Quote:
Originally Posted by MarchHare
I won't link it, but if you really want to get into the mindset of these people, search for and read the manifesto Eliot Rodger wrote prior to his 2014 shooting rampage.
Following the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, Conservatives widely mocked comments made by Justin Trudeau (particularly Pierre Poilievre who infamously remarked that "the root cause of terrorism is terrorists"), but he was absolutely right when he said that the common denominator among terrorists is a feeling of exclusion and social rejection. I wonder if all those lives could have been saved if someone somewhere had recognized what was going on in the minds of Eliot Rodger and Alexandre Bissonnette and Alek Minassian and provided them with support, hope, optimism and a way forward out of their self-induced pity party (assuming they were willing to accept the help, of course). Instead, those killers found like-minded individuals in /r/incels and other similar communities where their negative views festered until they lashed out with murderous violence.
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I read the manifesto and was pretty disturbed by it. The one thing I took away from it was how narcissistic and entitled Rodger was. Seemed to me like his parents loved him and spoiled him but whatever they provided was never enough. I was really struck by the parts of the manifesto where both his father and mother (divorced early in his life) had financial difficulties during different parts of his life and he considered those events to be a personal slight, and could only focus on how those hardships affected his life, with no consideration how it affected his parents or his siblings. And he had an amazing memory, allowing him to remember every personal slight and insult all the way back to his childhood years, no matter how small, and he nurtured them and allowed them to fester. Add to that he was very shy and socially awkward, which compounded the problem even more.
I'm not sure how much more his mom and dad could have done. I think they clearly knew their son had problems because they sent him to counselling, and his mom continued to set up play dates for him until his mid-teens, and his father even sent him on a trip to France to spend time with a friend and get him out of the house and where, even according to Rodger, he had a great time. Maybe they should have set him up with a prostitute, so he could see that sex was really no big deal?