I’m fascinated by the Santa Barbara killer Elliot Rodger in the same way I’m fascinated, on occasion, by Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh, Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley, etc. I feel like I understand these guys because I share their emptiness and I share their desire to lash out to prove my superiority. Unlike these killers, however, I’ve never had the drive to physically hurt anyone. I’ve never been arrested in my life and I would never allow myself to commit crimes. I have such a shaky sense of self that I couldn’t go on if I did bad things to people. I only survive by picturing myself as a good person, but I know there is great darkness in my soul. I often feel like I’m drowning in shame, and to flee from these intolerable emotions, I’ve developed this false self.
I think a big reason I write so much about predators is that I understand them (not the attraction to prepubescent kids, I don’t get that) and I would act similarly in some circumstances if not for my fears, my morals, my psychology, etc. I certainly know what it feels like to be driven by eroticized rage and when I disconnect from God and people, it floods back.
Like Elliot Rodger, I compensate for my failings by writing endless manifestos and making videos about myself.
I understand people who commit arson. They want the outside world to match their inside world. A couple of times when I was a kid, I set fires in the bush trying to create a conflagration (no harm was done). When I confessed to my best friend Wayne what I had done, he threatened to tell on me if I ever did it again, and so I stopped.
That I understand people who do horrible things does not mean I excuse them. It does not mean I don’t want to see them punished. I support capital punishment for murder, for instance.
My addictions to grandiosity, fantasy, and rage allowed me to survive my childhood, but simultaneously strangled me, so I had to seek help, which I eventually found in Orthodox Judaism, psycho-therapy, Alexander Technique, and 12-step programs. On May 28, I turn 48.
Daniel: “Too bad Elliot Rodgers didn’t have Orthodox Judaism and the Alexander Technique to give him a moral compass and inner peace like our brother Luke. The most havoc Luke could wreak is conducting a panty raid at Bais Yakov.”
Last night, I got flooded by feelings of helpless rage and could not sleep. I turned to all the things I learned about God and about my mind and about shame and rage and the need to let go and to forgive and it did me no good. I was too intensely triggered. After listening to a few hours of lectures on mindful awareness and attunement, my frustration burned out as my exhaustion set in. I got up, showered, ate a bowl of oatmeal and a blueberry smoothie, and started reading the manifesto of the Santa Barbara killer. It frightens me how much I identify with him (except the bits about wanting to physically hurt people).
Daniel: “Wow! He’s like Luke on crack! I wonder if people called him ‘Chinky’.”
Here are some excerpts from the killer’s manifesto:
* After doing a lot of extensive research within the last year, I found out that the sorority with the most beautiful girls is Alpha Phi Sorority. I know exactly where their house is, and I’ve sat outside it in my car to stalk them many times. Alpha Phi sorority is full of hot, beautiful blonde girls; the kind of girls I’ve always desired but was never able to have because they all look down on me.
They are all spoiled, heartless, wicked bitches. They think they are superior to me, and if I ever tried to ask one on a date, they would reject me cruelly.
* 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. I deserve it more. I tried not to believe his foul words, but they were already said, and it was hard to erase from my mind. If this is actually true, if this ugly black filth was able to have sex with a blonde white girl at the age of thirteen while I’ve had to suffer virginity all my life, then this just proves how ridiculous the female gender is. They would give themselves to this filthy scum, but they reject ME? The injustice!
* So far, Santa Barbara was not working. I dreaded how horrible it would be to continue suffering my miserable, lonely, celibate life in such a beautiful city where everyone else experienced the pleasures of sex and love. That would be the darkest hell. And that was exactly what was in store for me.
* On one of my very last days as a teenager, as I was sitting at my usual place at the food court outside Domino’s, I saw a sight that shattered my heart to pieces. A tall, blonde, jock-type guy walked into one of the restaurants, and at his side was one of the sexiest girls I had ever seen. She too was tall and blonde. They were both taller than me, and they kissed each other passionately. They made me feel so inferior and worthless and small. I glared at them with intense hatred as I sat by myself in my lonely misery. I could never have a girl like that. The sight was burned into my memory, and it caused a scar that will haunt me forever.
