor and working people simply have better shit to do – like figuring out where their next meal’s coming from – than to delve deeply into political activism of any kind.
Uncle Cosmo
Your post brought to mind Sennett & Cobb’s The Hidden Injuries of Class (1993) because of their comments on the permeability of boundaries in the rarely-admitted US class structure in comparison to the classic* European-style structure.
In the old European class system, boundaries were essentially impermeable: Who you are & how far you can rise (or fall) is determined by the class you were born in. This allowed lower-class individuals to attribute their failure to rise to the limits of their aspirations abilities to the structure itself, which was psychologically healthy (or at least non unhealthy).
In the US we maintain the belief that anyone can rise to the limits of their aspirations & abilities. We ignore the fact that only a very small percentage of lower-class individuals have the abilities and the luck to rise. But those lucky few are held up by society to the majority who have failed to rise like a taunt: S/he made it, what’s wrong with you that you didn’t? IOW society deflects the responsibility for failing to rise away from the collective (the class structure itself) toward the individual, who internalizes his/her disappointments as her/his own damn fault.
In some ways you might interpret the outbursts of white lower-class anger as coming from the growing understanding of how badly the odds are stacked against them, & the corresponding refusal to blame themselves (or put another way, to take responsibility for their own failures). They want to externalize the blame. And the obvious place to put the blame is on those who are perceived to be rising in much greater percentages than they “should be” & to their white liberal enablers who routinely put their thumbs on the scales. (Conveniently overlooking how much racism benefited them historically; as someone has recently famously pointed out, when you’ve been enjoying a position of privilege, equality feels like opression.)
I offer this as perhaps bearing on why these days, the aggrieved white lower classes seem to be more apt to act out their frustrations: they’re no longer buying the notion that it’s all their fault.
*Pun unintended but I’ll accept the award on behalf of my subconscious
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Exactly. One of the strain issues for McVeigh was that he didn’t make it through Ranger school (might have been the Green Beret Q course, can’t remember right now). He apparently got sick just before the start, tried to push through it. In his mind this failure, combined with the tax related problems that were created when the Army messed up his withholding and the IRS’s unwillingness to work with him (feeling he was mistreated as a Desert Storm veteran) were contributing drivers to his radicalization.
Uncle Cosmo
@srv: Can’t be said too often: FUCK OFF & DIE, SHITSTAIN!
Mnemosyne
I’m going to make what is on the surface going to seem like a really weird and unrelated movie recommendation: Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor. It’s constructed as a lurid mystery set in a psych ward (very lurid!) but it has some really interesting things to say about how American men are basically forced into impossible situations and then break when they can’t handle them.
It’s weird and hallucinogenic and sometimes a little off-putting, but it’s fascinating.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Adam L Silverman:
I was mocking redshirt’s short-attention-span reductionism (or joining his snark, if it was that).
You are upping your it’s game—one out of three—so kudos for that. You got it in your ** postscript but missed it in your very first sentence and lower down in “whether its ranting and raving.”
Don’t get me wrong; it’s a great post that expands on the reading I have been doing on stochastic terrorism. But the copy editor’s eye can’t unsee what it sees.
Also:
ETA: Huzzah! Not snarking. Great post, as I said.
slag
@Mnemosyne: Unconvincing.
First, associating masculinity with responsibility/restraint/”adult”ness while infantilizing femininity has a long rich tradition, which ultimately descends into toxic masculinity and the devaluation of both men and women in different ways.
Second, hippies. Hippies don’t do this shit. Is that because hippies are traditionally masculine? I wouldn’t think so. And yet, they’re fully capable of devaluing their strain.
In fact, I might argue that traditional masculinity is more the problem with these dudes than the solution.
Manyakitty
@Mnemosyne: Yep. Also, you are lucky. I fear that my boyfriend is falling victim to that line of thinking and it’s tragic, especially in a 48 year old man.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
One of my high school boyfriends used to build pipe bombs for fun and blow them up in the woods. He later became a volunteer firefighter in rural WI, where younger kids would set grass fires out of boredom.
And though my brothers claim they don’t remember shooting bottle rockets at their friends out of the windows of our house, I’m pretty sure they’re lying.
Adam L Silverman
@Steeplejack (tablet): Fixed!
