Archery is pretty hard, you need strong arms and a good eye. The fact he managed to get 5 kills is impressive. I know back in the olden days archers could kill dozens in a single battle, but for a contemporary archer 5 kills is nothing to sniff at.
Some mass murderers, like certain types of serial killers, are very strong narcissists and enjoy the attention, both from the media and law enforcement. Ted Bundy absolutely loved talking to FBI agents, and the audio tapes with him amount to dozens of hours of him bragging about his murders and presenting himself as a self-styled absolute genius and master manipulator. Anders Behring Breivik was also officially diagnosed with very pronounced narcissistic personality disorder by forensic psychiatrists. Bundy and Breivik didn't simply kill people for the sake of ending a person's life (there's a subset of serial killers whose main motive is simply the gratification from watching a person die). It was in no small part a horribly perverse way of showing the world what underrated geniuses they were. And Breivik in particular took the time to type up 1,500 pages of pernicious alt-/far-right drivel, probably fancying himself one of the greatest intellectual minds of our time.
But yeah, if you only need four hours to answer all questions about the how and the why of killing five people with a bow and arrow, then you're probably not that far up your own arse. Especially if religious extremism is involved. Believing that your god wanted you to do it is sort of the opposite of killing people because you think you are a genius.
>>35558 >Believing that your god wanted you to do it is sort of the opposite of killing people because you think you are a genius.
Wouldn't the opposite be to "go forth and multiply"?
>>35557 I was just making a joke about him being questioned "for hours".
But you're right, archery is tougher than I realised until I saw this video earlier in the year. The featured archer is built like the proverbial and apparently all he does is pull bows to look like that. Rather innappropriate to post it itt I suppose, but it's not like this site's got a reputation for anything else.
I notice the Far Cry games, the Tomb Raider reboots, and Horizon Zero Dawn all feature bows, also The Hunger Games. Do you think he was influenced by the 2010s trend for bow wielding protagonists?
I like how you're all jumping to the conclusion it's some flavour of militant daft woggery, completely ignoring the fact it's a Danish man in Norway, which really tells you all you need to know.
I mean. Really showing your cultural ignorance here lads, do better.
>>35555 Which makes it all the more glaring that people somehow had to wait for information about him to emerge before deciding it was an act of terror.
>>35561 >>35555 >back in the olden days archers could kill dozens in a single battle
What really makes it impressive to me is that, back in the olden days, that battle would be fought on an open field with a bunch of idiots standing around waiting to be loosed at, or running at you in a straight line. Modern cities aren't like that. There's cover everywhere. Even if you start by going for a crowd they'll be able to get out the way fairly quickly. To kill five people in one evening you'll be doing a lot of running around after them, possibly even loosing while moving.
A joke that's merely not funny passes by without anyone making a fuss. It's only when there are indignant fannies with big knobs of ginger stuck up their rectum present that you get this sort of response.
I would guess it's all about waiting for an opportune moment and picking an isolated target. I doubt that he approached this like your typical Yank mass shooter might, where you just start spraying down the aisles at WalMart or whatever.
A bow and arrow has the advantage that you can fire it without immediately giving away your position and making everyone panic like the crack of a gunshot would. If he made clean shots he could probably have killed two or three before anyone even noticed anything was up, and if he was able to sneak off and relocate between shots he could remain undetected for some time.
I've played lots of Far Cry, I am qualified to speak on this subject.
He was inside a shopping centre and starting firing after being confronted by police.
Apparently the victims were all aged 50-70 so just couldn't get away in time.
>>35561 I have nothing but respect for that guy for keeping an old craft alive, but that's not how modern archery works. It's not mentioned what kind of bow this particular shithead used, but with a decent compound bow you don't need near the strength, practice, and training to hit a human size target. And funnily enough, most people's response to intense violence like this is is to seek the first opportunity to hide be it helpful or not, to seek mercy or to be completely overloaded and not comprehend what's going on. At this point there are enough first person live videos of shitheads shooting up places that show this and I can only imagine it'll be similar if a bow is used. Hitting something with a bow if it's 50 yards away takes practice, just shoving arrows into a near by target not so much.
It remains to be seen if this particular shithead also filmed in first person, but what is important here is to remember that this was a shithead, should only be referred to as a shithead, and that shit happened because a shithead did shithead things.
>>35558 We label every mass murderer as having this or that mental illness. It's like racism against the insane.
When's the last time you heard of some mass murderer where, afterwards, everyone says they were perfectly sane? No. They soon find evidence of insanity because they set out to find it. If I went out tonight and killed a bunch of people I'm sure some psychologists would pick over my life with a magnifying glass and find something that doesn't fit with and imagined human ideal.