* Because of my father’s acquisition of a new girlfriend, my little mind got the impression that my father was a man that women found attractive, as he was able to find a new girlfriend in such a short period of time from divorcing my mother. I subconsciously held him in higher regard because of this. It is very interesting how this phenomenon works… that males who can easily find female mates garner more respect from their fellow men, even children. How ironic is it that my father, one of those men who could easily find a girlfriend, has a son who would struggle all his life to find a girlfriend.
* By nature, I am a very jealous person, and at the age of nine my jealous nature sprung to the surface. During play dates, [a friend] would have other friends over as well, and I would feel very jealous and upset when he paid more attention to them. Feeling left out, I would find a quiet corner and start crying.
* I was different because I am of mixed race. I am half White, half Asian, and this made me different from the normal fully-white kids that I was trying to fit in with.
Mixed race kids have it harder. In Elliot’s case, he was neither white nor asian but a mutt.
It’s a shame Elliot Rodger couldn’t find a starter girlfriend, such as a Filipina. They’ve often been nice to me, even without pay.
Chaim Amalek: As their relative proportion of the population has declines, white women have gotten to feel more valuable and thus have become pickier, even to the extent of pricing themselves out of the market. Asian women, on the other hand, are trying to break into the market. But the racial dynamic there might be brutal if you are the son of such a pairing.
David Tainsh: Asian are more fun anyway….
Chaim Amalek: But what about the next generation, especially the males?
Jenny Pool: Depends on where you live. Asian chicks chase rich Jews in California, and score. Not here [Vegas].
Chaim Amalek: Also, in general ____ chicks chase rich ___ in ___ and score.
Jenny Pool: Vegas. They won’t even hire Asian broads at the high dollar strip clubs. Can’t make money off ’em.
They’re a dime a dozen at all the cheap handjob stroke joints down the block.
Chaim Amalek: There is a granularity to the human race that our elites have declared off limits for further discussion
Jenny Pool: I dig nerdy guys. I’ve never been attracted to beefcaked, ‘roid-heads.
Chaim Amalek: LV is a strange place in so many ways. An [edited this to read “pretty, white”] 18-21 year old girl can make six figures without doing much more than taking off her clothes. I suspect the guys that age don’t have any option that pays that well. Also, other than gambling and drinking what do people do there?
Jenny Pool: You’re kidding, right? Who do you think owns these clubs, runs this shit? It’s not pretty white broads. One of the most lucrative female strip clubs in town is owned by homosexual Jewish lawyer.
According to the SPLC: “On Monday of this week, Rodger wrote in a thread at BodyBuilding.com that ‘It’s been my life struggle to get a beautiful, white girl.'”
Luke: Many Steve Sailer readers are picking on Elliot Rodger for being 22 and in community college. What a loser! I was still in community college at age 22. I took a year off after high school to work in Australia, and then I worked various jobs while going to Sierra Community College from 1985-1988, eventually getting into UCLA in the fall of 1988 with $30,000 in the bank.
Here are some posts from Steve Sailer’s commenters:
* He shoulda forgot about the blondes and got himself an Asian girl. Something is better than nothing.
* He should have studied science or engineering, fields where one is not expected to have fun. At least then he would have had an excuse for being alone and miserable all the time.
* It’s always a bad idea to try to read broad societal implications into the actions of one mentally disturbed individual.
* The (largely mistaken) belief that other people are doing it like rabbits causes a lot of mental anguish, especially among guys.
* Why was this idiot aiming for the most beautiful buxom blonde women? He could’ve settled for an Asian girl.
* Paradoxically, egalitarianism breeds
supremacism if the society is celebrity-centric.
If egalis preach that all are equal and there are no innate differences UNDER A HUMANISTIC SOCIAL ORDER, most people might accept the basic necessities and humble joys of life.
But if egalis preach that all are equal and there are no innate differences UNDER A CELEBRITISTIC/NARCISSISTIC
SOCIAL ORDER, then everyone will expect to be equally as cool, hip, sexy, and ‘popular’ as the famous stars and cool kids.
