Sunday, May 25, 2014
Good morning:
Elliot Rogers wanted all the “blonde sluts” at UC Santa Barbara to know that he is the “perfect alpha male” for them, so he recorded this video to explain how incredibly cool he is and why he decided to slaughter everybody creating “mountains of skulls and rivers of blood.”
As I watched and listened, I was struck by how privileged and self-centered he was.
Here is the heart wrenching statement, from a father, who lost his son:
UPDATE 1
Here’s Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown’s press conference yesterday.
The UK Guardian is reporting today,
On Sunday, Santa Barbara’s county sheriff, Bill Brown, blamed failures in mental-health treatment for the fact that Rodger’s behaviour had worried people around him and precipitated three contacts with police, most recently last month, but had not caused an intervention that might have averted the slaughter.
“I think the fact of the matter is, there’s a general lack of resources in community mental-health treatment generally,” he told CNN on Sunday. “There’s also probably a lack of notification by healthcare professionals in instances when people are expressing suicidal or in certain cases homicidal thoughts or tendencies.”
An attorney for Rodger’s father said Rodger was diagnosed as a high-functioning patient with Asperger’s syndrome and had trouble making friends. “The Rodger family offers our deepest compassion and sympathies to the families involved in this terrible tragedy. We are experiencing the most inconceivable pain and our hearts go out to everyone involved,” the family said in a statement on Saturday.
Here’ wikipedia on Asperger’s syndrome:
Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger disorder (AD) or simply Asperger’s, is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. It differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development. Although not required for diagnosis, physical clumsiness and atypical (peculiar, odd) use of language are frequently reported. The diagnosis of Asperger’s was eliminated in the 2013 fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and replaced by a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder on a severity scale.
The syndrome is named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger who, in 1944, studied and described children in his practice who lacked nonverbal communication skills, failed to identify their peers’ emotions, and were physically clumsy. The modern conception of Asperger syndrome came into existence in 1981 and went through a period of popularization, becoming standardized as a diagnosis in the early 1990s. Many questions remain about aspects of the disorder. There is doubt about whether it is distinct from high-functioning autism (HFA); partly because of this, its prevalence is not firmly established.
The exact cause is unknown. Although research suggests the likelihood of a genetic basis, there is no known genetic cause and brain imaging techniques have not identified a clear common pathology. There is no single treatment, and the effectiveness of particular interventions is supported by only limited data. Intervention is aimed at improving symptoms and function. The mainstay of management is behavioral therapy, focusing on specific deficits to address poor communication skills, obsessive or repetitive routines, and physical clumsiness. Most children improve as they mature to adulthood, but social and communication difficulties may persist. Some researchers and people with Asperger’s have advocated a shift in attitudes toward the view that it is a difference, rather than a disability that must be treated or cured.
Although Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, was diagnosed with Asperger’s, violent behavior is atypical. Here’s Barbara Goodman of webmd.com,
Indeed, psychologists and psychiatrists agree that people with autism or Asperger’s are not more likely to commit violent crimes than members of the general population, but they say in very rare cases, it can happen.
Last, but not least, here is a link to Rodgers’s 140 page manifesto (H/T to Towerflower)
I still think he was a rich spoiled brat.
UPDATE 2
NBC News is reporting:
he three victims who were stabbed in the apartment of the man who unleashed a rampage in the college town of Isla Vista, California, were identified by authorities Sunday, two days after the violent spree.
The victims were identified as Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, and George Chen, 19, both of San Jose, and Weihan Wang, 20, of Fremont.
Authorities said that Hong and Chen were listed as tenants at the apartment of 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, who was suspected of causing the rampage. It was unclear if Wang was a roommate, too. All three were students at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Rodger was suspected of stabbing the three “repeatedly with sharp objects,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said Saturday. “It was a pretty horrific crime scene,” Brown added.
UPDATE 3
Boston.com has this report about Elliot’s parents frantically driving to Isla Vista after they found out about the manifesto.
Elliot Rodger’s parents raced to his Santa Barbara-area community after his mother saw his online threats, but they heard the news of a shooting on the radio as they were driving on the freeway.
They later learned their son had killed six people, wounded 13 and then — authorities say — took his own life.
The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that mother Chin Rodger got a call from her son’s therapist shortly before the shootings Friday about a ranting email sent by their son.
Then the mother found his video vowing to kill people.
Family friend Simon Astaire tells the newspaper that Chin Rodger alerted authorities and set off with her ex-husband, director Peter Rodger.
But by the time they arrived, officers confirmed their son had gone on a rampage.
Frederick Leatherman Law Blog 
It is because of his aspergers! Many aspies act overly masculine and narcissistic and appear creepy to girls. Instead of blaming his shortcomings on his poor social skills due to Asperger’s syndrome he blames the world. He refused his treatment because of his narcisistic symptoms. Many aspies believe they are perfect and everyone else is crazy and cruel. Basically many deny having it and do not work on their social skills and continue having problems with people and become very angry and hateful. They start believing that others are too stupid to understand them and that’s where the “godlike” attitude comes from.
His problem wasn’t that girls rejected him. It was his fear of rejection! He NEVER asked a girl out! He waited in places like Domino’s for women to approach him and when they didn’t, he got pissed off! Someone should have taught him some social skills…and by someone, I mean his father! Not the people he hired to do the job! Reading his “manifesto” he’s begging someone to stop him. As sick as he was and as sick as his rampage was, I must say I do feel a bit sorry for him. I’ve never seen such a lonely, lost soul.
Asperger’s doesn’t MAKE you do anythiing. It could, of course, KEEP you from doing certain things. But this is all so beside-the-point when the real issue is that this guy was allowed to buy an arsenal and use it in a little mini-Hitlerian puscht to take over an imaginary world while ACTUALLY MURDERING PEOPLE.
As to the point that “saying it is due to mental illness doesn’t imply that the society can do nothing about it” — I’m just thunderstruck. Let’s agree that the society can do nothing about what took place already on May 23, 2014. But it can do something about our general social RESPONSE and our manifestations (on the web, in the press, with each other) of our reactions.
Who has not, upon occasion, as a child, curled up in a closet somewhere and mumbled to ourselves in the dark, “I’ll die and then they’ll be sorry”?
The important message of our society should be: HEY, if you decide that you’re gonna kill people in order to design a big “boo hoo” and a groundswell of pathos FOR POOR YOU in this big world you choose to leave, it’s gonna FAIL.
It’s gonna be a FAIL!
