> can be leveled at a lot of different websites, video games, and political parties.
Everyone - every signle website, author, pundit, politician, etc who finds themselves mentioned favourably in a mass shooter manifesto should at least ask themselves how they got there and what has gone wrong with their messaging. There may not be anything they can do, but a lot of places seem to think that hate never leads to action.
Didn't the Christchurch shooter also mention people like Nelson Mandela and MLK? Does this mean that their teachings are irrevocably tainted now?
For that matter, look at the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting - should Pelosi resign over the impact her words had? (Along with the rest of the DNC's leadership?)
Point being, mentally ill people do weird shit for illogical reasons. That doesn't make it the fault of whatever they used to justify their actions.
Nelson Mandela did spend thirty years in prison for terrorism and was vindicated only in hindsight. This comes back to the terrorist vs. freedom fighter conversation; looking at the rightness of the cause, the appropriateness and necessity of the methods, the power relations context, the violence carried out by the other side, and then still being very reluctant to support the use of violence to achieve a political goal.
(What was the essential difference between, say, the occupation of the Malheur wildlife refuge in 2016 by armed extremists and the occupation of the Dublin GPO in 1916 by armed extremists? Which could be considered mentally ill and why?)
(I also find it interesting that the most basic, minimal kind of critique - asking what the effect of the work is on the audience - has generated such outrage. I haven't called for censorship, I haven't even called for self-censorship, not directly attributed moral responsibility. All I said was should think about whether there was moral responsibility or not.)
This is my impression of the comment chain so far:
The root said "The users of that forum have literally been linked to public shootings.", as part of an argument that /r/the_donald is a shithole and deserves to be banned. The reply was that all sorts of people find themselves in mass shooter manifestos, and that this doesn't imply any sort of culpability whatsoever.
You then replied saying that everyone who finds themselves in such a manifesto needs to reexamine their messaging. This would seem to imply agreement with the root - that since /r/the_donald was mentioned by mass shooters, it's bad.
So if person X spends years writing about how Jews are an evil conspiracy that run the world, and then someone shoots up a synagogue leaving a manifesto saying "finally I'm going to do something" and citing X, those are totally unrelated?
And BTW, is we're speaking of t_d, I never seen there anything even close to "how Jews are an evil conspiracy that run the world". I've seen this on other alt-right places (like voat and some gab areas) but never even once on t_d. Of course, I don't spent hours every day reading every comment, so maybe somewhere in the depth of the comment trees there's stuff like that - but on a casual look I can't see anything even remotely like what you describe.
Likely yes, they are. There were people murdering Jews well before Internet, TV, radio, printing and arguably even written language existed. There still are. Attributing this to a random wacko, without specific casual proof, is likely to be wrong. Of course, in some cases (yes, that case, thankyouverymuch) there's ample proof. In most cases we're dealing with on the Internet, there isn't. And a single reference by a demented individual, without further proof, can't be taken as such. Otherwise you basically pass the control of the moral norms into the hand of demented wackos - the only thing they need to do to ruin anybody is to commit some atrocity and declare they were doing it in your name. Obviously that alone can't be a proof of anything. You need to examine whether they were sincerely inspired by those ideas, where those ideas indeed intend to inspire such reaction (some people are sure TV is full of secret messages telling them to kill the President, that doesn't mean we have to shut down the TV broadcasts) and whether this reaction is something that is inherent in those ideas.
Also, there is a myriad of possibilities between "totally unrelated" and "have direct causal link which imparts responsibility". If somebody is on the left politically, is he "totally unrelated" to Lenin and Pol Pot? Not exactly, they probably share some ideas somewhere. Is he responsible for all atrocities Lenin and Pol Pot committed? I don't think many people on the left would agree to that. And here we have direct link between ideology and actions, acknowledged by everybody. You are extending it to actions of insane people which may be just using ideology to dress up their demented impulses - this is even worse distortion.
People are responsible for their actions. But if some crazy person mentions somebody in a positive sense, that by itself does not impart responsibility on the person they mention.
A motivated investigator can always find extremists to discredit a large group. For example, among Bernie supporters, recently, talking about "an evil conspiracy that runs the world":
> if they try to do that [nominate someone other than Bernie at a brokered convention], forget the "political" part of the "political revolution" [1]
with thousands of upvotes and no moderator or admin action.
And some of the top comments on that post:
> If they do that it's time to revolt.
> This is a peaceful revolution. If they fight against it, they risk violence.
> Okay fine, a socialist revolution it is.
> Yeah the convention is a canary. If the canary dies we riot.
There's enough evidence of unmoderated site rules violations on that one post to shut down that sub if reddit wanted to.
But reddit doesn't want to, they're trying to tip the scales by censoring half of America.
Asking yourself why you were mentioned is not at all the same thing as taking responsibility. If a mass shooter mentioned how much they appreciated me, my work, or a group I ran (or was even in) I'd be concerned and would wonder why. That seems like a perfectly healthy response.
Actually that's the opposite of a healthy response. There's no reason to investigate why someone likes something unless it played an active role in the thing that is being investigated. Asking yourself why Joe Dirt liked listening to your podcast about cats and listed it on his BAD THING manifesto is truly at the polar opposite end of what normal people would do. They would definitely not feel concerned that he listed them as an inspiration.
I bet a lot of people like doughnuts. Just because they might write that in something when they get infamous does not make a doughnut shop question their actions.
>I bet a lot of people like doughnuts. Just because they might write that in something when they get infamous does not make a doughnut shop question their actions.
Are you seriously implying that hanging out and posting on 8chan,Voat, or alt-right subs is similar to eating doughnuts when it comes to race motivated mass shootings? Even with just the raw probability numbers it's off by many orders of magnitude.
Eating doughnuts for breakfast and committing murder is a random co-incidence, are you implying it was completely a random coincidence that those kind of sites show up repeatedly as hang out spots in mass hate killings?
But those sites are all just being racist ironically, which lets them off the hook. There are no actual racists anywhere on the internet - everyone is just a bored teenager posting edgelord memes and role-playing.
Everyone - every signle website, author, pundit, politician, etc who finds themselves mentioned favourably in a mass shooter manifesto should at least ask themselves how they got there and what has gone wrong with their messaging. There may not be anything they can do, but a lot of places seem to think that hate never leads to action.