The video is a strange mix of ‘leftist’ egalitarianism and ‘rightist’ supremacism.
“I wasn’t equally loved and admired, so I hate the world for such inequality (and failure to deliver the hope/promise of equal happiness for all), and to prove my superior worth over you all, I will kill.”
* The problem is that in today’s liberal sexual market the differences between winners and losers is much more pronounced, and also rubbed inthe face of the losers. In the past overall sluttiness was much lower due to fears of impregnation and limiting of mixing of the sexes, plus people were prudes so they kept their conquests to themselves.
The loser anger is understandable, but often these rejected omegas forget that they themselves do the exact same to a lot of fatties and ugly women. Can’t blame hot chicks for rejecting you if you keep rejecting fatties.
The PUA solution need not work for everyone. The other option is to accept reality for what it is, accept you aren’t going to be rolling in tail like Charlie Sheen, and see what else you enjoy doing in life. Megalomania and narcissism need to meet an end at some point, and usually that point is when your desires bump up against society’s willingness to acquiesce to them.
* Killing for fame is as old as Herostratus and the Greeks. That is something that has not changed. What has changed is the shuffling off of power to various bloated, incompetent, politic-ridden, bureaucratic government agencies.
Suppose this happened in say, Northfield Minnesota in the 1870’s. With repeating rifles and handguns, not a strange supposition.
Now imagine what would have happened to such a man. If he had not shot himself, he’d have been strung up and his body exhibited to anyone who any ideas of copying him. His family would have been persecuted and had to move, change their names, and live in poverty.
Social control, such as it was, lived with ordinary people collectively and spontaneously, not in remote, politic-driven bureaucracies that move like a glacier.
That this guy’s father was the Director of Hunger Games astonishes me. Most Hollywood spawn get various jobs with their fathers in the industry, and pull far above their weight otherwise.
My guess, is that the father was estranged/divorced from the guy’s mother, did not take an active role in his life, and was not available as a prop to get this kid some sex and a relationship.
Ickiness? That certainly did not stop the phenomena that Steve Sailer termed “Chicks Dig Chechens!” (tm Steve Sailer). Women certainly don’t find murder, brutality, even applied to other women a turn-off. Whitey Bulger, John Gotti, and the Petersons Drew and Scott, did not lack for female companionship.
Our female oriented consumer culture puts an absolute premium on social dominance and aggression. At one end, the typical Black rapper or athlete or such; and on the other end the nerdy, physically slight White or (worse) Asian guy.
PUA stuff CAN help guys like this, but they need to get over the “wrongness” of women wanting what they want. Do you blame the Ocean for being wet, and dangerous? Women are what they are, if a guy wants to have sex he better be what they WANT. Not what they say, but their revealed preference.
Is it much harder for a physically slight, Asian/White-Asian guy to succeed with women? Sure. But it can be done. Bruce Lee found it hard to deter people picking on him, its one reason he worked out so brutally (to get the “hooded” back look) which may have led to his stroke. But the good news is that social dominance is less reliant on looks alone (they do play a part certainly) and charisma, performance, status, achievement, fame, etc. can play a part. A significant part.
Look at say, Robert Downey Jr. Physically he’s much slighter in build than say, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, or WWE Wrestler Batista. But socially and charisma wise, he owns each guy.
* These are crimes of social striving.
All the mass murders like this in the past few years are perpetrated by (largely) white or partially white guys.
Looking into their histories a bit, it becomes clear that there is a familiar pattern. Since early youth they have been continually rejected socially. It may be funny looks or ADD or apergers etc. They are usually way above average intelligence and are quite clear in perceiving their continual rejection.
So, what do you do when your body tells you its time to find a mate and your intellect tells you that there is no way in hell this is going to happen? Well a childhood and adolescence of continual rejection will cause anyone to give up on human relationships and crush out any residual empathy towards other human beings.