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: That’s more Institutional Anomie theory. See Crime and the American Dream by Messner and Rosenfeld.
http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/book_review_angulski_crime_and_the_american_dream_ijc_april_2013.pdf
robert thompson
@Omnes Omnibus: Absolutely, a vision quest if you will. I did it by backpacking in the Sierra Nevada. It taught me a lot about myself. But I am also thinking there is no male mentor establishment today. No more Elks Club or Rotary that grooms young men, as if they were junior partners on a hunt, and it is a male phenomenon, takes them under the wing and gradually introduces them into the environment where they will get their sea legs and hopefully flourish. Life is too solitary and compartmentalized and so they self radicalize from a chauvinist base and bring all that toxin with them. Who has an answer for that?
Mnemosyne
@slag:
??? Really, you’ve never run into a sexist hippie? You’re a lucky woman, then.
Also, Weather Underground, Earth Liberation Front — there are plenty of dudes out there who would consider themselves “hippies” who are actually violent extremists who blow things up or set them on fire.
I don’t disagree that toxic masculinity is the problem, but you have to name it AND name the alternative. In Nichols’ construction, the alternative to the immature “Lost Boys” and their construction of masculinity is the constructive, mature masculinity that he describes.
I know it’s weird but, really, I don’t think women/femininity really enter into this at all. It’s something the guys need to work on and, at least from what I’m reading in the Nichols article, he’s not setting it up as masculine good, feminine bad, but contrasting different types of masculinity.
Miss Bianca
@Joel: Hey, I *was* watching “Luther”just a few weeks back – I consider “The Wire” almost light fare compared to that! (so far, anyway!)
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: For McVeigh, it was failing the Q. Me, because the army stuff in a line arty unit wasn’t that much, I drove way too fast on German roads while refusing to wear a seatbelt because that was cheating. I skied shit that I should not have skied. I volunteered for French commando school, but our unit lost the bid. Plus, sport sex. None of those things were approved of by the very petit bourgeois morality of the US Army, but neither were they condemned for single officers. That outlet, that diversion from a path that my fellow undergrads followed – med school, law school, PhD, banking, Big 6 accounting*, helped me a lot. I was lucky that I had it.
*Big 6 dates me.
Mnemosyne
@Manyakitty:
G is currently working on his master’s degree so he can become a librarian, so, yes, I am quite lucky. ?
redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus: Praise Be Brother! We’ve all got skin in this game.
Manyakitty
@Mnemosyne: Awesome!
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Thanks, couldn’t remember if it was the Q course or Ranger School.
cynthia ackerman
Not going to link because this phone makes a naked link in any case, TPM quotes Michael Hayden saying Trump should know he’s responsible for what people hear, not what he says. That is such an important qualification for POTUS which no one seems ready to ascribe to DJT.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
Does the PDF include a scene with the main character stumbling into the “nympho ward” by mistake?
I rest my case. ?
slag
@Mnemosyne: There is a difference between blowing up things and blowing up people. And Weather Underground and ELA don’t fit the lone wolf formulation. If we’re going to expand the conversation to include anyone who acts out in destructive ways for any reason, then, well, we’re going to have to include boys, girls, trans, you name it.
Nichols is right that there is a type, and it is primarily a male one. But traditional concepts of masculinity are a big part of the problem, so reinforcing them—intentionally or otherwise—is probably not the solution we are looking for.
Miss Bianca
@Uncle Cosmo: Yeah, but here’s what has me confused: on the one hand, in your “European class structure” model, the working-class male’s tendency to externalize – blame the system – you cite as heatlthily outer-directed. But then the working-class males of the American structure – where the story we tell ourselves is that class barriers are permeable- who lash out are not inclined to buy the story that they are the ones to “blame” if they don’t make it – but, rather taking it out on society.
So, what makes for the difference in a healthy acceptance of – or dissatisfaction with – the strictures that “The System” places on us and our personal ambitions, and an unhealthy one?
I’m not sure this even makes sense…
cynthia ackerman
Moderation hell again?
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: Highly unlikely.
Psych1
Suicide is usually an act of anger solely directed inward. If we were able to intervene and help prevent that act, how many would have then gone on to direct that anger outward toward others? We cannot know the answer but I believe quite a lot. In fact, many violent terrorist type acts are suicidal acts with the added external feature.
If that is true, what does that say about prevention/intervention efforts and policy?
Adam L Silverman
@cynthia ackerman: Actually it wound up in the trash, not sure why.
Mnemosyne
@slag:
I’m not sure that conceptualizing masculinity as “responsibility/emotional maturity/restraint” is inherently destructive but I don’t think we’re going to agree on that.
