A new study reveals that shifting attitudes and social media platforms have created a permissive environment where acts of violence are celebrated and emulated.
We will see a rise in left wing political violence now that cancel culture is not an effective way to silence and intimidate those deemed objectionable.
The ability to cancel people and exert such tremendous power and influence on society has fundamentally changed some of these people’s expectations and given rise to a sense of entitlement to control what people believe and how they act.
I agree with your post, but I would add that all the threats I have received on Substack originated from sites identified as "conservative," and the threats were pervaded with antisemitism and misogyny. I have no doubt that I will at some point attract threats from "the left" as well, as I don't pander to extremists of any ideology.
I was recently "defriended" for asking, in a FB post, why not donate to someone's medical expenses, as opposed to a wealthy assassin's futile defense fund? This former colleague was also enraged when I responded to hysteria that no, Trump was not going to stop international students from entering the country.
This man is a professor, btw. He harassed me in a d.m. over a post with QUOTES from various black people about defunding the police, including the grandmother of an infant slain in gang crossfire, which brought two non-white detectives to my apartment seeking access to street camera footage. This "professor" wrote: "I'm afraid to work with you" -- because I posted black people's opinions on defunding police....I hadn't even (and generally don't) posted my own words on the matter.
Anyway, I'm "hateful" for trying to get him to calm down over his unfounded fear of losing international students. I'm "hateful" for questioning throwing money at a wealthy assassin's defense fund.
This "professor" claims that "health insurance denial killed (his)father," ergo....so he's a victim, and 99% of his posts are victim-oriented, which I find intriguing given this person is supposed to be a grown man...
Even more acute, I responded to his private message that if he can't look at something objectively, he shouldn't be teaching. (Are we not supposed to evaluate the quality of the argument, and not the opinion, after all?)
I said that in order to do that, one needs to listen to the primary sources. Has he listened to Trump talk about immigration policy? On Rogan? With Musk? And decided based on that what to worry about?
He scoffed at this, with ad hominim response. What angel dust was I smoking? Objectivity? Musk? Rogan???
Which rested my case.
In the meantime, I've become concerned about this person's teaching, and predilection towards to the authoritarianism you mention in this essay. Because he's clearly expressing those traits. Harassing me for posting what isn't even my opinion -- and an ethical question aligned with common professorial questions -- is deeply concerning.
Even more so, that my objective teaching was jettisoned -- I'm gone -- but they kept this dangerous person.
Here's a better alternative to murder: enact single payer universal medicare: this will save people money, improve everyone's health, increase life expectencies, and lower the risk of bankruptcies. Put the Medical Insurance companies out of business! It's worked in every industrial country except in the U.S.A., where it hasn't actually been tried.
It's a mixed bag in other countries, like Canada, where a woman had to get a leg amputated while waiting too long for corrective measures after knee replacement.
You can't allow unbridled immigration and government health insurance.
I was treated for a serious illness while living in S. Korea, where I had no health insurance, and it may even have been the case that there wasn't any. I paid the equivalent of $15 for each doctor visit (every other week) which included the blood tests. As a "foreigner" I paid slightly more than a Korean citizen for the same service. I got a wisdom tooth pulled for FIVE DOLLARS. Later, in the US, the second wisdom tooth extraction cost upwards of a thousand (covered by insurance, thankfully). And that came with far more painkillers than necessary. (I don't remember how I made it through the first one -- I don't think they gave me anything for it?)
I read that the expenses have escalated because of insurance companies and the administration that they require. Allegedly, patients were billed directly by the doctors. Food for thought.
No matter what, though, murdering CEO's is not going to solve the problem.
"Policymakers, educators, platforms, and community leaders must work in unison to restore the moral boundaries against violent extremism."
It is concerning that society is shifting towards violence as a solution to systemic corruption and abuse. But it's easy to see why, though certainly not excusable, when our public officials and institutions no longer serve the community or the justice it seeks.
But it's equally concerning that these incidents may be used by policymakers as an excuse to further control social media and other online interactions. It's also worth considering whether the incidents themselves and/or the extreme amount of mainstream coverage they receive is not intentionally generated for just such a purpose. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.
I completely agree, the problem brings "solutions" that at the same time brings even more problems, and the cycle continues.
Why we are leaving the responsibility to the "public services" instead of the families?... Right, because the concept of family nowadays is broken with all the disfuncional parenting .
Mental-illness among young men plays a critical role in understanding this type of action. Although studies suggest that females experience more depression and mental illness, I would probably argue that male depression and mental illness is more covert and female depression and mental illness is more overt, essentially eliminating any such idea that females somehow experience more mental-illness than males. (This observation does not excuse Mangione's action in any way. It does, however, require us to start looking much more deeply at our nation's sons, who are turning to more substances and more likely to engage in this type of behavior.)
The 15-year-old female shooter at the Christian school in Wisconsin, for instance, is an outlier.
When we actually look at outcomes (things like suicide, addiction and overdose deaths, alcohol deaths, pain medication, mass shootings, and medication for ADD/ADHD), it is overwhelmingly male. It's not happening because they're toxic. It's happening because our culture is shifting away from things like sex-differences and the fallout of thousands of young men who are lost and purposeless.