You’re gonna be MOCKED and your image will be ERASED and your name will be uttered only in contempt and disdain. You’re not gonna have people all buzzing with “understanding” for what you went through, GET IT? So either grow up and accept that life isn’t perfect or take your chances with a very serious society that will condemn and reject and repudiate and mock you and your bad acts no matter what bullshit you think glorifies you and excuses them.
HERE’S THE MESSAGE: Go through your own suffering your own way but if you choose to inflict suffering on others, don’t ask for any pretty-pretty in response. You kill, you lose your right to sympathy.
Correction: contempt and derision.
He obviously had what I like to call ‘entitled aspergers’. Growing up with AS I’ve learned to classify people like me into two groups:
1. The kids with AS who either were not diagnosed until later in life or were diagnosed earlier but their parents didn’t let them use it as an excuse. These are the people who struggle socially but have more or less learned how to assimilate themselves into society. I call this method of child rearing ‘forcing your children to be as normal as possible, so that they can lead productive lives and become functional members of society.’ For example when I would come home crying after school my parents would tell me to get over it because people are assholes, and to go do my homework. Then they forced me into a plethora of extracurricular activities to force me to socialize with people so that one day I would be functional enough to go to university, meet a man, get married and have a life. For this I owe them my eternal gratitude.
2. Entitled ass-pies. These kids are usually diagnosed early, or their parents are retardedly happy when they are diagnosed because their gigantic dreams of sympathy no longer have to be faked using munchausen’s by proxy. Tell their children every single day that they are special snowflakes of unique specialness and that the whole entire world should warp to accept them, not the other way around (because one person is clearly more important than a couple of billion). Because obviously the whole world needs to revolve around your family and your fucking child. Selfishness runs in these families. These people are absolutely unbearable, and can’t get any because no chick, blonde, slutty, aspergery or otherwise wants to sit around and listen to you talk about your own penis and how the world revolves around it. These are the people sadly that end up in the spotlight and give people with aspergers a bad name.
While I don’t completely agree with your dichotomy, there are certainly parents who my son would describe as ‘enablers’ – who seem to want to accomodate the comfort zone of their offspring with Asperger’s and assume that they will be limited by it rather than encouraging them to overcome it and lead a normal life. I don’t credit or blame everything that happens on the parents, because within the Asperger’s/high functioning autism diagnoses there is a wide range in terms of adaptability/difficulty adapting and intelligence. There was a time that I really worried whether my son, even though highly intelligent, would be able to go to college and get a job that came anywhere close to being a reasonable fit for his intelligence and abilities. And it was often difficult for a while, and we couldn’t just tell him to suck it up, we had to ride it out. And yes, extracurricular activities played an important part in his learning to get along with others and eventually make friends.
It just came to me. This is speculation, of course, but it begins to really make sense. (Remember when Fogen was talking about his wife being “a mess” and his wife calling Osterman and vice versa and blah blah blah and remember that after the divorce it came out that Shellie had LEFT HIM THAT NIGHT and gone to her father’s house because they had a fight?)
I do not think Rodger’s problem was that no blonde girl was helping him “lose his virginity.” I think his problem was that SOME blonde girl had gone to bed with him and discovered that he was utterly impotent. He would not mention THAT in his manibarfo because he did not admit it. He would not name her because he would then make himself ridiculous.
He could get women into bed if he wanted to. He didn’t want to because he would find it AGAIN humiliating.
That’s just what I am “seeing” in this story right now. As I said, it’s speculation. I feel entitled to it because this misogynist lying cowardly murderer has no rights left. He has forfeited them all.
Here’s a link to an article I find absolutely thrilling:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2014/05/30/elliot-rodger-didnt-have-autism-he-had-anger/
This article is mostly BS. She talks about the danger of armchair diagnosis, yet engages in it herself. And what makes her believe that anger wouldn’t coexist with autism (especially Asperger’s or other high-functioning autism)? People with those conditions often have anger or a tendency to react with anger. Granted, most don’t act on it in anything like the way that Rodger did. She is wrong. The common, and primary factor, is mental illness, with anger being a major contributing factor.
But apparently the actual medical diagnosis of asperger’s (for Rodger) was made provisionally and then unmade fairly quickly. Anger can co-exist with ANY mental illness of course, and it can coexist with perfect mental health too. But the kind of long-term, focused, action-packed rage that is repeatedly expressed by Rodger just doesn’t remind me (and probably many others) of any of our friends with asperger’s or autism. And the part about tricking the police and others into thinking he was harmless — VERY UNUSUAL for anyone with an autism spectrum disorder. Obsessional qualities, yes; long-term planning to murder a bunch of people while fooling authorities? I just don’t see it.
At a certain point you have to say that some things are bad. Even some people are bad. Are they also mentally ill? Quite possibly. But to ignore all the other issues is too easy. After all, if it’s “just” mental illness, then there’s nothing to be done. Crazy people will act in crazy ways so our society need not do any self-evaluation.
On the other hand, if a person slides through three, four, five years of overtly demonstrating hostility, treading on other people’s rights, trying and sometimes succeeding in harassing and humiliating strangers who have done him no harm, displaying various behaviors that make others worry and fear him and try to get away from him, and REGISTERS FOR THREE LETHAL WEAPONS and gets them, legally or not legally, THAT does mean that something other than “mental illness” is wrong. Wrong with HIM and wrong with our society.
He could have taken out a full-page ad in the local paper saying, “Everybody better give me whatever I want right now or I’ll exact retribution,” yet the wire would not have been tripped because he was white, middle-class, and tricky. If he had been Black, “lower-class,” or otherwise disadvantaged, his prior incursions into other people’s rights (spraying orange juice on strangers in the park, pouring soda on people, trying to throw people off a ledge, etc.) would probably have landed him in a world of trouble, whereupon his videos would have resulted in a complete search of his room, discovery of the weapons (Hell, he probably wouldn’t even have been SOLD the weapons) and REAL action that might have changed the outcome considerably.
Although he did stab people as well as shooting them, I will bet that he would not have had the nerve to so much as slap them if he did not already know that he was armed to the teeth and if a serious defense arose, he could shoot. I think he stabbed his first victims to avoid the possibility that gunshots would be heard and the rest of his murderous plan would be prevented. It was the mad, power-crazed shoot-out (with him playing omnipotent, avenging deity while others are destroyed at his whim) that he craved and that he got. Really, it’s available to anyone who can get hold of guns and ammo.
The first part of this comment is an example, like the article that you are basing it on, of where a little knowledge is a ‘dangerous’ thing, at least in terms of leading your toward wrong conclusions. I am not sure what the story of Rodger’s diagnosis it, since I have seen different stories from different sources. And he showed so many symptoms of Asperger’s that I don’t see why the diagnosis would be ‘unmade’ unless the therapist had an agenda or was already seeing something more serious in his symptoms. (And when you get right down to it, a diagnosis of Asperger’s is based on symptoms.)