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: Heh?
Mnemosyne
@slag:
Okay, here’s the guy I was thinking of: the animal rights activist who murdered Pim Fortuyn. Not exactly a right-winger.
scav
Seems like this has been, well, something between outsourced or embodied in publicly recognized institutions by the faux middle “both sides do it” Faux Balance style of journalism. It also certainly seems to play out in every comment thread in the usual below article cess-pits.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: That those characteristics are definitionally male.
Prescott Cactus
@Amaranthine RBG: So true. Thanks Adam !
@Omnes Omnibus:
As the owner of a 36″ tube Sony, I would suggest adjusting horizontal and vertical hold. YMMV
Mnemosyne
@Psych1:
I don’t know if you’ve read Carol Tavris’s classic book The Mismeasure of Woman, but she has a great chapter in there about how men get screwed by the construction of clinical depression as “feminine” even though men are far more likely to attempt and succeed at suicide.
As someone else mentioned above, there can also be a tie-in between suicide and domestic violence, like when a (usually) guy murders his whole family and then kills himself.
different-church-lady
@Adam L Silverman: meh — for me, a page and a half of Proust and I’m down like a baby.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think Nichols thinks of them as definitionally adult, and since males are the group under discussion, they’re defined as “masculine” for his purposes. Because his focus is so narrow, I honestly don’t think you can broaden it out to being reflective of him having a poor opinion of women or an opposite definition of femininity.
Obviously, the mileage of others varies, so we should all go watch Shock Corridor instead.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: No, I am saying that his assumption of “male” is off base.
Ian
@srv:
I get that you are the in-house troll, but you do get WHY that violent rhetoric is a bad thing, right?
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
But do you think it automatically discredits everything else he says in the essay? I say no, slag seems to say yes.
I think he got a little too tied up in his own rhetorical constructions and didn’t mean for the reader to start reading women into being the automatic opposite of everything he says about “masculinity.” I’m willing to gloss over it because I think the rest of it is valuable.
JordanRules
@Uncle Cosmo: Really appreciated this comment.
I love Paul Newman’s acknowledgement of luck and I love to imagine that this could be part of a solution for avoiding violence and getting better perceptions of great human living and pursuits.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
…. aaaand now that I started picking the fight, I’m heading off to sleep. Sorry to be lame like that.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: You are doing your thing of expanding on what people said. I said what I said. I leave it there.
Ruckus
@Uncle Cosmo:
Could I recommend Cleek’s pie filter or Troll Be Gone? Saves having to read assholes like SRV, helps control your blood pressure and makes the world a better place. Not that your comment is unnecessary or out of line though, and if you enjoy it, carry on!
FlyingToaster
@Mnemosyne: I can attest to the “entitlement” mindset.
Professionally, once upon a time, I would build templates for companies to pour training content into. And then I would train their otherwise “redundant” workers to pour said content into said templates.
One of the guys (ex DEC) was really pissed at me for being a) female b) architect of the the engine c) knowing more than him and d) not being married or having kids or acting like a woman.
I didn’t put up with him (didn’t have to, I was a contractor/consultant and any shit he gave me was getting reported up the line, and by my immediate “report-to”), but I did one day take him down for coffee and explain the fucking rules to him so he didn’t get fired.
Which was a) born that way, jackass b) that’s what I do for a living, analyze a problem in line to simulating it or demonstrating its solution for training c) busted my ass in college and grad school and my first job after which I went freelance because I’m a very good expert and a suck-ass employee d) not interested in divorce, so I’ll wait until I find Mister Right, not Mister Right-Now. My tits weren’t disappearing, and my brain wouldn’t stop working, and our mutual boss was ready to can his ass for making their ISO 9000 operation into a hostile workplace. I finished up a month later with no further to-do, and I have no idea what happened out there — the company eventually got bought, but I didn’t try to keep in touch with the personnel.
There are a lot of guys who think they’re entitled to success, whether they get the breaks or no. Most women are trained to recognize the phrase “shit happens”, and most adults (male or female) are familiar with the idea that no [battle] plan survives encounter with [an enemy] reality intact. It’s the ones who never learn that lesson who become dangerous.
Prescott Cactus
@cynthia ackerman:
Adam L Silverman
@FlyingToaster: Also, the enemy always gets a vote!
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
I think you are correct.
I typed out a long screed but I want to think about my comments before posting. Maybe tomorrow.