It appears Mangione was encouraged by the anti-capitalist philosophy of modern education, the addictive nature of social media, and who knows what else to carry out this planned and orchestrated attack. All of this fed into him specifically because there is little doubt his mental state was compromised to say the least.
There must have also been a thrill for him that appealed to the more male nature of risk taking, even reckless risk taking.
Although words are not violence, encouraging powerful violence is certainly more likely for people who spend hours on social media and in silos of thought that only amps them up.
I would classify greed as a universal human weakness that varies in degree among individuals. It is classified as a sin or spiritual obstacle in Christianity, Buddhism, and other of the world religious philosophies.
The overwhelming majority of murders, as well as violent crimes generally, are committed by boys and men between the ages of about 15-35. I don't doubt, however, that women would egg on mob violence and join in with it, as history provides many such examples.
Colin, huge numbers of Americans are rightfully frustrated, angry, outraged by the financialized US "health care" non-system. The only way it functions systematically is to funnel huge amounts of money to corporations like United Healthcare, whose very nature is driven to increase profits by limiting care. Look at the favorable response to the murder of this UHC CEO as akin to peasant support for Robin Hood, as a rare turning of the tables. UHC murders people as a matter of course, silently, in a manner unseen by the general public: "it's just business." Luigi Mangione murdered the CEO publicly. The score is still thousands against one. The only surprise here is that this hasn't happened more often (the great fear of the unaccountable billionaire class, hidden behind private security, walled compounds, and private jets), and your failure to understand the to totally understandable. Don't make out like this is some "left wing" thing: I guarantee that plenty of Trump voters had the same visceral reaction to this rare event: "the bastards had it coming." Instead of worrying about what's being said on social media - an approach all too akin to that of the censorship squad that has squelched open debate on "gender" madness and the response to Covid, how about focusing on the rapacious Medical-Pharma "industry" that so ill-serves us?
The people I know under say age 35 who live entirely online are all in on Luigimania, it makes them feel edgy and alive, he is the newest cool meme; the people I know who are adults with jobs and kids have barely mentioned it, except to say how ugly and stupid it is.
But if there's any silver lining here, the people who live online are also the kind of people who are too fearful to even look you in the eye and spend most of their time outside avoiding conflict and mumbling apologies. The closest they get to a radical political act is stealing a Netflix password.
Luigi is just another shiny new toy for the bored lost souls of the internet age to play with—it makes sense that they would cheer someone cowardly shooting a man in the back and running away, they are timid and conflict-averse even in their revolutionary fantasies.
It does seem to me, though, that the "newest cool meme" becomes progressively more immoral, vile and cruel. And at the same time, there is more and more despicable, cruel, cowardly violence being committed by crazy people "acting individually," as the media says. Our social fabric is unraveling very rapidly, violent rhetoric and certain kinds of violent actions are both increasing, and there is a sense that we are circling the drain of morality. Not only the feeling of anger, and verbal expression of anger, but acts of violence are being disinhibited because our civilization is collapsing.
This is a very disturbing trend. I think it's a sign that society has gone off the rails when a majority of young people believe a cold-blooded, pre-meditated MURDER is justified and even laudable.
Further, it would be interesting to contrast the opinions of those same people with respect to Daniel Penny.
The conflicts between the principle of freedom of speech and the need to reduce physical violence continue to escalate. Threatening violence against specific people is a crime. It can be reported to law enforcement, but my impression is that reports are often not made, because the recipients of these threats have no confidence that action will be taken on their reports. As
Dr. Wright stated in the article, journalists and other people who have spoken about various subjects have been targeted by threats of rape, torture and death on multiple occasions. I personally have received death and torture threats since I began commenting on Substack a couple years ago and did not report them for the above reason. Reporting threats can increase risk to victims if law enforcement takes no action against the people making the threats.
Unfortunately, no amount of law and its enforcement can stop the generational increases we are seeing in sociopathic attitudes and behaviors.
Yes, I don't think that we can reverse the downhill trend of our civilization unless a higher level of order is restored to "the public square." Children need limits and structure to mature as human beings, a significant part of which involves learning to inhibit their darker impulses.
Great piece, but you left out any mention of where on the political spectrum glorification of the CEO murderer is coming from. It’s coming overwhelmingly from the Left.
“Bluesky, widely lauded by political progressives as a kinder and friendlier alternative to X/Twitter, now exhibits the highest justification rates for the UHC CEO’s murder (78 percent), surpassing even extremist platforms like Gab and 4chan.”
This was a very shallow, not properly analized and useless article. Comments as well. First question to ask which was not asked and answered that, social media or anything else is just a medium between a very united, raged masses and some groups. SMs are just mirroring it. Writing an article describing how people write violence messages on sm but not why, is just waste of our valuable time. Please stop writing
There is a glaring absence in this piece which makes Wright's notion of "dialogue and mutual respect" into a farce. Wright also mentions "diminished personal agency" as if this applies only to peasants committing potential acts of violence.