I actually find it easy to see where some people with Asperger’s could develop sustained anger, although they might not show it, or show it only as occasional outbursts. And I also don’t find it difficult for someone like my son or other young adults with Asperger’s to be able to avoid raising red flags with the police in a five-minute conversation. It probably would mostly have required knowing to avoid talking about something if not absolutely necessary.
As for the rest of your post, I agree that guns may have been a critical factor in his plans and his decision to carry them out, and that he probably would not have gone forward at all without them.
I agree that our society seems to have a lot of difficulty in being able to pick up on repeated clues that someone is dangerous. But, I strongly disagree with your claim that saying that mental illness is a major cause means that there is nothing to be done. I think that, as a nation, we need to do more to pick up on and treat mental illness, including having some more organized tracking mechanisms and being more able to lock up people who show strong evidence of being a danger to themselves or others (although admittedly, if we are not careful such mechanisms can lead to abuses such as locking up people for things like public demonstrations related to political and social causes). Being able to pick up on such things is key to being able to prevent killings related to mental illness. And certainly, we should think about whether there are steps that we can take to keep guns away from people who shouldn’t have them because they are a danger to others.
In this case, there may have been some difficulty in identifying him as the perpetrator of some of the actions involved, like the orange juice spraying, if that actually happened. The victims likely didn’t get a clear view of the perpetrator. But there were enough other clues as to serious problems that it seems as though more could have been done if more of an effort had been made to do them.
It’s just cavil to say the orange-juice-spraying might not have happened. We only learned about it through his own confession. We DO know that the attempt to push “as many women as possible” off the ledge ten feet (possibly causing very serious injury or even death) did happen and that he ended up injured himself as a result and wanted the police to prosecute his would-be victims for their successful self-defense.
As to what led me toward my “wrong conclusions,” I do not agree that they are wrong conclusions. They seem to be quite different from your conclusions and obviously you prefer yours.
Here, for the sake of clarity, are mine and (once again) a short description of what I have NOT concluded (and don’t believe matter):
1. I do not conclude that we have a firm “diagnosis” of Elliot Rodger (or a RULE-OUT, in each case) of Asperger’s, Autism Spectrum, or any other mental illness.
2. I do not conclude that Rodger’s problem resulted from bullying, and I point out that the “pushing off the ledge” incident resulted in his being beaten and hurt, but I would not call it “bullying” because it was self-defense on the part of the people he would describe as the perpetrators.
3. I do not conclude that Rodger’s problem resulted from he self-alleged condition of pernicious virginity and in fact find that both stupid and offensive.
4. I do conclude that Rodger had serious mental problems but I don’t care, because his mental problems were those shared by many despots, tyrants, dictators (indeed, he aspired to be one), abusers (he surely described himself as one) and criminals.
5. I do conclude that intense interest in poor Rodger’s problems is counter-productive for our society and CERTAINLY for me. Earlier in this thread I was admonished to be constructive rather than DEstructive in my comments about Rodger. I judge myself as being constructive NOT when I try to understand HIM, but when I make it clear to anybody who reads my words that he is to be derogated and mocked, and his deeds are NOT to be allowed to give him in death what he wanted in life: sympathy, attention, understanding, WORSHIP. His fantasies were to torture and kill women for NOT GIVING HIM WHAT HE WANTED. Am I to “understand” this or to mock and condemn it? After all, the way I react now will not change HIM; the way I react NOW will change ME, and possibly others, and I HOPE possibly someone who thinks it will be cool to emulate this little turd to gain his own recognition, with his trusty side-arms and his own personal “I am entitled to act upon my hatred” written eructations.
Malisha,
1. OK.
2. I don’t claim that bullying was a cause either, although I believe it is fairly likely that he was bullied at some point in his life. And to clarify with the ledge incident, what I read he claimed about it is somewhat different than what you said. I read (in the May 25th LA Times) that when he tried to much the women off the ledge, some men at the same party came over and pushed him off. When he returned because he wanted to retrieve his sunglasses, they beat him up. That could be seen as defending others, but it is not SELF-defense.
3. I agree, that’s ridiculous.
5. I think that you’re being ridiculous, that continuing to mock him has NO constructive value in improving society or prevent other incidents, and that you’re just trying to find a justification for being judgmental when reading the words of a seriously mentally ill person. But, I can see that I’m not going to change your mind.
Couldn’t help but say this, however:
You think I shouldn’t be “judgmental” of Rodger because he was mentally ill?
Wow.
Wasn’t Idi Amin mentally ill?
Cut it out, Malisha. I never said nor implied that his actions Rodger’s actions were OK or that he should have been allowed to do them. I have encouraged and welcomed any attempts to steer the discussion towards “What can be done to prevent violent and destructive acts by people suffering from serious mental illness?”.
Anger is one of the most common coping mechanisms of people on the spectrum. You hit a certain point of being unable to socialize and you enter this ‘why me’ phase, the same as someone who is born, say, without use of their legs may feel. Being on the spectrum and turning out ‘alright’ is all about the specific coping mechanism that you choose to use and the success of it. I feel constantly as if my entire life up until recently has been trial and error. And I went through the anger phase too, I just directed it inwards instead of harming people.
This comparison seems not to have been made:
Rodger wrote “Women are evil and they deserve to be tortured and killed for not doing as I wish” and then he killed some (and, of course, a few non-women as well because they got in his way).
Many people are finding ways to focus on him as a victim of bullying, of family inadequacy, of inability to deal properly as a society with mental illness, etc.
What if he had written, say, “Jews are evil and they deserve to be tortured and killed for not doing as I wish” and then killed some (and of course, a few non-Jews as well because they got in his way). Or, “Blacks are…” or “Gays are…” or “Etc….”
Would we then be concerned about his childhood experiences or his entitlements to good medical and familial care?
He committed hate crimes and I don’t care WHY he says he hated.
you won’t hear it much in the mainstream media — but there are plenty of blogs which are clear about the fact that rodger’s misogyny is the prime motivator. MSNBC has brought it up. most news outlets are going with the ‘he was crazy’ routine because that is the comfort zone. Salon has had a couple of articles and my other favorite blog “we hunted the mammoth” is doing nothing but examining the misogyny, to the point where no other factor is relevant. twitter was a real hotbed for a few days.
to acknowledge the misogyny and rodger’s involvement with the ‘new’ mens rights movement (and they are a frightful bunch — i’d put them right up there with the klan) is critical to the whole situation. it’s obvious to me that the misogyny came first at a young age and that the delusions associated with mental illness freed rodger to act out his plan, much like alcohol will lower the inhibitions of someone who is inherently violent and acts on it when drinking.
