Columbiners, Holmies and the worst tumblr savages

the Newtown thread was drifting even further

http://sadieissoweird.tumblr.com/
Eric Harris, Nazis, We Need To Talk About Kevin and poor misunderstood teenagers who just want to curl up in the corner with a book.

Not that much different from Manson fans or people with shocking Nazi regalia, but tumblr makes it worse, somehow.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/bdc0900a42550ebd7d7454dbb0b13da6/tumblr_mfnlmrVgbS1rfcrt2o1_500.jpg

http://25.media.tumblr.com/6f1c7d50db8b78194f6a25b1228ffe05/tumblr_mflo67qCY61resxc2o1_500.png

http://i.imgur.com/OJbBU.png

i'm sure there is a sophisticated, clinical, even compassionate way to explain the emotional transference and projection that happens when people fixate on high-profile psychopaths but i do not have the emotional endurance to understand it so all I have to say is NOPE to these fuckups just NO NO NO WRONG NOPE

taboo and transgression don't kill people, people with guns kill people.

i mean this stuff is.. not really a surprise? and feeds off attention, like a trainwreck that wants to be stared at and now we have a thread to stare at the trainwreck, always valuable.

there is an unbridgeable gap between the teenage brain & being an adult i think. whenever i think about that time it is with a there but for the grace of god go i vibe, because i think you're in such a strange anti-logical space that you're just lucky if you get out without indulging in just the worst behaviours (i'm talking here about venerating psychopaths & constructing weird anti-societal pyramids in support of your dumb ideas, here, not about the shootings themselves, which are obviously a whole other thing). like i remember the sort of swamp of cluelessly feeling things & being probably pretty malleable, or at least having weird, solipsistic priorities that could govern my actions & responses. it makes me feel weird because i think the kid wearing the columbine t-shirt today is more-likely-than-not going to be okay enough in ten years, will have grown the fuck out of it. & so how do you shut down something that's so inherently a phase?

^otm. basically they need something to do and some support and no easy access to guns.

did teenaged u venerate psychopaths, a poll

empathy develops a lot more slowly than theory of mind, i don't think empathy is fully-formed in most people pre-mid-20s. obv in some people it's quite difficult to detect at any age.

this stuff is an interesting connection b/w two of the internet's most dominant subcultures: trolling and conspiracy theories

^would prob be a valuable counterpart to this, fwiw, i feel like the distance between "i did this" & "this is intolerable" is part of the weird paradox
xxp

i will concede that as a branch of the exploding field of internet studies it holds promise xp

prurient anthropology

http://25.media.tumblr.com/a9d6c461e5ec34851dc8249d422c6472/tumblr_mfo2r9KrcE1s016m3o1_400.gif

it blows goats for me that this dude's last name is holmes. my irl last name is holm and the same goes for my son and daughter. all the dumb nicknames that people gave me when I was young, like kids calling me Sherlock Holmes or Holm-boy or whatever? No doubt all the dumbasses and bullies at SOME point will single my kids out about this fuckwad, and it really doesnt make me feel better that "Holmies" is an actual goddamn group of people.

it's like 3 ppl

and 'ppl' is something of a stretch

is fixating on actual psychopaths as misunderstood anti-heroes different from fixating on fictional psychopaths as misunderstood anti-heroes?

like, i sort of feel like the incredible media saturation of our culture hastens the process by which a person in the news becomes a piece of malleable fiction that can be adopted and played with -- which is to say that it makes people-in-the-news, and their actions, feel less real.

so if you're a teenager and you have settled upon this shocking and horrible story as the thing that sets you aside and comforts you and is the thing that you understand in a way that no-one else has the discernment of emotion to get-- does it matter if you've settled on a character in a comic who's functionally a serial killer, or a character from the news who was an actual murderer?

even better if you can adopt a conspiracy theory around it - you get the thrill of how transgressive the crime is, with the reassurance of but-if-wasn't-their-fault, plus the boost of feeling that you are the one who truly understands and everyone else is deluded and wrong.

* but-it-wasn't-their-fault

People did the same with Bonnie and Clyde and Charles Starkweather, I guess. This doesn't feel like something unique to contemporary culture.

i guess you could even take it back to murder ballads!

Yes. Over the centuries, the balance might actually shifted away from mythologising actual psychopaths and towards safer fictional characters, on the whole.

in my experience people who were into serial killers growing up, and all sorts of morbid shit as adults, are miserable fucks even today. no offense to anyone here, i'm sure not all are like that.

http://www.theawl.com/2012/10/the-killer-crush-from-columbiners-to-beliebers

my tumblr feed, unfortunately, is full of terrible people like this. when i first started my gif blog, i would follow back people who reblogged my gifs, especially if i could see that lots of others would reblog from them in turn. now when i check my dash, it turns out that a lot of those people are racist teenagers with a terrible obsession with hitler. eventually i was able to unfollow them, but to this day the occasional incredibly offensive thing pops up.

the hitler thing i can sort of barely understand - he's an iconic figure for better or worse, there's an entire tv channel that's practically dedicated to him (military channel), even bowie had a weird hitler phase. the Holmies/Columbiners stuff is just terrifying, though.

i should be a miserable fuck, by some stroke of luck I am not

ts: tumblrs featuring anime-eyed kiebold/harris fanart VS tumblrs featuring the tag 'thigh gap'

"I, who write this, love you beyond infinince"

really shut down the window for hilarious jokes about fascist tv stations by identifying the military channel there, z s

(national geographic)

(fox sport news)

I always heard that joke about the History Channel, but I guess they're more aliens and conspiracies these days than NAZINAZINAZI

haha, yeah in my original post i also fingered the history channel (tee hee), but i deleted it because i think that they have broadened their scope to jesus + aliens

when you get down to it, history is pretty much jesus + hitler + aliens, though

hitler was a pretty boring guy IRL too, if the albert speer book is anything to go on. mass murderers tend to be surprisingly tedious and un-complex. except stalin, maybe.

am i venerating a mass murderer:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7LRguTAWzME/S7KpKtoS7WI/AAAAAAAAACw/bH_bcGWW5DY/s600/Stalin

Sean Penn's a mass murderer?