I'm starting to lose where I'm going with this but I bet normal people commit far more crimes than we're being told.
I think there's an argument to be made that wanting to kill people, for any reason, is by definition a marker of "inasnity", whatever that word means. It's an awfully unfashionable word nowadays though.
The juxtaposition and conflict here comes from the fact that we've had this big push in recent years to de-stigmatise mental illness and make it so that being neurodivergent or whatever today's word is is okay. But even as someone who's suffered with lifelong neurodivergence- I don't agree. It just leads to this perverse situation where you're expected to get on just the same as anybody else despite the fact your brain is malfunctioning, as long as everyone says enough empty platitudes about it.
It's a bit like with a disability. People in wheelchairs don't want you to pretend they're not in a wheelchair and wilfully force yourself to believe they're just as capable as anyone else. They want you to acknowledge the fact their legs don't fucking work and give them the accommodations they need to deal with that fact.
The majority of serious violent crime is perpetrated by people with personality disorders. That's not terribly surprising - people with no empathy or a strong predisposition for antisocial behaviour or aggression are much more likely to hurt other people.
I mentioned this in the Sarah Everard thread, because I think it's important to bear in mind whenever we're discussing extremism or "rape culture" or whatever. A small but significant minority of people simply don't have the ability to think about the consequences of their actions or respond to moral reasoning. We can't appeal to their better nature, because they don't have one; we're not even sure that we can deter them with the threat of punishment. Horrible violent crimes are fortunately quite rare, but to a certain extent they're also inevitable.
>>35581 >When's the last time you heard of some mass murderer where, afterwards, everyone says they were perfectly sane? No.
Maybe that's because nearly every person who isn't a mass murderer will tell you that it's pretty fucking far from perfectly sane to go out and murder any number of people you see fit.
I'm not sure either where you're going with this, but it sounds kind of like a "Hitler was good with children" defence (no, really, by all accounts, he was adored by the children of his inner-circle entourage). I don't think there is any redeeming quality at all that a person can very well have which isn't completely negated by them killing innocent people for fun, out of narcissism, sexual deviancy, or even to advance the Master Race.
>>35589 >The majority of serious violent crime is perpetrated by people with personality disorders.
Then again, not all personality disorders give you a violent disposition. Aspies aren't known to be particularly violent, maybe with the exception of that Elliot Rodger lad whose crippled social skills led him to violently murder half a dozen girls who had turned him down.
Really this question is a number of questions each with their own very deep philosophical rabbit holes.
It's a matter of perspective and moral relativism. If you believe what the Nazis believed about jews then the holocaust was totally rational. But we are in general agreement that what they believed was, in fact, mental.
When it comes to the question of mental health it's often difficult to draw the line between what kind of "insanity" constitutes actual mental illness and what is merely a divergence from tolerated social norms. There has been a great deal of examination on that question in film and literature.
Agency is... Well, it's a pretty meaningless term in all honesty. There's an argument that agency doesn't exist because the universe is deterministic. There's the argument the universe is not strictly deterministic, but that we lack agency anyway because our decisions are merely a by-product of the circumstances and experiences that have shaped our personality. There's an argument that we do have agency, but that in reality our realistic options in any given situation are limited to a very narrow range of possibilities.
I suppose you can make an argument that going on a mass murder spree is one of the only sane things you can do to reclaim agency when faced with all this. But very few people are going to agree- In fact they'll probably call you a nutter.
>It's a matter of perspective and moral relativism. If you believe what the Nazis believed about jews then the holocaust was totally rational. But we are in general agreement that what they believed was, in fact, mental.
You're removing from the equation that a Nazi can be just like you and in many ways our society would prefer that outcome over facing our own humanity. Hitler had one nut, Napoleon was a short-arse, Dutch people are frogs, when you killed those crabs you were just temporarily insane etc.
Is someone a serial murderer because they have a mental illness, or are they diagnosed with a mental illness because serial murdering is one of the agreed upon symptoms for diagnosis?
Yes, although it's quite unlikely. There aren't many circumstances where a psychologically healthy person would just suddenly decide to kill a bunch of people.
>Is someone a serial murderer because they have a mental illness, or are they diagnosed with a mental illness because serial murdering is one of the agreed upon symptoms for diagnosis?
Psychiatric diagnoses aren't just judgement calls, they're based on specific criteria. Those criteria are tested for "inter-rater reliability", which is to say that different people applying the same criteria to the same patient should get the same result.
The most relevant diagnosis to extreme acts of violence is Antisocial Personality Disorder. The ICD-10 criteria require at least three of the following traits:
1) Callous unconcern for the feelings of others;
2) Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations;
3) Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, though having no difficulty in establishing them;
4) Very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence;
5) Incapacity to experience guilt or to profit from experience, particularly punishment;
6) Marked readiness to blame others or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behaviuor that has brought the person into conflict with society.