I agree with you. The misogyny is so obvious it screams from the page. But it’s not just the misogyny itself that is significant; it’s his BASIS for the misogyny: HE is entitled to HAVE beautiful women LOVE him. HE is entitled to be given SEX by beautiful women and he hasn’t even ASKED them for it. They OWE it to him and they were supposed to OFFER it to him and of course, NOT give it to anyone he didn’t tell them to give it to, either.
They are supposed to acknowledge at all times that they live only for his pleasure.
His Mother stands accused of not using HER SEX to buy him a rich indulgent step-father who could then grant him millionaire-master status!
BTW he was humiliated to ride on the bus. Wealth = dominance and femaleness = subserviance. The “new men” groups and the “men’s rights” groups and the “fathers’ rights” groups are all organized in the same way: They dominate; they do not have responsibilities but they have RIGHTS. Women/mothers who do not bow down to them must be destroyed (or, if not beautiful, turned into drudges to work for them and hand over their earnings to them).
He was a true picture not only of the money-worship that has overtaken our society but of the misogynistic woman-defilement and mother-degradation that gestates it.
Malisha, I’m tired of you using this as an excuse to rant. If someone is going to write a psychological autobiography of themselves as an exercise assigned by a therapist, which some in this thread have speculated is the origin of the manifesto, then it is not surprising that you would see in it personal resentments and other unfiltered thoughts that, in other contexts, the person probably realizes that there are factors and reasons entering into it and others have their own points of view and they wouldn’t act it out. That is, it seems to me that such a document could come out sounding narcissistic and entitled-sounding even it that isn’t necessarily the person’s makeup.
There is no way to understand this incident without the perspective of his mental illness. Yes, it’s true that most people with Asperger’s, schizophrenia, and/or narcissistic personality disorder wouldn’t express these thoughts, let alone do the things that Rodger did, so it still raises questions of why things took that direction with him. But the severe mental illness was the key issue. Ranting and mocking about his sef-centeredness is destructive, rather than constructive, to any question of deterrence or prevention, because it pretends that the most important factor is nonexistence or was insignificant in its effect.
Wow, feel angry at me any, gblock?
Why shouldn’t I have an “excuse to rant”? And if I am looking for an excuse to rant, why shouldn’t it be this “treatise on the history of the world according to Lord Elliot”?
See, here’s why I can very well rant:
1. #YesAllWomen. Yes. I am a woman and I have not had a life filled with everyone putting aside everything they have ever wanted just so they could bring me happiness and satisfaction. Not at age 22, not at age 33, or 44 or 55 or 66… or ever.
2. Why do I care what “some in this thread have speculated [is] the origin of the manifesto”? Am I required to agree with someone (on this thread or anywhere else) who finds a nice, sympathetic entitlement-based excuse for ELLIOT RODGER’s excuse to rant? In fact, since I have not murdered anyone, much less six victims, I believe I have about an equal right to rant with this dead arrogant narcissist, at least under the First Amendment (and we are not just entitled to the SECOND)!
3. What is the basis for guessing that the document only SOUNDED narcissistic and entitled? What is the basis for presuming that Rodger’s “makeup” was NOT narcissistic and entitled? Didn’t he try to push people off a ledge? Didn’t he say he would enjoy killing the room-mates because they were ugly and annoying? Didn’t he express racist and hateful and misogynist intentions and then carry them out violently and illegally?
It just boggles my mind that anyone finds it offensive of me to be ranting about this man. The whole world would have been better off without him. Yet the human lives that were canceled (BY HIM) were, by probability alone, valuable to the whole world. Jeesh!
RANT RANT RANT. I hope I never stop ranting. You may, however stop reading my rants, since you are tired of them.
1. It is clear from some of the events of his life (parents divorce, etcetera) that everyone, even his parents DIDN’T “put aside everything they ever wanted to bring him happiness and satisfaction”. Haven’t you ever fantasized that some person or people who were important to you for some reason would do certain things that would make you happy, even though they might not, in fact, have cared less?
2. It is an extremely likely fact that much of what he said and did came from a position of severe mental illness which caused him to be delusional, probably complicated by Asperger’s syndrome. To continue to rant at the contents of the manifesto without acknowledging this is destructive, not constructive, to the aim of understanding what was going on and why he ended up killing people. If you would acknowledge and consider this, I might have more patience with the rest of the rant. And, to be honest, it sounds like a lot of what Rodger said reads like a bad movie.
3. You’re the one who is presuming – not me. Your rants are based on a presumption that Rodger was a person capable of totally rational mental processes who decided that he was entitled to what he wanted and should hate and punish those who didn’t go along with it. I am just pointing out that there are alternate possiblities that should be considered – including the almost overwhelming likelihood that severe mental illness was a major cause.
See, I am not at all concerned about anybody’s (yours, Rodger’s, any blogger’s, anybody’s) need or desire to “understand” what “made” Rodgers DO what he DID. I can see that there may be many reasons to be interested in his psychological problems (on the part of his family, his friends, any psychiatrists or psychologists, etc.) but frankly, I don’t give a damn. To me, the question is not of why he was the way he was (what, after all, do I care? He is DEAD) but rather why he DID what he CHOSE (whether he chose as a sane person or chose as an insane person) to do what he CHOSE to do and HOW he was able to carry out the plan he chose to carry out.
So, it’s like this: To me, his manifesto is only important in that it allows me to speculate (and that’s all, because I cannot do any effective fact-checking on this liar’s self-aggrandizing bullshit) what he was managing to do while he pulled off a crime.
And to that extent, the manifesto is important. Not for what it tells me about HIM but for what it tells me about the society in which he lived and those other six people DIED. Because I LIVE and I will die in this society. How I live is partly decided, unfortunately, by people like Elliot Rodger. See, how Richard Martinez lives TODAY has been partly decided, unfortunately, by Elliot Rodger.
So I mock the manifesto and the dead punk murderer. WHY? Because I think our society will improve (however slightly) if people LIKE Elliot Rodger who are still alive understand that if they arm themselves and pull off something like HE did, their memory will not be the big immortality-project-picture that Rodger thought he was painting. People will not “finally understand him” and give him the sympathy and post-mortem worship that he craved while still breathing and allowing others to do the same. People will find him ridiculous, and will mock him and laugh at him, lampoon him, see and say how WORTHLESS he was, and will communally disrespect him, reject him, sully his memory, refuse to excuse him, disbelieve him, discount him, and resoundingly say: THE MEMORY OF ELLIOT RODGER IS NOTHING BUT A BIG STINK!