What about the everyday acts of violence committed at a distance by men (and a few women) who prioritise profit over the values of care and self-sacrifice that doctors and health workers have embodied for centuries? What about all those deaths, and the years of disabled life, committed by enforcing lesser standards of, or denial of health care? (and poor quality housing, public education and UHP food and erosion of environmental protections)
There is a real "urgency [to]initiatives that reinforce the bonds of civic trust" but that won't come about when by attempting to enforce a vision of personal agency and mutual respect as envisaged in this post. That amounts to nothing but obedience and deference, even obeisance, to corporates however they behave.
There is a younger generation on both sides of the political aisle who have tried a wide variety of legitimate political actions which have had little or no impact on the decline in their living standards (leaving aside the tidal wave of consumer crap) or in ensuring a better future. People do have agency and if think they have no future, violence becomes a solution.
Word aren’t violence, though trans often would have us believe so, they aren’t tantamount and are don’t reflect actions taken by someone who clicks a survey.
We are witnessing a naturalistic test of the hypothesis that mass justification for violence will lead to increased rates of violent actions in the population.
I suspect it defuses violence. It’s the principal of the ancient Greek idea of κάθαρσις or catharsis. Once a violent act is abstracted into language, it tends to find closure for many people, which is an explanation of why rape declines as access to pornography increases.
The most violent and brutal mass violence, murders, tend to be isolated men, and the Jeffrey Dahmers , and Dean Coril’s (The Candyman) are comfortably in pre-internet era. if you’re psychotic, Internet is merely one trigger of many.
I suspect that what we may see are misogyny honeypots arise in the era of AI to redirect unreconstructed trolls away from ordinary social media.
If you’re not aware, web pages long ago created honeypots for spambots, and if you only had a single aggressive female-typed AI who engaged with online harassment they’d become fully occupied with what we used to call conversations with /dev/null
Sounds like the "honeypots" of which you speak are decoys. I was not aware that this went on, especially "long ago," whatever that term currently implies (18 months?). I like the image, like wasps circling a trap, getting stuck in it, and then having their brains rewired by the AI. Could be a new kind of "trans."
I often use violent words - “go fuck yourself” or “drop dead”. I reserve the calm “you can die now” for better friends, I’m a gentle giant so they are extremely incongruous and humorous.
Words of violence and death are omnipresent in language. The Red Queen from “Through the Looking Glass” shrieked “Off with their heads”, a children’s book.
Grimm’s Fairytales is saturated with beheadings, and all other manner of atrocities. It’s hard to read for me because it’s so surrealistically funny - the stepmother slams a trunk shot on her son, his head pops off, so she sets the body in a chair and puts the head back on. The daughter complains that the son won’t respond to her, the stepmother tells the daughter to slap him, which knocks the head off, then the stepmother punishes the daughter for killing her brother: where does it end!
A survey asking “Should Trump go fuck himself”, well you can imagine the results. Nobody literally means he should go fuck himself, because his obvious obesity would cause it to be difficult unless he is a closet contortionist, and I doubt if he has a sufficiently lengthy penis to close the loop so to speak given the incessant remarks made in Spy Magazine about his being a “short-fingered vulgarian” and his obvious insecurity. It’s a figure of speech.
“When it comes to CEO’s of Healthcare companies, should we ‘off with their heads’”? It’s a figure of speech, from the Red Queen.
“What do you call 1,000,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean”.
“A start.”
It’s a figure of speech.
Language isn’t violence, and public language doesn’t create violence any more than knives being sold at Williams-Sonoma creates stabbings.
Language especially on a cellphone - about as threatening as a stamp, or doily - is perhaps the most metaphorical of all. Nobody is present, nobody is seen, most are anonymous, and there are virtually no conceptual penalties.
We don’t use language in public forums limited by the possible outcomes of the most mentally deficient as to the greatest possible danger.
I don’t buy it, the hoo-ha over people scream-tapping a phone to “die all common bastards” is not going to cause an army of psychotics to run amok.
Jesse Singal is persecuted, clearly. Should BlueSky control that language? It depends on how they want to make money. They are a publisher, and if they want to publish crap, go for it, and lose revenue.
I found the entire debate most illuminating, that we know that the side is entirely run by trolls.
Most of the violence I have read online is not metaphorical and it makes those who receive it frightened and distressed.
Personally I believe and act on the basis that sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me - however IRL I avoid and reject "gentle giants" who play games with violent language. Who knows which player will turn out to be a thug?
That’s the point of online threats, is to create fear, and unhappiness that’s what trolls do. Personally even this notes function I find that it is slowly easing into doom, but doe now it’s fun. I would never threaten an anonymous person, but that’s because I’m not a troll.
I’ve been attacked physically, I’ve been verbally attacked, I’ve had unpleasant threats on my business line answering. Nothing has risen to harassment.
When a forum has too much harassing content I leave. I’ve left perhaps two dozen social media systems in the last three decades, they all decay if they are free.