It should be fairly obvious why a large proportion of mass murderers or habitual violent criminals tick a lot of those boxes. Narcissistic and Paranoid personality disorders are also fairly common among violent criminals.
>If it is insanity to commit murder, then are the armed forces all mentalists?
No, but it's a really interesting issue. Historically, most soldiers (especially conscripts) didn't actually shoot to kill - they'd go through the motions, but they just couldn't do it. Since the Second World War, military training has become progressively more realistic, moving from target practice at bullseyes to full-scale simulated combat, the goal of which is to make killing a trained reflex rather than a conscious decision. We have also relied on increasingly remote and depersonalised means of killing like artillery, airstrikes and drones.
Volunteer armies do tend to contain a disproportionate number of "mentalists", because psychologically healthy people tend to be put off by the prospect of going to war for less money than you'd get working at Carphone Warehouse.
>It's a matter of perspective and moral relativism. If you believe what the Nazis believed about jews then the holocaust was totally rational.
I think problems start when you allow certain goal posts to be moved by the highest authorities. Most people will instinctively fall in line and not question the moral or ethical coordinates set out by governments and leaders. And there are also group dynamics involved. Think back to school, if the majority of kids thought that some poor social outcast was fair game to pick on, then it was the accepted thing to do.
And on the scale of racism and what the Nazis did, "reasonable" and "ethical" thinking can then completely turn itself on its head, where weeding out a Volksschadling ethnic minority is in the interest of the purity and wellbeing of the Aryan race. You were only euthanising Jews, gypsies and the disabled in Germany's best interest. It also tied in with social darwinism, which had been gaining popularity since the late 1800s and declared reasonable the idea that survival of the fittest was also applicable to the competition and struggle of survival between nationalities or ethnicities.
So yeah, I guess where it gets messy is where self-perceived reasonable people are oblivious to the fact that what they are doing or what they believe in is horribly wrong. And it doesn't stop at Nazism, historically. Just think of slavery in Colonial times where it was considered the white man's duty to civilisie the racially inferior savages. Or societies and cultures where it is still entirely reasonable for a husband to treat his wife as personal property.
"Madness" is deviating from the social norm. If it's the social norm to do genocide or ecocide or drinking-koolicide, you're not [considered] mad to do those things.
I would definitely kill people for sport/fun. The only thing stopping me is the almost certain punishment, I don't want to go to prison so it's not worth the risk.
I don't think I'd ever be diagnosed with a mental illness, I certainly haven't so far. I just don't really have a good moral compass.
>>35609 It's several things, and that's one of them. It's also acting irrationally, or attempting to do the same thing repeatedly expecting a different result. In this context, it seems quite clearly to refer to diagnosable medical conditions characterised by detectable differences in the brain.
>>35610 Would it have to be strangers, or could you do it with people you know, or your family? Does the idea that you're preventing that person from experiencing anything more in life affect you? Would you actually do it if you were assured of no consequences, or do you think the idea that you could do it without consequence would detract from the allure of serial murder? I'm not having a go, I'm just curious.
>>35601 >>35602 Well, here's where I'm cynical because if you're doing all of this after someone has done a bit of murder then you're under enormous pressure to get a result and the individuals life is going to be put under a magnifying glass.
It's like how they say the one way to drive yourself crazy is to start asking if you're crazy. Or how in Victorian-Edwardian times people ended up constantly being watched and diagnosed for ills. If you set out to find something you will find it.
It would have to be strangers, or at least people I don't like. The people I keep around me are people whose company I enjoy, so it would be a net loss to kill them.
If there were assuredly no consequences, I'd only kill people if I could profit from their death, potentially including family, I'd really have to weigh that up though - do I prefer spending time with my grandma, or do I prefer inheriting her house a few years early, that sort of thing. Otherwise, the broad appeal would be that you're doing something Very Bad and getting away with it, but again, I'm not willing to risk my freedom on whether or not I can outsmart a murder investigation - it'd be fun, but I have plenty of hobbies that are probably just as fun that don't come with that sort of risk.
It's also entirely possible that, actually stood there, finger on the trigger, I actually couldn't do it, I'm sure instinctually killing another person for anything other than self defence is hard-coded against - I don't think I'd know unless I was there, but I do deep down believe I could.
The accepted clinical definition requires both dysfunction and distress. If you're perfectly content, can function in society and cause no harm to anyone, then you're not mentally ill no matter how eccentric you are.
Hearing the voice of god doesn't make you mad if you find that voice comforting and it tells you to do good things; it only becomes diagnosable as schizophrenia if you find that voice frightening or it tells you to lob dead rats at schoolkids.