That is the world I am trying to contribute to. NOT the world in which people go, “awwwww, poor Elliot, nobody put out for him. Oh boo hoo how he suffered. At least now we KNOW why he killed people whose lives he would have liked to dominate.”
Pfeh! I don’t care who likes or dislikes, is tired of, or hates my rants. THIS IS MY RAISON D’ETRE. RODGER’s estate can sue me for post-mortem slander if they don’t like it and anybody else who doesn’t like it can better use their “understanding” in the service of poor delusional “young men” than for me.
Malisha, if that is what you are attempting, it seems pretty silly to me. I doubt that any sane person is glorifying Elliot Rodger did. And someone is seriously mentally ill who suffers from delusions similar to his would not read back, or think back, to what you said, and think, “Oh, I was mistaken, I should rethink my plan”.
Well you know, gblock, it’s pretty supercilious of you to appoint yourself the judge of what on my part is “silly” but since you seem to do that, I’m reminding you that all I was doing was expressing my own feelings about this dead punk when YOU came into the discussion calling me out for mocking him. THEN I explained that my mocking him was a good thing and that the whole society should be refusing to do the “coddle the poor murderous virgin” routine, and should be setting a example of our RIGHT to mock, criticize, abhor, and delegitimize Rodger and those like him (and those excited by his behavior) so that his “manifesto” and his self-glorification don’t work.
I did not set out to correct my society by encouraging mockery of a pinky-penis-woman-hating-coffee-hurling-vomit-stinking-despot-dreaming-gun-toting murderer, but when it came down to defending my expression (that so disappointed you, presumably because it was so unfair to the poor presumably bullied mentally disturbed youth), I allowed that it was a damn good activity to be engaged in. NONE of this would I ever have done had he not chosen to murder six people before committing suicide. And I would not have felt that he deserved mockery had he actually killed people who had done something TO HIM! Perhaps then he would have deserved scorn and anger (perhaps NOT) but not (probably) mockery.
My point is this: I feel perfectly 100% righteous and deserving of NO NEGATIVE CALLING-DOWN for my expressions about Elliot Rodger. I feel you were out of place to call me down for the way I reacted and responded to this story. I also feel you’re getting haughty about opining on the virtue or lack thereof of my positions. Let’s settle on this: YOU think I have the wrong attitude. YOU think my defense of my position is silly. I’m not defending it any more. But I completely reject all your commentary. That said, you’re probably a great person with all good intentions.
Malisha, you are putting words in my mouth. I never called for “coddling” him – since he is dead, it is impossible to coddle him now, anyway, but I didn’t claim it to be a good idea to begin with. I also never called for being sympathetic to any of the views that he expressed in his manifesto. What I HAVE repeatedly called for is viewing the manifesto and his actions as coming from the point of view of a seriously mentally disturbed person, and responding accordingly.
Thinking about it now, I realize that, when confronted someone who has gone on a killing rampage and written a long manifesto hateful, disturbing content, it can make people feel better to mock his words. And to the extent that this is what I called you out on, I apologize. What still bowls me over is your claims that mocking his words has wider social value and that viewing his actions as being those of a seriously mentally ill person doesn’t. And I don’t apologize for criticizing those claims or saying why I think they are wrong and destructive in that they discourage the evaluation of appropriate societal changes.
This boy is a symptom of divorce. He felt abadoned by his birth mother and he never got over it.
We talk about how absentee father’s effects on young men, it’s nothing to a young man who doesn’t have his mother’s love.
I doubt if objective reality supports a belief that his birth mother abandoned him.
He certainly did not get along with his stepmother.
there is so much more going on with this kid’s psyche, that blaming it on divorce is simplistic.
we know this by rodger’s own writings which are delusional. kids, as a rule do not deveop psychoses or aspbergers from divorce. we also know that the number of kids that come from divorced families, do not on the whole, become mass murderers.
additionally, there is no evidence that he was abandoned by his birth mother. on the contrary, she is described repeatedly as a calming and comforting presence throughout rodger’s life and in his own words.
OUCH. Mother-blaming is not appropriate here. At. All.
Looks like I have a new patter and colour. Anyway I thought I would post my theory of Elliot Rodgers personality and how his therapy was a trigger in the final outcome.
Elliot Rodgers was a depressed co-dependent narcissist. He was like half a person in need of another person to make him feel like a whole person = co-dependency. Without his other half, he felt isolated and alone and this made him depressed. The fact that he had very little empathy for anyone and views people as objects to satisfy his needs, shows that he was a narcissistic personality. The trigger for Elliot Rodgers was his therapy.
In his manifesto Elliot Rodger describes emotions of envy and jealousy, he also admits to various bad deeds that he engaged in and how he lied about them. People with a narcissistic personality don’t acknowledge their flaws and this is where the psychotherapy played a major role in the outcome. Those with true narcissistic personalities, usually attempt to kill a person who is going to expose them, because they cannot face the truth about themselves. However Elliot Rodgers was being forced to look at himself by one or more of his therapists.
It is obvious that the emotional content in his manifesto, derived from his therapy because narcissistic people don’t admit to emotions such as jealousy and envy, instead they claim others have hurt them. This he is documenting what he learnt in therapy about his emotions, whilst at the same time justifying those emotions and his behaviour by blaming others. The justification and blame game are common trait in those with narcissistic personalities.
No matter how he presented his life story in the manifesto, Elliot Rodger knew the truth and he believed his therapist(s) were also on to him. Hence his peculiar behaviour in the video, where he is always looking over his shoulder. Consequently he decided to take his revenge by destroying as many lives as he could, including his own.
Elliot’s manifesto was published on line as the ultimate attack on our moral values, because he seeks justification and sympathy for a cold blooded mass murder. This is a fundamental attack on our humanity.
I have trouble attributing Rodger’s murderous hate-crimes to a “trigger” at all, much less a trigger of therapy. Obviously any improperly exploitive therapy harms the patient terribly and even inadequate or insufficiently skillful therapy can be a “net negative” experience but I can’t see it as a call to action because the patient is the one who decides what to tell the therapist. Clearly Rodger did not tell any of his therapists, “I want to hurt everyone who doesn’t give me whatever I want,” and in fact, that desire is not a mental illness but an indication of evil. To judge it otherwise is to simply re-name despots, malevolent dictators, tyrants and warmongers as mentally ill people who coincidentally acquired military machines.