I tend to agree with you, but we live in strange times. The point is the power that comes from Normalising ideas that were previously preposterous. I would never ever have dreamt that we'd be slicing young healthy girls breasts off as a social trend.
Violence has been normalized since writing existed, and grotesque violence - then Grimms Fairy Tales - is what we share with children. I don’t know if you’ve watched TV lately, but there are shows which make “Pulp Fiction” look tame, particularly shows like “Criminal Minds” or “American Horror Story”.
I think Jesse Singal has been harassed, and the publisher he joined either should block the accounts or they should lose audience, that’s simple. But people saying CEO’s should be punished is somewhere between Robin Hood and Lawyers to the Bottom of the Sea.
To me, it’s ridiculous to complain about such things.
My mother told me when I was old enough for exposure to fairy tales that the Grimm's tales were horrific. She didn't outright forbid me to read them but I respected her opinion and abstained.
To be fair, reading Grimms Fairy Tales did not normalise grotesque violence. It may have depicted it, but I don't think kids in those days ran around being Grimmsters with their parents accepting it because, oh... Germans will be Germans.
The pervasiveness and global reach of social media, which has never ever been seen before, along with the bizarre tendency for individuals to just swallow whatever behaviour they see (and becoming more and more extreme for the necessary likes and subs) and form groups of mindless followers is what's causing the normalising in this case.
Well, it seems you’re not familiar with children’s literature present or past, television thrillers, film thrillers, horror films on tv, in books, and in film, nor are you aware of the publishing genre and phenomenon of anime and manga, nor have much awareness of the multi-billion-dollar video game industry which eclipses film.
Consider the Final Fantasy franchise which combines cartoon-like anime, manga, video games, and film and fantasy fiction - quite popular - which involves blood-dripping murder, dismemberment, beheadings, cannibalism and torture. It’s very 21st century and makes discussions of stalking a CEO seem like romper room.
The violence, torture and dismemberment is quite operatic. This is a synoptic violence video - available to anyone, which sums up the events of genre. Consider a child beating a puppy to death then killing all the children around them. Again, CEO stalking?
A certain percentage of men who make online threats against women do subsequently rape and/or kill the women they threaten (or other victims). Murder of women by male strangers is reportedly preceded by stalking behavior in the majority of cases. Nowadays, a lot of the stalking takes place online.
Rape has declined around 85% since 1980 according to NCVS and other sources. Since according to the DOJ forcible female rape has been declining more, both absolutely and per capita, since the expansion of public use of the internet since 1990, I think it may have the opposite effect of what you imagine; similar to the fact that historically as pornography becomes freely available, rape declines in proportion to ease of access.
Discounting the quite substantial level of male rape which became included in statistics in 2016, I think it’s safe to say when it comes to threats of rape, it’s almost bark and little bite considering the volumes of rape harassment unleashed by Gamergate, two women running for presidency, Sandra Fluke’s testimony, and other focuses of online misogyny.
Language can be harassment, but it isn’t violence.
I agree that language is not violence. Direct threats of violence are, however, a crime which could be investigated by the FBI if they had enough personnel to do that, which they don't.
The stats I read most recently on online stalking followed by rape and/or murder were from the UK. One of the points made was that rapes committed by incels had decreased, and the authors speculated it was because they could get gratification by terrorizing women online. As I recall, the number of women murdered (in one year?) whose killers were known, and who had previously harassed women online was around 64. I was reading this when I was trying to get a better idea of how much danger I was in from men who were sending me videos about what they wanted to do to me. (They make their own pornography). The 64 number was not reassuring to me, no matter what percentage it was of rapes overall.
The first death threat I received was in 1972 or 1973. I was targeted because an article in Time Magazine discussed my work and that of my radical feminist group to improve outcomes for intended victims of rape. (The best strategies include evasion and fighting back). I did report this, did get my phone monitored by local police, and the man was caught. He was an obviously mentally ill individual, and the detectives who spoke to him told me he was so frightened by their interview with him that they thought he would leave me alone thereafter. That was not altogether reassuring to me, either, but he did stop calling my phone. The publicity led to a request to me to appear on national news to discuss what feminist groups were doing to raise awareness about violence against women. I declined it, as well as all other subsequent requests.
We will see a rise in left wing political violence now that cancel culture is not an effective way to silence and intimidate those deemed objectionable.
The ability to cancel people and exert such tremendous power and influence on society has fundamentally changed some of these people’s expectations and given rise to a sense of entitlement to control what people believe and how they act.
I agree with your post, but I would add that all the threats I have received on Substack originated from sites identified as "conservative," and the threats were pervaded with antisemitism and misogyny. I have no doubt that I will at some point attract threats from "the left" as well, as I don't pander to extremists of any ideology.
I was recently "defriended" for asking, in a FB post, why not donate to someone's medical expenses, as opposed to a wealthy assassin's futile defense fund? This former colleague was also enraged when I responded to hysteria that no, Trump was not going to stop international students from entering the country.
