Linky Friday: Summertime

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

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21 Responses

  1. Doctor Jay says:

    [Ma3] In the sense that spree killing has nothing to do with bipolar disorder, or depression, or schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, or even narcissism I agree and endorse. What I know about the process of spree killing suggests it isn’t even related to sociopathy, since the perpetrators go through a great deal of trouble winding themselves up to do it.

    People who suffer from mental illness don’t want the association. It doesn’t work like that for them. I don’t blame them.

    But it also doesn’t make much sense to be described as the product of some ideology, since there are so many different ideologies involved. The common threads seem to be a sense of humiliation in the spree killer, and a sense of alienation. It’s very definitely a specific psychological process, though it isn’t necessarily easy to observer and/or predict before the fact. Still, I feel that we could do better at noticing these processes and intervening than we are doing now, but it would require us to be a bit more intrusive, which goes against the grain of the culture at large.Report

    • This is more @wvesquiress, who loves this stuff and has excel charts on common factors and such. Big picture there is such a lack of understanding what constitutes “mental illness” were people just write it off as “crazy” when they hear the term. You can have a head cold compared to invasive cancer; both are illnesses but there is a wide spectrum between them. Yet many make mental illness a blanket coverage of gone in the head. When you have something like a mass shooting, often there is an element that will never make sense to anyone, so its tempting to slap the “crazy” label on the shooter and then rant about mental health instead of the hard deconstruction of a troubled person. We as a nation are doing very poor on all fronts with mental health and it starts with a lot of just lazy thought about the subject and careless application.Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      I don’t disagree with the notion that mental illness is overdetermined in mass shootings, it does seem to exist at some level. The Virginia Tech shooter appeared to be suffering from schizophrenia, but we cannot know for certain because he killed himself and it’s not clear that he ever received a diagnoses.

      Locally, we had a student who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, who went off his meds and began hearing voices and experiencing intrusive thoughts. He had lost his FOID card, but he went to a gun store and held it up with an imaginary weapon, took a gun to the state capitol and shot and killed one of the guards as he made his way through the entrance. But upon seeing the guard drop, he changed course and fled.

      Since you’re using the term “spree killing,” I think maybe what you are getting at, and I would agree, is that typical mental illness (depression, autism, etc.) lacks explanatory power for mass homicides, and in cases where mental illness is obviously a factor, the ability to focus and plan is severely compromised.Report

  2. Saul Degraw says:

    I don’t get why old people retiring to hit areas is a thing. Here is an article about how retirees in Florida are turning the State into a Trumplandia

    https://www.vox.com/2018/7/12/17564904/trump-popularity-state-approvalReport

  3. LTL FTC says:

    Ma3: since there is a small group of people who commit crimes for a living, wouldn’t any group but that little niche be more likely to be victims of crimes than perpetrators?

    (That doesn’t mean, of course, that any mass shooter screening method is good for much more than a bunch of false positives.)Report

  4. Oscar Gordon says:

    So2: It’s not sound waves, it’s shock waves. The rocket went supersonic and you are watching the shock propagation.Report

  5. Kolohe says:

    He1 RTGs have been around for a while. Though, true, maybe in the future plutonium is sold in every corner drug store, but in 2018 it’s still a little hard to come by.Report

  6. Kolohe says:

    St5 the local TV news did a similar bit with the old Washington Post building before it was torn down a couple years ago. It too had some leftover features from when the paper was printed right in the building in the early decades, before they moved printing to a dedicated facility. (Also fictionalized in The Post movie, though w more than a few inaccuracies for a more elegant set design)Report

  7. For me no review of Summertime would be complete without Miles Davis version that reconfigures the melody in unique ways.

    https://youtu.be/5FAYe2N4yRIReport