Obviously, a history of lots of therapy does help psychopathic and narcissistic individuals “steal a march on the language” and recast their sadistic behavior as emotionally motivated involuntary actions of poor misunderstood patients. Many dyed-in-the-wool wife-beaters routinely refer to their anxieties, depressions, feelings of humiliation and chronic upsets as they show (usually for the benefit of courts and court-related mental health evaluators) how viciously their “abusive” and “bullying” family members forced them to lose control and deliver beatings. Domestic violence perpetrators used to routinely get sentenced to “therapy” during which sessions they collected psychobabble comments to excuse their behavior and generally turned their “treatment” into exercises in converting “It was wrong for me to abuse my victim” into “Oh poor me, how misunderstood I have been, causing me to lash out!”
It’s about power. Rodger used his manibarfo and his videos to deliver to himself feelings of god-like power that he then manifested by killing people. All his life, apparently, he obsessed himself with being able to totally control others. He called his mother “selfish” for not marrying someone for the express purpose of providing HIM with unlimited wealth. Her “selfish” refusal to marry a sugar-daddy-for-number-one-son reveals a core belief, on Rodger’s part, in the idea that he has an innate right to control other people’s lives.
I just can’t believe that was “triggered” by therapy.
Good comment here:
http://www.welcomebacktopottersville.blogspot.com/2014/05/nice-guys-finish-last-then-go-on.html
Here’s word from our hostile-idiot contingent:
“Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/27/1302350/–Your-dead-kids-don-t-trump-my-Constitutional-rights?detail=email#
BUT… the life interests of those “dead kids” DO trump your liberty and property interests.
BUT… Thanks to our founding fathers (the slavers) and their progeny, and Chief Justice Taney and Chief Justice Rhenquist, the “LIFE INTEREST” has never been recognized in a single lawsuit in these United States except as the “residual life interest” of a convict sentenced to death.
Here’s a sample of their bravery and manliness:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/guns-bullying-open-carry-women-moms-texas
SEE? They’re real men like Rodger. They’ve got guns.
Close to the end of the manibarfo we see two sentences that came from Frank Taaffe and Chris Serino (one each) echoing exactly Fogen’s megalomaniac-murderer beliefs. But we hear them out of the mouth of another megalomaniac-murderer:
“I am the true victim in all of this. I am the good guy.”
For the sake of clarity:
Three days after Fogen killed Trayvon Martin, Taaffe led a camera crew over to a place on the sidewalk and pointed, saying, “Right HERE is where George became the victim.”
The same night as Fogen killed Trayvon Martin, Chris Serino assured him, “You’re still the good guy here.”
I can only hope and wish that both Serino and Taaffe get what they deserve during the rest of their lives. And by that I don’t mean “beautiful girls.”
In the final analysis, this is about guns and NOT about wealth, autism, sex, or mental illness. If this narcissistic murderer could not have gotten his three guns he would never have tried ANY murders. He only stabbed the room-mates so he would not have anybody back home if he got lucky enough to capture a torture victim; he would not have stabbed them if he did not know he had guns available both to defend himself if the stabbing didn’t go as planned AND to perform his great blood-bath “theater of the revenge-giver” afterwards.
In fact, if he could not have gotten the guns he would not have dared commit any crimes. He didn’t even throw soda on people’s heads for the very simple reason that “Father was there.”
The guns made him feel powerful enough to be a god and kill unworthy disobedient subjects “like animals.”
I would add to this conversation that mineral chemical imbalances, poisoning , heightened by radiations, GM foods, diet of ideas that ferment or decay fermenting that poison relations too, burdens of social and sexual conflicts; engineered. cloud seeding populations with the wrong mix of distortions. weird babies born, weird teenagers grown, weird manchilds grown, weird fruits in our garden. willfully ignorant species? Race? amnesia between us in our familiies… and recognise how close, how chemical this wedding is; that produces this marraige and this bastard manchild
this elliot character, is like a GM seed that was watererd with poisonous flouridated copper sulphated chlorinated water, ideas and. he is in a garden gulag . he seems deprived of sunlight. deprived of insight and deprived of beauty, deprived of insight, deprived of love. dad director; screen magician participating in the intrancing and distortion/ive influences,…Black magic ….this child has bathed in the plastic light of the screen. he lacks so much. he lascks light, insight and any “organic” influences that could correct his poisoned distorted GM seed…he is a messenger from the “verse”…he was not corrected. he is the screens lights child.010101010101110000….revealing …
so, fred — i have a hypothetical for you.
had elliot rodger survived his killing spree and you were his defense lawyer, how would you build a defense? the manifesto shows that he knows right from wrong as evidenced by his fear of being reported to the police, his fear that they would search his room finding weapons and his written plans and finally by deleting his disturbing videos.
he also has a long psychological history. i would bet money that he had recently been diagnosed with either schizophrenia or bi-polar with schizoid tendencies (as was my father). clearly a battery of tests would be administered by both the state and the defense. would there be an argument to be made for diminished capacity? if so, can you explain a bit how that works?
in my vast experience with the mentally ill, bi-polars can be productive members of society, whether medicated or not. not all of them are even dangers to themselves or others. schizophrenics on the other hand are rarely productive members of society whether medicated or not and like bi-polars they are not all a danger to self or society.
prison seems like the wrong place for this guy, but the prospect of institutionalization with forced medication and the prospect of someday being released is horrifying.
I would have explained to Elliot that his case was not about winning or losing, it was about living or dying.
His manifesto considered together with his acts, is an unambiguous admission of all of the material facts necessary to support a guilty verdict to capital murder:
(1) He committed an act or series of acts (the actus reus or prohibited act)
(2) with premeditated intent to cause the death of another person (the mens rea or accompanying mental state); and
(3) the crime involved multiple victims (the statutory aggravating factor).
Insanity is not a defense because he concealed what he was about to do until the last possible moment to avoid discovery and he committed suicide to avoid imprisonment. IOW, he knew he was about to do something that society would consider to be wrong and unlawful.
Diminished capacity admits committing the prohibited act, but denies the capacity to form the requisite mental state, which is premeditated intent in his case. He doesn’t qualify.
However, his mental illness certainly would qualify as mitigating evidence such that a jury might not be able to unanimously agree that, despite his complex mental illness, he should be sentenced to death.
The most likely outcome in most jurisdictions, assuming a qualified and skilled death penalty lawyer, would be LWOP.