This man is a professor, btw. He harassed me in a d.m. over a post with QUOTES from various black people about defunding the police, including the grandmother of an infant slain in gang crossfire, which brought two non-white detectives to my apartment seeking access to street camera footage. This "professor" wrote: "I'm afraid to work with you" -- because I posted black people's opinions on defunding police....I hadn't even (and generally don't) posted my own words on the matter.
Anyway, I'm "hateful" for trying to get him to calm down over his unfounded fear of losing international students. I'm "hateful" for questioning throwing money at a wealthy assassin's defense fund.
This "professor" claims that "health insurance denial killed (his)father," ergo....so he's a victim, and 99% of his posts are victim-oriented, which I find intriguing given this person is supposed to be a grown man...
Even more acute, I responded to his private message that if he can't look at something objectively, he shouldn't be teaching. (Are we not supposed to evaluate the quality of the argument, and not the opinion, after all?)
I said that in order to do that, one needs to listen to the primary sources. Has he listened to Trump talk about immigration policy? On Rogan? With Musk? And decided based on that what to worry about?
He scoffed at this, with ad hominim response. What angel dust was I smoking? Objectivity? Musk? Rogan???
Which rested my case.
In the meantime, I've become concerned about this person's teaching, and predilection towards to the authoritarianism you mention in this essay. Because he's clearly expressing those traits. Harassing me for posting what isn't even my opinion -- and an ethical question aligned with common professorial questions -- is deeply concerning.
Even more so, that my objective teaching was jettisoned -- I'm gone -- but they kept this dangerous person.
Here's a better alternative to murder: enact single payer universal medicare: this will save people money, improve everyone's health, increase life expectencies, and lower the risk of bankruptcies. Put the Medical Insurance companies out of business! It's worked in every industrial country except in the U.S.A., where it hasn't actually been tried.
It's a mixed bag in other countries, like Canada, where a woman had to get a leg amputated while waiting too long for corrective measures after knee replacement.
You can't allow unbridled immigration and government health insurance.
I was treated for a serious illness while living in S. Korea, where I had no health insurance, and it may even have been the case that there wasn't any. I paid the equivalent of $15 for each doctor visit (every other week) which included the blood tests. As a "foreigner" I paid slightly more than a Korean citizen for the same service. I got a wisdom tooth pulled for FIVE DOLLARS. Later, in the US, the second wisdom tooth extraction cost upwards of a thousand (covered by insurance, thankfully). And that came with far more painkillers than necessary. (I don't remember how I made it through the first one -- I don't think they gave me anything for it?)
I read that the expenses have escalated because of insurance companies and the administration that they require. Allegedly, patients were billed directly by the doctors. Food for thought.
No matter what, though, murdering CEO's is not going to solve the problem.
News Flash: we don't have "unbridled immigration in Canada! And if you ask Canadians the vast majority prefer the Canadian system to the U.S. one.
The same Americans who believe in national health care also believe in inviting the Third World in to partake of it.
That’s partly my point.
"Policymakers, educators, platforms, and community leaders must work in unison to restore the moral boundaries against violent extremism."
It is concerning that society is shifting towards violence as a solution to systemic corruption and abuse. But it's easy to see why, though certainly not excusable, when our public officials and institutions no longer serve the community or the justice it seeks.
But it's equally concerning that these incidents may be used by policymakers as an excuse to further control social media and other online interactions. It's also worth considering whether the incidents themselves and/or the extreme amount of mainstream coverage they receive is not intentionally generated for just such a purpose. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.
I completely agree, the problem brings "solutions" that at the same time brings even more problems, and the cycle continues.
Why we are leaving the responsibility to the "public services" instead of the families?... Right, because the concept of family nowadays is broken with all the disfuncional parenting .
These poll results are chilling. I would love to the results broken down by political ideology.
...and I would love to know about the family situation in the childhood such as single parenting, lack of male figures, abuses, etc.
Mental-illness among young men plays a critical role in understanding this type of action. Although studies suggest that females experience more depression and mental illness, I would probably argue that male depression and mental illness is more covert and female depression and mental illness is more overt, essentially eliminating any such idea that females somehow experience more mental-illness than males. (This observation does not excuse Mangione's action in any way. It does, however, require us to start looking much more deeply at our nation's sons, who are turning to more substances and more likely to engage in this type of behavior.)
The 15-year-old female shooter at the Christian school in Wisconsin, for instance, is an outlier.
When we actually look at outcomes (things like suicide, addiction and overdose deaths, alcohol deaths, pain medication, mass shootings, and medication for ADD/ADHD), it is overwhelmingly male. It's not happening because they're toxic. It's happening because our culture is shifting away from things like sex-differences and the fallout of thousands of young men who are lost and purposeless.
It appears Mangione was encouraged by the anti-capitalist philosophy of modern education, the addictive nature of social media, and who knows what else to carry out this planned and orchestrated attack. All of this fed into him specifically because there is little doubt his mental state was compromised to say the least.
There must have also been a thrill for him that appealed to the more male nature of risk taking, even reckless risk taking.
Although words are not violence, encouraging powerful violence is certainly more likely for people who spend hours on social media and in silos of thought that only amps them up.
