The NZ perp is also an ideologue. There is an emotional component to his radicalization experience, but he is not in an emotional spiral and he is not crazy. He is a political extremist.
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It is instructive to compare the NZ perpetrator to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, who is a more typical example of what an ideological Hard Righty mass murderer looks like: ideological, but way more emotional, way less prepared, and murdery but way less murdery.
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PITTSBURGH PERP, reaching emotional peak. "Screw your optics, I'm going in" NZ PERP, reaching emotional peak. *makes decision to commit terrorism, plans for two years, prepares manifesto, ensures its wide distribution, commits horrifying massacre which he livestreams*
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The Pittsburgh perp is actually pretty typical of how these things go; consider Frazier Glenn Miller, longtime Klansman who decided to try to commit mass murder at a Jewish community center in 2014. He killed three people, none of whom were Jewish.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overland_Park_Jewish_Community_Center_shooting …
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Basically, what you see in a lot of these cases is "garbage person emotional spasm." That's not what the NZ perp did: he's a cold-headed extremist.
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I read the NZ perp's manifesto. I have read a lot of manifestos.
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Most manifestos are kind of like blog posts. They're lists of personal grievances, they're rambly, they're emotional infodump. Christopher Dorner's manifesto was like this, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_and_manhunt …
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Elliot Rodger is often seen as an ideological killer, but per his manifesto his ideology was extremely fuzzy and ill-defined; more important was that he was a narcissist who was also completely incompetent and unlikable, and his emo manifesto reflects this
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IMHO the way to look at a manifesto is to ask, "who is the audience for this, and what is the intended effect?" For a lot of perps, like Dorner and Rodger, the audience is "anybody" and the intended effect is "to vent" or maybe "to get people to feel sorry for me"
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Anders Breivik's intended audience was "everyone," so he produced a goddamn benchthumper of a manifesto with stuff for everyone from normies to people ready to go out and commit terrorism the first half of his manifesto is just blog posts he hopes will be onramps for normies
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