It's a fairly arbitrary line based on the particular norms and mores of our society, but it's also pretty useful in dividing nutters who need help from nutters who are fine as they are.
>The accepted clinical definition requires both dysfunction and distress. If you're perfectly content, can function in society and cause no harm to anyone, then you're not mentally ill no matter how eccentric you are.
It rings true, if slightly, but it still seems a bit odd. So basically, you can be a proper nutter as long as you don't start doing crazy shit while you are out and about?
>So basically, you can be a proper nutter as long as you don't start doing crazy shit while you are out and about?
If your crazy shit doesn't cause you any distress or cause harm to others, then yes, you're perfectly sane. From a psychiatrist's perspective, if there's no distress being caused to anyone then there's no disease to treat.
Fetishes are quite a good example. Some people are really into feet or latex or whatever, to the exclusion of everything else. If you're fine with that and it doesn't cause you to do any creepy shit, then it's not something you need psychiatric help with. If on the other hand you desperately want to fuck your wife but you can only do it if she dresses like Mr Blobby, or you keep getting locked up for sniffing bike saddles, then you've got a paraphiliac disorder that a psychiatrist can treat.
It's fairly arbitrary, there are a lot of difficult grey areas, but it's an important safeguard against psychiatrists becoming agents of social control. Most psychiatrists have the sense to say "if it makes you happy and no-one is getting hurt, then it's none of my business".
So we're only mental when our mentalness gets in the way of others. From one perspective that's great and makes perfect sense, from another it's a perfect way to supress anyone whose personality might be too much of a hassle to society/taxpayers.
That's probably a very stoned uni student way of thinking about it, but it does grimly mirror the way I've seen firsthand the way both the state and other people will write off those with mental illnesses. My family almost immediately gave up on my auntie when she was diagnosed with schizophrenia because she was 'fighting' her medication. Of course she fucking was, she's a paranoid schizophrenic.
>So we're only mental when our mentalness gets in the way of others.
Or if our mentalness causes us distress. Whether we actually get adequate, humane treatment to resolve that distress is another matter.
FWIW, I think that efforts to reduce the stigma of mental illness have in fact done the opposite. We have a socially acceptable narrative of mental illness along the lines of "I was feeling bad, I asked for help and now I'm better" that is totally at odds with the experiences of people with severe and enduring mental illness. We spend a lot of time talking about people who used to be depressed, we hear a lot from people with minor anxiety disorders, but people with schizophrenia or severe depression are left out of the conversation.
>>35644 I have recently hatched an epic sissify that a lot of modern mental health activism is a CIA conspiracy. A lot of people report problems with their lives, and rather than taking steps to resolve these for everyone, which would upset the status quo and threaten the hegemony of the 1%, the media now encourages people to embrace and acknowledge these problems as indicative of some emotional disease. The greatest and bravest people are not the ones who fight the system that makes everyone poor; it's the people who are brave enough to normalise these hardships and treat them as inevitable, and then try to medicate themselves into accepting it, thereby cementing the current established positions of landowners and the oppressed. Isn't that a wacky coincidence?
Obviously this doesn't apply to mental health issues where you believe mad things about the CIA conspiring against you (ahem), but as you say, these are not the issues that are normally seen as brave to be open about.
>We have a socially acceptable narrative of mental illness along the lines of "I was feeling bad, I asked for help and now I'm better" that is totally at odds with the experiences of people with severe and enduring mental illness.
That is kind of true, like if you're going in to have a broken leg fixed or a tooth straightened.
What if that leg just keeps breaking or that tooth keeps getting back out of alignment somehow. Neither is likely, but if we assume that mental illness is a one-time thing like a broken leg or a wonky tooth, then we also ignore just what you're saying, that mental illness isn't like that and can come back. It should really be treated more like recurring cancer. On the other hand, that is then a slippery slope in its own right, because assuming that somebody with a history of mental illness will at some point just slip back into it, a bit like a ticking time bomb, isn't fair to anybody who was able to put that mentall illness behind them for good.
That said, the most ludicrous thing is what happens in America, where at least for a while it seemed that going into sex rehab was more about the ritual than it was about learning to control your urges or channel them in a healthy way. It's like for some time, every B movie actor who got caught getting a blowie from a prostitute in his car in a back alley went to sex rehab. And probably more to save their own career than to better control their sexuality. Because harmful sexual tendencies are a lot more difficult to cure than many types of depression, which probably every paedo can attest to.
The only part you're wrong about is it being the CIA, but in terms of the establishment in general, we have definitely developed into an attitude where a mental health problem is a faulty cog that needs only the requisite amount of repair to fulfil its function in the machine.