Unchecked greed should be classified as a mental illness, don’t you think?
No greed and mental illness are two completely different things.
So how would you categorise unchecked greed?
I don’t.
Makes me wonder who you’re working for.
LOL
A little paranoid aren't we?!?
I am retired, and I have never worked in a health insurance company.
I would classify greed as a universal human weakness that varies in degree among individuals. It is classified as a sin or spiritual obstacle in Christianity, Buddhism, and other of the world religious philosophies.
The overwhelming majority of murders, as well as violent crimes generally, are committed by boys and men between the ages of about 15-35. I don't doubt, however, that women would egg on mob violence and join in with it, as history provides many such examples.
Colin, huge numbers of Americans are rightfully frustrated, angry, outraged by the financialized US "health care" non-system. The only way it functions systematically is to funnel huge amounts of money to corporations like United Healthcare, whose very nature is driven to increase profits by limiting care. Look at the favorable response to the murder of this UHC CEO as akin to peasant support for Robin Hood, as a rare turning of the tables. UHC murders people as a matter of course, silently, in a manner unseen by the general public: "it's just business." Luigi Mangione murdered the CEO publicly. The score is still thousands against one. The only surprise here is that this hasn't happened more often (the great fear of the unaccountable billionaire class, hidden behind private security, walled compounds, and private jets), and your failure to understand the to totally understandable. Don't make out like this is some "left wing" thing: I guarantee that plenty of Trump voters had the same visceral reaction to this rare event: "the bastards had it coming." Instead of worrying about what's being said on social media - an approach all too akin to that of the censorship squad that has squelched open debate on "gender" madness and the response to Covid, how about focusing on the rapacious Medical-Pharma "industry" that so ill-serves us?
My own personal anecdata backs this up.
The people I know under say age 35 who live entirely online are all in on Luigimania, it makes them feel edgy and alive, he is the newest cool meme; the people I know who are adults with jobs and kids have barely mentioned it, except to say how ugly and stupid it is.
But if there's any silver lining here, the people who live online are also the kind of people who are too fearful to even look you in the eye and spend most of their time outside avoiding conflict and mumbling apologies. The closest they get to a radical political act is stealing a Netflix password.
Luigi is just another shiny new toy for the bored lost souls of the internet age to play with—it makes sense that they would cheer someone cowardly shooting a man in the back and running away, they are timid and conflict-averse even in their revolutionary fantasies.
It does seem to me, though, that the "newest cool meme" becomes progressively more immoral, vile and cruel. And at the same time, there is more and more despicable, cruel, cowardly violence being committed by crazy people "acting individually," as the media says. Our social fabric is unraveling very rapidly, violent rhetoric and certain kinds of violent actions are both increasing, and there is a sense that we are circling the drain of morality. Not only the feeling of anger, and verbal expression of anger, but acts of violence are being disinhibited because our civilization is collapsing.
This is a very disturbing trend. I think it's a sign that society has gone off the rails when a majority of young people believe a cold-blooded, pre-meditated MURDER is justified and even laudable.
Further, it would be interesting to contrast the opinions of those same people with respect to Daniel Penny.
Don't worry, it's just Locker Room Talk.
The conflicts between the principle of freedom of speech and the need to reduce physical violence continue to escalate. Threatening violence against specific people is a crime. It can be reported to law enforcement, but my impression is that reports are often not made, because the recipients of these threats have no confidence that action will be taken on their reports. As
Dr. Wright stated in the article, journalists and other people who have spoken about various subjects have been targeted by threats of rape, torture and death on multiple occasions. I personally have received death and torture threats since I began commenting on Substack a couple years ago and did not report them for the above reason. Reporting threats can increase risk to victims if law enforcement takes no action against the people making the threats.
Unfortunately, no amount of law and its enforcement can stop the generational increases we are seeing in sociopathic attitudes and behaviors.
Well that is the other point... the mental disturbances actually caused by increases use of social media/porn etc.
Yes, I don't think that we can reverse the downhill trend of our civilization unless a higher level of order is restored to "the public square." Children need limits and structure to mature as human beings, a significant part of which involves learning to inhibit their darker impulses.
In computer based shoot 'em ups, if you get killed ( or someone else gets killed) it's no big deal. You just come back to life again.....
Great piece, but you left out any mention of where on the political spectrum glorification of the CEO murderer is coming from. It’s coming overwhelmingly from the Left.
“Bluesky, widely lauded by political progressives as a kinder and friendlier alternative to X/Twitter, now exhibits the highest justification rates for the UHC CEO’s murder (78 percent), surpassing even extremist platforms like Gab and 4chan.”
"Progressives" take their anger problems, judgmental moralizing, and vicious inquisitions with them wherever they go.
This was a very shallow, not properly analized and useless article. Comments as well. First question to ask which was not asked and answered that, social media or anything else is just a medium between a very united, raged masses and some groups. SMs are just mirroring it. Writing an article describing how people write violence messages on sm but not why, is just waste of our valuable time. Please stop writing
There is a glaring absence in this piece which makes Wright's notion of "dialogue and mutual respect" into a farce. Wright also mentions "diminished personal agency" as if this applies only to peasants committing potential acts of violence.