Miss Bianca
@FlyingToaster:
Word. Particularly that last bit.
jl
@The Dangerman: Scalia determined that the militia clause has no more meaning than clearing one’s throat before speaking. According to Scalia and the other corrupt reactionaries on the Supreme Court, the Framers could have written ‘cough cough’ in there and it would mean the same.
Prescott Cactus
Ted Kaczynski: solid middle class upbringing in a lily white suburb of Chicago. Went to the same High School, but graduated a decade apart.
Upon learning of his adventures we often kidded that it wasn’t surprising that our High School had produced the Unibomber, but that someone from our school actually got accepted to Harvard. . .
Ruckus
@FlyingToaster:
Very true.
Ruckus
@Prescott Cactus:
Similar situation. Went to school with someone who is still in jail 40+ yrs later for a rather famous murder. She sure didn’t seem out of place in school or church and was quite popular. Only difference is that it was a big surprise that someone would go from her upbringing/school etc to murder. The Harvard part? Yeah that would seem to be a stretch for my HS as well.
Major Major Major Major
@Prescott Cactus: @Ruckus: Has it been discussed on the thread that the CIA had a hand in inventing the Unabomber?
Kaczynski was literally an MK Ultra subject in an experiment that sought to see what happened when you isolated and broke young brilliant men.
Steve in the ATL
@Mnemosyne:
Isn’t that a fundamental requirement of being an engineer? Hyperbole, of course, but I have spent a shitload of time around engineers and their people skills are universally bad.
No offense to the engineers here on BJ, of course!
Anne Laurie
@Mnemosyne:
In other words, they’re Hall Monitors — with guns, and mobs to back them up.
It’s not that they’re not bad people! They just want everyone to live their lives the RIGHT way!…
But the #Hashtag Terrorists are the opposite of bullies; they’re the sad little men who could never get that all-important Hall Monitor Sash, with the bitchin’ merit badges & bling. They’ve often grown up as the targets of bullies — which they end up externalizing as Political Correctness or Social Justice Warriors or Godless Atheists. They would have been, they’re sure, super good at enforcing the codes, if not for the evil-minded interference of outside forces, sapping their vital bodily fluids!….
To put it another way: Bullies are Saruman, or Wormtongue, or even poor deluded Boromir. #Hashtag Terrorists are Gollum, reduced to pale wraiths lusting after a lost “Precious” they could neither use nor walk away from.
Anne Laurie
@Mnemosyne:
It’s not that complicated. Organisms like the environment they’ve grown up in, even when that environment is toxic. People who grow up in dysfunctional / violent families seek out others from similar backgrounds, because — to paraphrase a character on Northern Exposure — sometimes it’s just easier when you don’t have to explain why your half-brother is also both your cousin and your uncle. That’s why there’s a rueful joke among ACOAs, that we have a mark on our foreheads visible only to other ACOAs (adult children of alcoholics).
Anne Laurie
@Chris
There’s at least one popular comedian — Chris Rock? — who ‘explained’ that Black people historically didn’t turn into lone wolf terrorists because those guys feel like they’re losers who’ve failed their life test. But people of color (and, I’d add, women) figure that every day they’re alive makes them “winners” in a world that keeps signalling how much it wants them dead.
The monologue started along the lines of “Middle-class white men, if they’re not president, they’re already losers… “
Steve Finlay
I think we also can try to figure out how the nature of social media and the Internet promote certain kinds of thought and behaviour, and discourage others. We need these media tools analyzed with the same level of brilliance and detail that Neil Postman applied to television in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death. Postman’s fundamental insight (which he credits to Marshall McLuhan, who never could express it clearly) was that tools, especially media and communications tools, are not in any way neutral: They have an inherent nature which demands that they be used in certain ways, and then using those tools in those ways can change the very nature of our thought.
Anne Laurie
@Steve in the ATL:
The meatspace social group I’ve been loosely affiliated with since we were in college contains a lot of engineers, including a couple actual rocket scientists. Many of them (us) come from what could charitably be called less-than-optimal family backgrounds. It’s a forty-year standing joke how many people become engineers because they crave situations where, as long as you input the numbers correctly, you’ll always get the same answer. Other humans just aren’t as predictable!
Elizabelle
Looks great, Adam. Pulled down the Tom Nichols article and saved this thread. Not sure I will harsh my mellow by reading it this sparkling morning, but will read it in time.