(2) to cause the death of another person
Now I have spent a bit more time with the “manifesto” and concluded that much of it is just plain untrue. One of his room-mates had recently said that he was going to move out because of Rodger’s behavior and one of the instances was that Rodger played loud music in the middle of the night. Yet in Rodger’s “manifesto” we see this:
So he “raises and issue” with a room-mate who then “starts arguments.” His own conduct does not “start arguments” see? Only the response of the other person is blameworthy. The other person was supposed to respond in the way Rodger wanted and his failure to do so is the problem.
So we have this massive projection.
MY take on this is that much of the 141-page garbage dump is also massive projection. Whatever he accuses others of doing, he has done. HE tried to push others off the ten-foot ledge but they ended up pushing HIM as they defended themselves physically. Etcetera. I think if Fogen had the education and wherewithal to write 140 pages of drivel, he would have said similar “everybody else did wrong” things about every single piece of his worthless obnoxious life. There is, along with the entitlement, a very clear habit of insisting that others are “up to no good” and that HE should have what nobody is willing to GIVE HIM.
For Rodger, the inferiors he had a right to punish were “females”; for Fogen, they were “suspects.”
It just occurred to me: This guy (the Rodger, the Fogen, etc.) is the slaver personality. Someone else has the obligation to use his whole life’s effort and intent in the service of this guy and for what reason? One reason: This guy’s superiority. He’s just a slaver born into the wrong century.
I am now seeing more people comment about how poor Elliot Rodger was “bullied.” His story, however — told obviously by him from his own distorted point of view — does not contain very much evidence of bullying. MOST of the acts that so enrage him are acts of other people simply making their own way through the world, without making HIS DESIRES their priorities. Girls who don’t fall all over him with worship are seen as unjustly ignoring him; boys who date are seen as evil monsters collecting benefits that should more rightfully be HIS; sexually active individuals are deserving of torture because they ENJOY themselves.
This is not a real picture of others bullying HIM. This is an unsuccessful bully who is despondent because he cannot satisfy himself by bullying everyone ELSE!
HE would like to torture “sluts” for not giving him sex and love. That’s what? Anything other than bullying behavior?
It is common for kids with Asperger’s syndrome to be teased and tormented by other kids, regardless of whether or not he discussed relevant instances in his manifesto.
…. and what keeps playing on my mental radio as i continue to read el manifesto ….
How about this one. 16-year-old transgender child is in an adult prison in Connecticut, in solitary confinement, no end in sight. She has not been charged, convicted or sentenced. She has a history that began with being raped at age 8, and subjected to abuse all of her life in various settings. None of her abusers have been charged with anything. The Connecticut Child and Families Department believes that the most healing and therapeutic environment for this victim, is solitary confinement without charges, in an adult prison:
Our countries belief that our prison system ‘works’ is one of the fallacies of the century. That we put CHILDREN into the same human warehouses we put offending adults is INSANITY. Those of us with walking legs need to get our butts into the streets and protest the old fashioned way: in person! But we’ve all gone soft and can’t be bothered and are allowing a friendly facism to steadily rules us. The fact that fox news, even with their ties to Murdoch, actually exist as ‘mainstream news’, demonstrates how easily the jackboots creep onto the front porch. So many scandals and yet…when people do protest, we’ve learned to kneejerk and say absurd things like ‘get a job ya stoners!’ etc, instead of,’hey, it’s good we can still kind of exercise our rights’…I fear deeply for our ideals…
Now a picture begins to emerge.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/sheriff-calif-shooter-rodger-flew-under-the-radar-when-deputies-visited-him-in-april/2014/05/25/88123026-e3b4-11e3-8dcc-d6b7fede081a_story.html
Apparently Rodger pushed people off a 10-foot ledge and they fought back. But citing “no evidence” there was no prosecution even though HE said he was attacked but MANY OTHERS reported that he had been the aggressor. I suspect his family’s money made the charges go away. The next time there was contact with the police, this guy’s “politeness” won him the day.
It does remind me of Fogen. He has prior records of violence but since he is not a member of the underclass, they are forgiven or ignored or covered up. So he progresses to murder.
He tried to push the people off the ledge but they fought back and he was the one thrown off, breaking his ankle in the process. He lost or had stolen a gold necklace given to him in the process which sent him into an episode. He goes into it in his manifesto.
It seems to me that there were a number of factors that acted as negative forces in this man’s life. First he was lacking in social skills, second he engaged with groups that condemn women, third Elliot Roger was receiving psychiatric therapy and fourth society promotes violence toward women. However I think you have undermined the damage that the health experts can do with their patriarchal attitude. I can assure you that the medical profession actively promotes this abuse toward women.
When I was 17 a doctor told me I needed to see a psychiatrist because I was not interested in sex and did not want to go on the pill. It wasn’t that I was gay it was just that I didn’t want to sleep around. When I was in my early 20s I was sexually assaulted by a doctor, the medical profession not only refused to do anything about it, but they actively withheld the evidence that proved I was assaulted, and they slandered me as mentally ill. Then they assaulted me again. Consequently I spent years fighting for justice, but could only pursue civil action, because no one saw the abuse as a crime. I did win the civil action because they were prepared to recognise the crime as negligence. Though I spent ten year of my life fighting, I will never say I received justice and I got very little in the way of compensation, so I have not been able to pick up the pieces of my life.
I know that I will never recover from the injustice that was done to me, but I have to go on fighting for others because no one deserves this abuse.
We need to change the attitude of those who are meant to protect us and this includes the police, doctors, psychiatrists, counsellors, Centre against sexual assault, nurses, religious organisations, lawyers, judges and everyone else who thinks it is OK to violate another human being by ignoring their NO, ripping away their dignity and destroying their life.
Good you spoke up (in) about this, Jade. Not only do some medical and mental health professionals promote violence against women, some actually use their “expertise” to defend their “patients” when they DO get into trouble for crimes against women. I knew a very prominent psychiatrist who involved himself 20 years back in a case where he knew, and said, and confirmed, that a man had molested his daughter and destroyed the child’s mother’s life in court with a complete contingent of corrupt judges and molester-protector Hynes who was at that time the DA in Brooklyn, New York. But then this psychiatrist decided NOT to write the book and just remained silent about the case. 20 years later, this case reappeared in his life and he swung, in one move, over to the molester-defense-team side, did not even try to explain his perfidy. He worked as hard as he could to destroy the mother (who had survived the first volley) AGAIN and he disavowed the prior admissions he had made about KNOWING about the abuse and wanting to tell the world about the injustice. He used his considerable financial power to prevent people from revealing what had actually happened. (Fortunately I had, and preserved, a transcript of his original admissions; one day I may use that for something, I don’t know.)