What about the everyday acts of violence committed at a distance by men (and a few women) who prioritise profit over the values of care and self-sacrifice that doctors and health workers have embodied for centuries? What about all those deaths, and the years of disabled life, committed by enforcing lesser standards of, or denial of health care? (and poor quality housing, public education and UHP food and erosion of environmental protections)
There is a real "urgency [to]initiatives that reinforce the bonds of civic trust" but that won't come about when by attempting to enforce a vision of personal agency and mutual respect as envisaged in this post. That amounts to nothing but obedience and deference, even obeisance, to corporates however they behave.
There is a younger generation on both sides of the political aisle who have tried a wide variety of legitimate political actions which have had little or no impact on the decline in their living standards (leaving aside the tidal wave of consumer crap) or in ensuring a better future. People do have agency and if think they have no future, violence becomes a solution.
I wouldn’t confuse words and deeds.
Word aren’t violence, though trans often would have us believe so, they aren’t tantamount and are don’t reflect actions taken by someone who clicks a survey.
The words are justifying violence; they're not violence itself.
Yes. That is a critical distinction. But let's see what happens when you justify violence to people who are weak and unstable.
We are witnessing a naturalistic test of the hypothesis that mass justification for violence will lead to increased rates of violent actions in the population.
I suspect it defuses violence. It’s the principal of the ancient Greek idea of κάθαρσις or catharsis. Once a violent act is abstracted into language, it tends to find closure for many people, which is an explanation of why rape declines as access to pornography increases.
The most violent and brutal mass violence, murders, tend to be isolated men, and the Jeffrey Dahmers , and Dean Coril’s (The Candyman) are comfortably in pre-internet era. if you’re psychotic, Internet is merely one trigger of many.
I suspect that what we may see are misogyny honeypots arise in the era of AI to redirect unreconstructed trolls away from ordinary social media.
If you’re not aware, web pages long ago created honeypots for spambots, and if you only had a single aggressive female-typed AI who engaged with online harassment they’d become fully occupied with what we used to call conversations with /dev/null
Sounds like the "honeypots" of which you speak are decoys. I was not aware that this went on, especially "long ago," whatever that term currently implies (18 months?). I like the image, like wasps circling a trap, getting stuck in it, and then having their brains rewired by the AI. Could be a new kind of "trans."
I often use violent words - “go fuck yourself” or “drop dead”. I reserve the calm “you can die now” for better friends, I’m a gentle giant so they are extremely incongruous and humorous.
Words of violence and death are omnipresent in language. The Red Queen from “Through the Looking Glass” shrieked “Off with their heads”, a children’s book.
Grimm’s Fairytales is saturated with beheadings, and all other manner of atrocities. It’s hard to read for me because it’s so surrealistically funny - the stepmother slams a trunk shot on her son, his head pops off, so she sets the body in a chair and puts the head back on. The daughter complains that the son won’t respond to her, the stepmother tells the daughter to slap him, which knocks the head off, then the stepmother punishes the daughter for killing her brother: where does it end!
A survey asking “Should Trump go fuck himself”, well you can imagine the results. Nobody literally means he should go fuck himself, because his obvious obesity would cause it to be difficult unless he is a closet contortionist, and I doubt if he has a sufficiently lengthy penis to close the loop so to speak given the incessant remarks made in Spy Magazine about his being a “short-fingered vulgarian” and his obvious insecurity. It’s a figure of speech.
“When it comes to CEO’s of Healthcare companies, should we ‘off with their heads’”? It’s a figure of speech, from the Red Queen.
“What do you call 1,000,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean”.
“A start.”
It’s a figure of speech.
Language isn’t violence, and public language doesn’t create violence any more than knives being sold at Williams-Sonoma creates stabbings.
Language especially on a cellphone - about as threatening as a stamp, or doily - is perhaps the most metaphorical of all. Nobody is present, nobody is seen, most are anonymous, and there are virtually no conceptual penalties.
We don’t use language in public forums limited by the possible outcomes of the most mentally deficient as to the greatest possible danger.
I don’t buy it, the hoo-ha over people scream-tapping a phone to “die all common bastards” is not going to cause an army of psychotics to run amok.
Jesse Singal is persecuted, clearly. Should BlueSky control that language? It depends on how they want to make money. They are a publisher, and if they want to publish crap, go for it, and lose revenue.
I found the entire debate most illuminating, that we know that the side is entirely run by trolls.
The magic of free speech.
Most of the violence I have read online is not metaphorical and it makes those who receive it frightened and distressed.
Personally I believe and act on the basis that sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me - however IRL I avoid and reject "gentle giants" who play games with violent language. Who knows which player will turn out to be a thug?
That’s the point of online threats, is to create fear, and unhappiness that’s what trolls do. Personally even this notes function I find that it is slowly easing into doom, but doe now it’s fun. I would never threaten an anonymous person, but that’s because I’m not a troll.
