re: #75 Targetpractice

Both of those terms also instantly takes someone who is Of The Body and makes them Not Of The Body. So not only are they not responsible, the killer was not them all along, so there’s no reason to self-reflect.

Which is why they don’t get into particulars about what “mental illness” is, ever.

Because—and this applies to the misogynists shooters too—any level of analysis beyond conjuring with term “mental illness” would have to address how the killer’s worldview was entirely consistent with the culture of internet people and “thinkers” and reactionary politicians and priests, but for the killing.

That every single bit of “logic” about how little the dead people mattered, how they deserved to die, bounces around both on- and off-life. The world’s full of people with kinds of mental illness—anxiety, melancholy, delusion, in varying degrees of intensity…whose struggles do not end in violence. And when mentally ill people become violent, it does not tidily replicate a fully-articulated pre-existing cultural explanation of why you should kill people.

Anything to admit that the values and prejudices that include a belief in (1) an natural hierarchy, (2) the inherent threat of The Other logically proceed to violence.