The horrifying rash of massacres during this violent summer suggests that public, widely covered rampage killings have led to a kind of contagion, prompting a small number of people with strong personal grievances and scant political ideology to mine previous attacks for both methods and potential targets to express their lethal anger and despair.No shit, you geniuses, you're only now figuring this out?
Add to the motivation, I might add, that these assholes gain themselves a measure of fame (or infamy) that they otherwise would never achieve.
Hence the "Some Asshole Initiative" or the point that Your Humble Scribe began suggesting that these asswipes not be publicly named, oh, seven fucking years ago.
Unfortunately with Twitter and other social media it's impossible to cover up the existence of these events anymore, people actually at the scene are tweeting it or LiveStreaming it or otherwise making it impossible to ignore. We had a suicide cluster in Palo Alto a couple of years ago. The local powers that be tried to keep it quiet to prevent copy-cats. They failed, the kids were tweeting and MyFacing each other and the information about the suicides got out anyhow, but mixed with all sorts of bizarre misinformation. In the end, trying to cover it up turned out to be worse than just covering it in a just the facts ma'am manner would have been, hysteria spread faster via social media than it would have spread through the mainstream media.
ReplyDeleteFine world we're building here in the Silicon Valley...
Maybe even better than "some asshole" would be "The asshole that (insert appropriate hero here) took out" wherever possible. Make the asshole nothing more than an unnamed footnote to someone else's story.
ReplyDelete