For these guys, the one meaningful act they can do is to find dignity in rebellion. And mass murder is rebellion in spades. With the influences of video games and movies that glorify and desensitize killing with modern weapons, it is easy to connect the dots an see how mass murders could be conceived and planned.
* Actually, based on his internet posting trail, he was racist against non-whites. In his forum posts he complains about and disparages non-white men, mainly blacks and Indians apparently, for being around white women. He also complains about and disparages an Asian guy for talking to a white woman.
* If girls don’t like you back, you can:
a) keep talking to more of them, eventually one may like you
b) lower your standards and start talking to fat chicks
c) give up and watch porn
The reality is that the only dating market in which 5’6″ half-Asian men will have success is over in Asia.
Shooting some sorority women won’t solve anything.
* The people at blame for this is his father and mother.
Both people rejected their own race, and thus imparted a deep psychological sickness into their son.
You’ve been warned.
* And this goes to show why a rational society shouldn’t leave its boys’ sexual debuts to the haphazard when it becomes clear that they can’t figure out how to negotiate and close the deals with girls at developmentally appropriate ages. They should receive some kind of intervention like coaching in dating skills and even working with sexual surrogates if necessary.
For example, you can find sex therapists in Southern California who work with sexual surrogates. I happen to know a therapist like that in Orange County through my connections in the cryonics community. He told me one time that many of his clients come from the Orthodox Jewish community, men who marry well into adulthood without sexual experience who discover that they have trouble functioning sexually with their wives. They rationalize using surrogates as analogous to medical treatment which will help them with their religiously understood sexual obligations in marriage. I can see something similar to help sexually inexperienced men around the age of 20 before the hardcore alienation from womankind can develop.
As for seeing prostitutes, that doesn’t really solve the problem. Prostitutes don’t teach men an adult skill set for dealing with women competently in relationships.
* Rodger should have counted his blessings and thought himself lucky that as a priapic 22 year old denied access to women through the Oedipus like structure of modern society, (which despite all precitable howls to the contrary is as strong now as it was 40,000 years ago), that the marvels of modern technology and the skill and hard work of scientists and technologists has delivered the internet up to his gilded generation. Like penicillin, vaccination, automobiles or central heating, it’s just another one of this artful breakthroughs that have made life on earth for mortals that bit more agreeable.
Rodger’s plea, although selfish and self indulgent is the perpetual plea of frustrated male youth everywhere, from Philip Roth, who was mentioned on iSteve earlier, to more familiarly Beavis and Butthead. What the misguided and angry 22 year old really needed was a fatherly hand clapped on his shoulder and a straighforward pep talk, plus a nice little portable tablet computer together with a Brazzers subscription. Yes, Brazzers and the like, I would have thought, through the miracle of modern science, would have somewhat allieviated the tumescence and frustration of Rodger.
For this reason, I’m one who will never slag off internet porn, a double-edged (pork) sword, if there ever was one. Put it this way, internet porn is merely the universe as 22 year old kids want it to be.
* This seems to be a case of Tragic Mulatto with an Asian twist. Human beings like to belong to a group based on shared identity. It doesn’t need to be race
based but needs to be based on something. It appears that he didn’t fit in with guys, with Whites or Asians or anyone.
His posts on anonymous internet boards were combative. Usually folks like this can find one community to feel like they belonged yet he couldn’t even pull that off.
From the Santa Barbara shooter’s manifesto:
“I’m going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoilt, stuck-up, blonde s**t that I see inside there.”
The top sorority house at UC Santa Barbara is pretty much the top of the blonde heap in America…
So, targeting for slaughter this sorority is an extremely intentional racial hate crime. But how much do you think we’re going to hear about that? As Sapir and Whorf might have said, if a term doesn’t exist in our vocabulary, it’s hard to think about the concept.
BARRY EMAILS LUKE: “Fascinating piece on the “killing blondes” shooting. I think you are right about the beneficial effects of internet porn for sex starved young men. While not therapeutic exactly I think it helps to open their eyes about the fundamentally coarse nature of women and helps to demystify them. I also agree that the shooter’s parents did not help – I’ve known a couple of mixed race kids and its a terrible cross to bear.”