I’ve been attacked physically, I’ve been verbally attacked, I’ve had unpleasant threats on my business line answering. Nothing has risen to harassment.
When a forum has too much harassing content I leave. I’ve left perhaps two dozen social media systems in the last three decades, they all decay if they are free.
Social media is a troll's dream, an audience of millions at whom to flash.
I haven't been on it much until the past couple of years. I wondered if sites that are free all eventually become clogged with the dregs of society.
I tend to agree with you, but we live in strange times. The point is the power that comes from Normalising ideas that were previously preposterous. I would never ever have dreamt that we'd be slicing young healthy girls breasts off as a social trend.
Violence has been normalized since writing existed, and grotesque violence - then Grimms Fairy Tales - is what we share with children. I don’t know if you’ve watched TV lately, but there are shows which make “Pulp Fiction” look tame, particularly shows like “Criminal Minds” or “American Horror Story”.
I think Jesse Singal has been harassed, and the publisher he joined either should block the accounts or they should lose audience, that’s simple. But people saying CEO’s should be punished is somewhere between Robin Hood and Lawyers to the Bottom of the Sea.
To me, it’s ridiculous to complain about such things.
My mother told me when I was old enough for exposure to fairy tales that the Grimm's tales were horrific. She didn't outright forbid me to read them but I respected her opinion and abstained.
To be fair, reading Grimms Fairy Tales did not normalise grotesque violence. It may have depicted it, but I don't think kids in those days ran around being Grimmsters with their parents accepting it because, oh... Germans will be Germans.
The pervasiveness and global reach of social media, which has never ever been seen before, along with the bizarre tendency for individuals to just swallow whatever behaviour they see (and becoming more and more extreme for the necessary likes and subs) and form groups of mindless followers is what's causing the normalising in this case.
Well, it seems you’re not familiar with children’s literature present or past, television thrillers, film thrillers, horror films on tv, in books, and in film, nor are you aware of the publishing genre and phenomenon of anime and manga, nor have much awareness of the multi-billion-dollar video game industry which eclipses film.
Consider the Final Fantasy franchise which combines cartoon-like anime, manga, video games, and film and fantasy fiction - quite popular - which involves blood-dripping murder, dismemberment, beheadings, cannibalism and torture. It’s very 21st century and makes discussions of stalking a CEO seem like romper room.
The violence, torture and dismemberment is quite operatic. This is a synoptic violence video - available to anyone, which sums up the events of genre. Consider a child beating a puppy to death then killing all the children around them. Again, CEO stalking?
https://youtu.be/lqPlKecVZVc?si=UKXzkH_L3jLSzVZ4
Good point!
A certain percentage of men who make online threats against women do subsequently rape and/or kill the women they threaten (or other victims). Murder of women by male strangers is reportedly preceded by stalking behavior in the majority of cases. Nowadays, a lot of the stalking takes place online.
Rape has declined around 85% since 1980 according to NCVS and other sources. Since according to the DOJ forcible female rape has been declining more, both absolutely and per capita, since the expansion of public use of the internet since 1990, I think it may have the opposite effect of what you imagine; similar to the fact that historically as pornography becomes freely available, rape declines in proportion to ease of access.
Discounting the quite substantial level of male rape which became included in statistics in 2016, I think it’s safe to say when it comes to threats of rape, it’s almost bark and little bite considering the volumes of rape harassment unleashed by Gamergate, two women running for presidency, Sandra Fluke’s testimony, and other focuses of online misogyny.
Language can be harassment, but it isn’t violence.
I agree that language is not violence. Direct threats of violence are, however, a crime which could be investigated by the FBI if they had enough personnel to do that, which they don't.
The stats I read most recently on online stalking followed by rape and/or murder were from the UK. One of the points made was that rapes committed by incels had decreased, and the authors speculated it was because they could get gratification by terrorizing women online. As I recall, the number of women murdered (in one year?) whose killers were known, and who had previously harassed women online was around 64. I was reading this when I was trying to get a better idea of how much danger I was in from men who were sending me videos about what they wanted to do to me. (They make their own pornography). The 64 number was not reassuring to me, no matter what percentage it was of rapes overall.
The first death threat I received was in 1972 or 1973. I was targeted because an article in Time Magazine discussed my work and that of my radical feminist group to improve outcomes for intended victims of rape. (The best strategies include evasion and fighting back). I did report this, did get my phone monitored by local police, and the man was caught. He was an obviously mentally ill individual, and the detectives who spoke to him told me he was so frightened by their interview with him that they thought he would leave me alone thereafter. That was not altogether reassuring to me, either, but he did stop calling my phone. The publicity led to a request to me to appear on national news to discuss what feminist groups were doing to raise awareness about violence against women. I declined it, as well as all other subsequent requests.
I find it hard to believe that 85% figure. I see a huge increase in women getting so wasted that they can't remember what happened yesterday.
https://open.substack.com/pub/midnightmunchies/p/notes-on-anomie-and-the-age-of-disconnect?r=22k3m0&utm_medium=ios