I’m groggy and sore this morning.
This weekend, we rebuilt the raised beds for the tomatoes and moved plants from one side of the yard to the other. We cheered for Jonah as he ran a local 5K. We walked around the Bronx Botanical Gardens. (Note to self: Do not take a teenager to the botanical gardens on a Sunday morning. Apparently, they enjoy sleeping more than a leisurely stroll through the gardens of ferns. Much eye rolling happens when you choose ferns over sleep.) We deep cleaned the house. We hosted one BBQ and attended another.
So, my brain is frozen. Let’s see what people are talking about…
Michael Berube writes about Jaime and his quest for employment. (Thank, Jeremy S.)
The shooting rampage in CA is bringing attention to a really weird subculture on the web that revolves around guys who feel rejected by women. (Thanks, Amy P)
A college degree means a bigger salary. “Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s.” Hmmm. Going to come back to this study later.
I do enjoy all the “Leaving Academia” articles. (Thanks, Wendy)
Apt. 11d 
You also watched Mad Men. 🙂
This weekend we had both commencements, my husband went to the accountant to do taxes, and we hosted our annual Memorial Day party (which I plan mainly because it makes me clean the house before the summer begins).
Re the Santa Barbara shootings: I read every blasted word of that disgusting manifesto because of the news that he had an Asperger’s diagnosis. I read to look for clues that I need to know so I can identify them if they show up with my kid. But I just don’t see any of my kid in this guy. I am more and more convinced that AS is not a specific identifiable “thing” as much as it is a lens through which the person’s personality is refracted. There is no one AS personality; there are only AS-inflected personalities.
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Even if the social isolation that can be associated with ASD contributes to psychopathic behavior (and we don’t know that it does), it wouldn’t mean that we should associate ASD with mass murder just as we shouldn’t associate any statistical correlation with any individual. We should also start with the premise that a person isn’t a label, even when it is also a diagnosis (though, of course, you know that). Why would we expect there to be an ASD personality? any more so than a schizophrenic personality or a Downs personality? People are people, in their infinite variation, and, that’s true even when they share certain brain atypicalities, as when their brains are more typical.
Our reaction to the mass shooting and manifesto was to worry about the role of cartoonish violence in the media/popular culture (the series finale of Revolution was playing in the background). I am becoming increasingly worried about the normalization of that kind of violence in the shows we watch, games we play, and potentially books we read.
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“I read every blasted word of that disgusting manifesto because of the news that he had an Asperger’s diagnosis. I read to look for clues that I need to know so I can identify them if they show up with my kid.”
So far, so good, I think.
I think you’d see it coming 1,000 yards away if your son had that kind of attitude.
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I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Santa Barbara case this morning, and he was talking about the effects of social media. He was talking about how when he was a high schooler, he was daunted by hearing all the guys bragging about girls and all the fun they were out there having, and his dad told him not to believe any of it. He said his dad was essentially correct. Rush was saying that current social media magnifies this effect–it feels like everybody but you is out there having an awesome life, even when they’re not.
http://guardianlv.com/2013/08/facebook-causes-depression-new-study-says/
http://nypost.com/2014/01/16/americas-ugly-epidemic-of-social-media-envy/
I’d add to this that if the Santa Barbara shooter was an Aspie, he might be particularly literalistic about what he sees on the internet and on social media. He wouldn’t have the social savvy to give everything he sees on social media the appropriate discount. As an Aspie, he also might have very rigid, simplistic ideas about what it takes to be successful with women, and of course hanging out in the manosphere would tend to reinforce those rigid, simplistic views.
Here’s a thread I was on recently with the thread title “Is lack of dating experience by 25 a turn-off to women”?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=885065
I’m Xantippe in that thread.
Although murderers are fortunately uncommon, in my normal internet rounds, I do bump into this type very often–the sad, lonely, socially unsavvy guy who believes that everybody else but him is having a totally awesome life.
I haven’t familiarized myself with the minutiae of manopshere ideology, but from my brushes with it, I suspect that it’s psychologically really bad for the sad, lonely, socially unsavvy guys. From what I gather, the manosphere talks a lot about alpha males versus betas and encourages men to believe that somewhere out there, all the girls (and certainly all the pretty ones) are hanging out and having sex with the alpha guys. This is essentially the worldview of the Santa Barbara shooter.
Here are some correctives for that worldview that I’ve tried (or will try to get across) to that kind of guy:
1. Among college students and young adults, there often isn’t a lot of real dating, so actually asking women out can be surprisingly effective.
