A summary of my thoughts, using my posts in the past three pages as notes.
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This weekend, 22 year-old Elliot Rodger shot 7 people, and 3 bodies were found in his apartment, in Santa Barbara near the UCSB campus. This shooter was angry at the world and in particular at the fact he couldn't get hot blondes, so he sought to kill women and the men they date.
Rodger had a significant online presence, he posted several youtube videos detailing his plans a few weeks prior to the murder, and he posted on various forums like PUAhate.com. He wrote a 140 page manifesto, which I read this afternoon. I felt some anguish reading it as I recognised a lot of his life. As far as I know he never posted on hype, but he was a fan of science fiction so he could have posted here. He did post on bodybuilding.com, a website I used to frequent in the early 2000s. He was told to **** off. Some summary of his web presence can be found here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmir...print-of-santa-barbara-shooter-elliot-rodger/
Out of morbid curiosity, I read his 140 page manifesto this afternoon. I wanted to see if I could extract answers. There's a series of problems and non-problems.
1) I would not blame his family, they did what they could. I can't fault his parents who seemed to have made significant efforts to improve his life. They arranged play-dates when he was small, they arranged for him to change schools when he was over-bullied, they made him go to summer camp, they took him out on vacations, they paid for him to see a psychiatrist (several shrinks actually), they even sent him to Morocco a few times so he'd experience something else. His step-mother forced him to go talk to some skateboarders when he was 8 or 9 or 10, and even though he ended up making friends with them he resented her for years and years afterwards. His childhood seemed mostly decent, he talked about play-dates, nintendo 64, pokemon, etc.
In fact I would not blame the people in his life based on what I read.
His school, he doesn't seem to mention the principals and teachers at all. He was bullied, but not at the extreme end of the scale by any means. A lot of people have been bullied.
There's these two guys, Philip and Addison, who kept meeting him even though he kept getting into fights with them. I was wondering if they kept meeting him out of a sense of obligation because they were afraid he was going to be suicidal / homicidal. This was confirmed later on in the diatribe when Addison says to him not do anything rash. People were trying to help.
Therapists and psychiatrists were also trying to help and meeting him in separate occasions and in separate places. They did call the police on him.
2) I definitely blame the police for what happened, they could have prevented this. First of all he had gotten into a fight at a party ~1 year prior to the shooting where he tried to injure some girls that he was angry at because they were not throwing themselves at him, other guys jumped in to protect the girls and he broke his leg. He should have had a file for that, at the very least. There were tons of witnesses. Subsequently, a few weeks prior to the shooting, police were informed of his problems and creepy youtube videos, and 7 officers showed up at his house. He writes in his manifesto that if they had seen his room they would have found the three guns and the notes on his kill. But they left the scene because "he didn't seem suspicious". If this guy had been black and worn a hoodie, he would have been caught for sure.
Heads should definitely roll over this. The police officers were either too lazy to file the paperwork for a search warrant or too racist to be suspicious of a white male. It's awful.
3) The culture of white male privilege, and the related sociology of rape culture, contributed to this crime. He was angry at the world because he couldn't get hot blondes. He wrote comments like this:
Elliot Rodger said:
You girls have never been attracted to me. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me. But I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice. A crime. Because I don't know what you don't see in me. I'm the perfect guy. And yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me: the supreme gentleman. I will punish you all for it. ...
How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half-white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. ...
The ultimate evil behind sexuality is the human female. They are the main instigators of sex. They control which men get it and which men don't. ...They think like beasts, and in truth, they are beasts...women should not have the right to choose who to mate and breed with. That decision should be made by rational men of intelligence.
He assumed that he was entitled to hot blondes, and throughout his screed it seems to be the core of his resentment, that they never throw themselves at him. He assumed that he was entitled, and he was angry for being ignored. Note that he never talks about being rejected by a girl anywhere in his screed unless I missed it, I think he never bothered to ask a girl out, he certainly never wrote anything extended about trying to woo a girl. The only things he did as effort to get "hot blondes" were working out for two weeks just one time (two weeks !!!), moving to a party neighbourhood of Santa Barbara, and wearing expensive clothes. It's all passive and meek, as he clearly assumed that he should be given things including women. It wasn't just women -- he was passive and meek about everything else.
He never talks about his failures to connect to women as people, in fact he acknowledges never talking to them except for a therapist he met at age ~20, he only talks about his inability to get sex.
4) Two other components of that white male entitlement that manifested themselves are his total laziness / lack of ambition and his obsession with status and material goods.
I don't know to what extent his screed describes what he was over the 20 years, but it seems his only continuing interest is "pretty girls". He had no hobbies or interests that he stuck to, except maybe for world of warcraft and science fiction / fantasy, and most of what he took up (hackey sack, skateboarding, writing, etc) he quit in frustration within a year or less of picking it up. At one point he wanted to become a screenwriter, but he quit within a few weeks because he realised it would take decades to become successful, by which point he would be too old to attract hot blondes.
If he lacked "charm" with which to attract "hot blondes", it may have been because he never became interesting, which may have been because he never developed his own personality. He was more interested in fitting in than in being his own person even though he consistently wrote the opposite. There's a disturbing event that encapsulates all of this on page 100. He is attending college in what I think he wrote was a "last try" and his courses are math, sociology, english, film, I think. In his math class, he sees a pretty girl, he then looks her up on Facebook and sees that she is going out with a jock. So he drops his math class, and soon after, he drops all his classes. He writes that he doesn't want to torture himself seeing all those girls he could never have as nothing beneficial could come of it. He then writes that this was the day he crossed the threshold that made the day of retribution inevitable.
Though he actually "tried" a few more strategies afterwards. He thought that if he became a multi-millionaire he would be able to get pretty girls. He became obsessed with buying lottery tickets and spent many thousands of dollars on lottery tickets, he then says he feels the universe is against him because he was not the one who won.
On his obsession with material goods, several times when he wrote about luxury he would go on for pages and pages. At one point he delayed his shootings I think because his mother got first class plane tickets and he wanted to enjoy the rides. He talks a lot about all the buffets he got to eat, eating wine, et cetera. One time when boarding a first class flight he smirked at the economy passengers who had to wait in line.
5) OT: this guy was somewhat integrated in Hollywood.
Went to the red carpet premieres for the three star wars movies (his mother was friends with george lucas), return of the king, and the first hunger games (his father was second unit director).
Had a crush on Ashton Moio (
http://thehungergames.wikia.com/wiki/Ashton_Moio) 's sister when she was 12
He exchanged some emails with Dale Launer, a successful screenwriter and friend of his father's, who was trying to get him to have a different attitude to women. He quit responding to these emails because he figured Launer couldn't help him.