Ryan
“The common denominator for all of these men, as well as for Dylann Roof, Micah Xavier Johnson, Rizwan Sayeed Farook, and others from even farther back in time such as Timothy McVeigh, Eric Robert Rudolph, Shelley Shannon (a woman), and Ted Kaczynski, is the need to alleviate their strain.”
I guess the question I have at this specific point is that, casting as wide a net as you have with these specific people, I wonder, how is this falsifiable? How do you know if you are wrong, and what are the alternatives for someone. I am specifically thinking of Timothy McVeigh, but in general.
J R in WV
@Adam L Silverman:
I’m not sure. The contraction for [ it is ] uses the apostrophe = Now it’s time to go.
But the possessive does not= its color was black and menacing.
I have to think which it is to be sure I have it right. Not that big a deal on a blog, unless you want to reuse that text in something for a magazine, like LGM does, where it matters a little more.
PaulWartenberg2016
This essay absolutely spells out the foundation of what I call “Angry Guy Syndrome”. I am going to have to steal this.
marduk
@Adam L Silverman: You can check out Bruce Sterling’s description here.
Ruckus
@Anne Laurie:
I’m not sure that people like the situation they grew up in but a lot of times they just don’t know any different. That’s how life was for them, it must be that way for everyone. It takes a bit of self awareness to see that what you had can be changed to something else and that your life was not the way it should be. Recognition and the ability to change are not traits that everyone has.
Ruviana
Really interesting essay. Adam, what you called “social” with asterisks, we anthropologists call “culture” and includes all the subcategories. :)
Miss Bianca
OK, so now that I’ve had a chance to have some coffee and read a bit more thoroughly, this part leaps out at me:
There are a lot of blame vectors here (I’m not sure that’s really the term I want…I haven’t had enough coffee to feel sure), but the Supreme Court and the media have definitely played nefarious roles in perpetuating and normalizing the conditions you lay out above. The Heller decision, as far as I’m concerned, ranks as judicial malfeasance, whilst the media’s love affair with hating on the Clintons and puffing up Trump has created the conditions for a perfect shit storm. I’m trying not to be afraid, here, but I do hope at the very least that Donald Trump finds himself under the Secret Service equivalent of a citation and warning – that any further “jokes” of this nature are going to be considered outright incitement to assassination, and he’ll be placed under arrest.
I also hope for a horsie of my very own.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruviana: I generally use socio-cultural. Sometimes culture. But for most criminologists, the bulk of whom are also sociologists, its social. I’m not a sociologist, but I am a criminologist. And for the better part of the past decade I’ve been doing cultural operations, research, and support work for the military. The only DOD definition of culture is basically the 19th century social anthropological one that covers everything rather than something like the thin slice of human activities a la Gertz.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: The end point of Heller, that there is an explicit enumerated right within the parameters of the 2nd Amendment, to privately keep and bear arms for self defense is not outside the boundaries for the different historical positions of it. Though it was always the minority judicial interpretation. Where Justice Scalia went off the rails, as he usually did, was in the historical analysis he tried to concoct to get himself there.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: You know, you have prompted me to go back and actually read a summary of the text of Scalia’s majority opinion – only to find, to my dawning horror, that I apparently haven’t had enough coffee to make any sense of it. The logic of this decision strikes me as even more tortuous and contrived than I remember – I’m not sure I really *can* follow it.
This paragraph here is the kicker –
Is he really trying to claim that restrictions on certain types of firearms constitute “pronouncing the Second Amendment extinct”? It’s really “all or none at all”? *That* was how it struck me at the time, and that that was, for the so-called “originalist”, the real distortion of the historical record. But I could be wrong.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: No. He left the reasonable regulation caveats in place in the Heller decision, as well as the later MacDonald ruling. What he’s doing is picking a fight with a strawman that either the 2nd Amendment has some continued relevance and should continue to exist even though conservative legal theory argues its two clauses are separate, distinct, and the whole is not the result of the sum of the two parts or the 2nd Amendment is an outdated, 18th century artifact and should be read out of the Constitution by judicial review. The issue isn’t this binary and neither is the history or historiography except among the 2nd Amendment absolutist community and their conservative legal scholar supporters.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Ah, got it! thanks for the clarification.
btw, I’d never heard the term “stochastic terrorism” until you used it, and now I’m seeing it pop up all over the place today, specifically in the context of seeing Trump’s call on “2nd Amendment folks” as part of the ongoing campaign of anti-abortion and anti-feminist rhetoric and violence.