2. A lot of nice young women feel just as lonely and unloved as they do and have literally never been asked out.
3. Most women don’t like sharing. They don’t want 50% or 33% or 25% or 20% of some alpha guy–they want 100% of a guy. There aren’t enough alpha guys to go around. Therefore, you, too have a shot, even though you’re a dork. A lot of dorks are happily married and have kids. (I try to phrase those last two sentences somewhat more tactfully.)
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“From what I gather, the manosphere talks a lot about alpha males versus betas and encourages men to believe that somewhere out there, all the girls (and certainly all the pretty ones) are hanging out and having sex with the alpha guys. This is essentially the worldview of the Santa Barbara shooter.”
Yes, and when he was confronted by the reality of men who were not alpha males/conventionally “hot” males having sex with women, he wasn’t able to change his worldview to adapt. He was just astounded and then would usually get dismissive or racist about it. (How could that ugly black/Asian/Latino guy get a hot blonde woman!) He just couldn’t grasp the concept that sex is more than just about physical appearance.
“Therefore, you, too have a shot, even though you’re a dork.”
The premise of my favorite scene in Mad Men last night. 🙂
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“Yes, and when he was confronted by the reality of men who were not alpha males/conventionally “hot” males having sex with women, he wasn’t able to change his worldview to adapt. He was just astounded and then would usually get dismissive or racist about it. (How could that ugly black/Asian/Latino guy get a hot blonde woman!)”
The inability to abandon one’s rule in the face of persistent evidence that it’s not working is definitely an Aspie quality.
As a number of people have observed, the Santa Barbara shooter was actually a really good-looking guy, in the somewhat androgynous/boy band/teen heartthrob style (not unlike the younger Tsarnaev, come to think of it).
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/jahars-world-20130717
The Santa Barbara shooter is half Asian, which probably added a lot to the angst. (Another of my internet forum contacts was a short Korean-American guy who was struggling with the fact that while he LOVES white women, white women aren’t quite so keen on him.)
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Jahar is way better looking than the SB shooter. #creepyoldlady
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I admit I didn’t have the stomach for every word of the manifesto. I read a few pages, and used the search function. I did read about the Del Playa incident, because someone online cited it as an example of an episode the family lawyer described as “bullying” which was closer to self-defense on the part of the people the shooter was trying to push off a 10-foot wall.
He did state something to the effect that the end events could have been stopped if some girl had gone home with him at that point and “offered him sex.”
Ah, real life doesn’t work that way. This is not an online community problem. It’s not a therapy session problem, as a writer in Reason apparently theorized.
This was the writing of someone who has no idea how other people work. Like, it’s a total mystery. Was he using p rn films as his guide to life? Holed up in his apartment or his parents’ house, playing Halo, World of Warcraft, and (unspecified) movies. I’m betting they were p rn, or he was accessing it via the internet. Most movies have dialogue, in which people interact. His writing also shows absolutely no sense of humor, which is a real warning sign.
His stepmother was right to forbid him her house. He did intend to kill her.
I do wonder if anything could have been changed. All the adults in his life–mother, father, stepmother–had immigrated to the US from other cultures. He was thus (presumably) denied daily contact to a wider, extended family.
He reminds me of a relative’s child. That boy had the good fortune to be not as smart as this shooter, so his problems were handled by a succession of specialty schools until he had a series of brushes with the laws as an adult. This was a good thing. There are programs to keep potentially dangerous people in contact with social workers and medication. A track record with public law enforcement and the courts provides a guide to understanding a person having a crisis.
Isolating the shooter from the world, and keeping him “out of trouble,” might not have helped. He did see therapists, but there was no mechanism to ensure he took any medication. Was there any record of previous trouble which would have tipped the police officers toward an involuntary stay in a mental hospital?
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“His writing also shows absolutely no sense of humor, which is a real warning sign.”
Keep saying things like this. It makes me feel better. My kid is hilarious (unusual for kids with AS, but part of that is because humor/jokes were my way of distracting him from something he was perseverating on).
Last night:
E: “How *do* you grow pigs? –pause– I know. You plant porkchops….”
(Don’t ask me how we got on the topic of pigs. We tend to free-associate around here.)
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“This was the writing of someone who has no idea how other people work.”
Yep.
He was in therapy starting in elementary school–I wonder if any of his therapists tried to give him some mechanics on dating, or whether he just wouldn’t listen, because he was just so fixated on his internal script.
Do we know that he even tried asking women out or internet dating?
His family (step-mom and half-brother especially) had a very close call.
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From his manifesto, which I skimmed as much as I could stomach, it appears not. It seems like he sat in random public places wearing designer clothing, and assumed women would approach him. If they didn’t, he blamed the clothing and the women. Clearly there’s a narrator reliability issue, but still, that isn’t a successful way to get a date for anyone. It also sounds like but he sounds like he probably came off as incredibly scary and women (correctly) gave him a wide berth. There are several described incidences of dumping drinks on people and screaming in rage, but it’s hard to know if those actually occurred.
I would say that ‘lonely and sad’ is far too kind. He comes off as pathologically narcissistic and entitled. Superiority complex coupled with self-hatred. Honestly, if we came across a teenaged Hitler’s manifesto, I imagine it would read fairly similarly in terms of general tone and attitude.
For asperger’s. My ex-husband’s brother was an Aspie and a card carrying member of the PUA community. He also said some very disturbing things from time to time, e.g. that genocide wasn’t that bad because it reduced overpopulation. However, he wasn’t a homicidal rage-filled narcissist who believed he was innately superior to all other men. He used PUA techniques to learn how to flirt and and found them actually very helpful in learning how to socialize in certain settings. He had close female friends and LT girlfriends in the past and wasn’t really interested in sleeping around. Although I despise the ethos of the movement, I don’t think it’s necessarily that evil because it’s basically about teaching very unsocial men a way to socialize acceptably with women. The ev psych language is quite irritating, but if you can look past that even the more icky stuff like negging is really an attempt to explain how teasing works,* which has always been a form of flirting. IOI (indicator of interest) is actually a way to try to teach men how to understand how consent works outside of explicit verbal consent.** Also, the PUA movement emphatically tells men they are solely responsible for their success with women. If women don’t sleep with a man, it’s his fault, not the women’s fault, and importantly, it’s something the man needs to work on with himself. Again, most men don’t need this and can interact with women as humans, but if the alternative is a woman-hating Rodger or Soldini MRA type, I’d much rather a cocky PUA learning magic tricks and cheesy pick up lines. With my BIL, tried and was reasonably successful from steering him away from the overt misogyny of the movement, and he used the PUA skills to learn how to chat casually. He would flow chart conversations he had and write down all possible responses he could give in casual conversation, and then come to me for better responses when he inevitably got to the point where he inadvertently offended the woman and she stomped off. In the time I worked with him, we went from almost instantly offending a woman to being able to carry on a half hour conversation of small talk before either cutting it off or getting to the point he ran out of witty socially acceptable things to say.
It would be nice if some of the skills PUA stuff teaches could be separated from the ev psych nonsense, since a lot of it is actually very practical advice most people just pick up on innately. Part of the creepiness comes from the fact when you break down, analyze, and schematize any part of your own culture in minute detail, it comes off as weird and a bit disturbing.
*My ex-BIL’s initial attempts at negging were to say things like, “your shoes are ugly.” You can imagine how successful that was.
*The system works like this: things like arm touching, prolonged eye contact, or playing with one’s hair are IOIs, if a woman performs three IOIs, there’s a good chance she’s interested and the man should return an IOI, like a casual shoulder touch. If the women responds with an IOI, like not drawing back, or returning the touch, then the man can move to the next level of flirting. If the woman responds negatively by drawing back, then the woman isn’t at that point interested and the man should either find someone else or start over. It’s a overly schematic and feels a bit like a video game manual, but it’s not totally off base for human flirting interactions, and certainly training men to respond to subtle cues is preferable to lots of alternatives.
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Um…not planning on making this into a qualified defense of PUA stuff, but I guess how that’s turned out.
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I think the issue is what to do with sub clinical mental illness. In a number of these cases, there appear to have been warning signs, none of which reached the level that permitted legal intervention without the individuals consent.
I think parents/relatives are fairly powerless, unless they have gone to the more extreme step of getting consent from their child before they turn 18, and, in some of these cases, one would imagine that consent wouldn’t have been granted. In the SB shooter’s case, it seems that relatives were concerned, but that the concern couldn’t be acted on. I have to wonder, if the police had searched his room, would they have the authority to arrest him? Is it illegal to be stockpiling weapons in your room in California? Apparently it was in MA (if the law hasn’t changed): http://www.wbur.org/2012/07/25/massachusetts-gun-laws. Maybe if they’d found the threats/manifesto (but how would you find those, and what justification would there have been to do the search)?
I think the belief that a parent can prevent the behavior is a mistaken presumption of the ability of parents to control the behavior of their children, even when they know the behavior is problematic.
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