The real reason for his turn-around and his willingness to jump on the bandwagon to beat up an innocent mother and help perpetrate a fraud was that wealthy and influential relatives of his demanded it of him. None of this is any more surprising nor any less disgusting than the intrigue around the British crown in centuries past when anyone who spoke against the line of the greatest power could be burned at the stake.
Our courts are filled with court-whores who are doctors and who testify to any kind of crap imaginable, even when people’s lives hang in the balance.
Thanks Malisha. It isn’t easy for me to talk about this, but I can’t sit back and say nothing when so many people are of the opinion that psychiatric therapy is beneficial to everyone. I am not trying to say that every psychiatrist is evil, but there are a lot of them out there that do more damage than good. The medical model of therapy and their DSM works very well for the pharmaceutical companies, criminals, and malingerers, but it does little to help victims of abuse.
Whilst I have never heard of the case you are referring to, I have seen this type of abuse many times. It is appalling that so many people receiving psychiatric therapy become suicidal and or homicidal after they begin therapy. However if you look at the side effects of psychiatric drugs, particularly antidepressants, you will see that they are known to cause suicidal and homicidal thoughts. But even without the drugs these therapists know how to play mind games and their sexist attitudes do nothing to prevent violence against women.
How can a psychiatrist treat victims and criminals at the same time? The reality is they can’t, because in these situations you can’t sit on a fence. Victims need support and criminals want excuses. It is only when you look at how psychiatric diagnosis’s are used to oppress victims and reward criminals, that you realize something is far wrong with this alleged science.
A criminal lawyer would never defend a victim and the crown prosecution would never defend a criminal, yet our corrupt system allows psychiatrists to diagnose, treat and testify for both the victim and the criminal. No wonder the drug companies are making a fortune and crime is spiralling out of control.
The reality is that the medical profession are not helping the people they claim to be helping, because their model of care is broken. Personally I don’t believe it ever worked, but it sure keeps them in business and makes them lots of money, because they keep people ill and are always on the lookout for more victims.
In all honesty I have never heard of psychiatry curing anyone. They prescribe a lot of drugs and the patients keep coming back for more. Then if the patient injures his/her self or someone else, these alleged experts are always available with more psychotherapy and pills for both the victim and the offender. This is morally and ethically wrong.
I am proud of you Jade. I am sorry for what has happened. I am grateful for what you are doing to help all of us.
I feel so bad for you Jade. It’s a sad fact that some abusers seek positions where they think they will have a good chance of being believed instead of their victims. Hence the term ‘a bully behind every badge’, because some cops use their badges to hide behind. Stethoscopes can hide abusers too. A friend of mine, at the age of 16, was sexually harassed by an elderly creep of a doctor her parents sent her to. When she complained to her mother about it, her mother(!) excused the dr. and undermined her daughter’s abuse by coyly saying,”Oh, I’m sure he was just admiring your youthful beauty.” Our society excuses abusers and blames victims constantly. Abusers rail that there is too much false accusation(especially those MRA nuts), which causes victims to believe silent suffering is better.
Good to hear you had the guts to be your own hero, and to show those cowards who hurt you what grit and bravery REALLY look like. You’re voice and story are very encouraging and I hope you find many moments of increasing Happiness in your life.
For those reading the manifesto- read it with more than a grain of salt (perhaps an entire salt mine)! It is a self serving tome. It will be the fodder of many thesis/research papers!
How many full names of short term classmates do you remember from elementary school? The notion he had no conception of sex is laughable! California has had mandatory sex ed (elementary school) since the 70’s- (and it’s only become more explicit since then). I could go on but you get the idea…
I would be very surprised if he wasn’t under the care of a psychiatrist from a very young age (1st, 2nd grade) His accounts of so many school changes are counterintuitive unless that were true. Reading between the lines here shows a very troubled history. Although he recounts tantrums with an odd pride, as a sign of his manipulative prowess; think…… Who has tantrums in their teens?! (Risperdone would have possibly helped with this)
Agreed, this document is vile. But it is also an unusual window into a world we rarely see. Perhaps it will become a tool in understanding a type of mind most of us cannot begin to understand.
I read he had sent it to his therapist. I wondered if it had been composed as a therapy exercise. Many therapists have patients pen an autobiography. (although I’ve never heard of one that runs 140 pages!) If his manifesto was a result of the therapeutic process, it went terribly wrong. Therapy is a ‘process’ not a manifesto…. ie, a therapist should have been involved from the onset and throughout.
If not a part of the therapeutic process, it is totally believable this tome was a direct manifestation of his NPD!
Regards.
hi annamari and welcome aboard. i appreciate your insights and completely agree with you on how to perceive this document. i think i stated somewhere above that we are reading through a myriad of psycho filters and may never know the truth.
while i am unqualified to diagnose anything, i can safely say that there is more going on than just aspergers. my husband i have been reading and discussing this all day. each of us has (or in my case, had) a bi polar parent we immediately thought about our parents and then the rather large number of other members of our families who are either schizophrenic or bi polar. neither of these would surprise me given his age and the typical age of onset for both illnesses. i am sure that more will be revealed.
i have difficulty blaming other family members in these situations because i know first hand how impossible it is to get a loved one to seek help when they are convinced that their psych is poisoning them with lithium. reading through the lines, it does sound as if they did their best to deal with the situation, there were private schools and obviously some counseling going on. i don’t think that their lavish spending helped this kid at all.
i am reminded of my uncle who was drafted for korea just after my dad but sent home from basic training due to psych issues at 18. he was diagnosed as schizophrenic but nothing anyone said or did made a bit of difference toward getting him help. he was fortunate that my grandparents would support him on their family farm in utah all their lives and provided for him until his own death last year. he obviously never worked, except around the farm, he knew he was not good around people and spent most of his time out on the cattle range, isolated from the world in a log cabin my grandfather built in 1926.
my family has dealt with such a similar situation, my grandparents, like elliot rodger’s did the best that they could, even if at times, it misguided and inadequate.
like you, i do think there is value in this manifesto — it is a clear indication of the inner, delusional workings of a sick mind. this, combined with the videos and whatever else may exist could hold some answers on how we deal with such things as a society.
Faux, I agree with your suggestion of schiz. After watching some of the videos again, his affect (lack thereof) is telling. I am thinking there was a ‘perfect storm’ of mental health issues here- coupled with the ‘enabling’ that existed in his formative years (lavish spending, etc) like you, I do think his parents did the best they knew- I can see their motivations…. At least he’s interested in something… Help him fit in…. Also, I can clearly see why his parents alternated weeks, apparently did not leave him unattended, and forced him to go on trips.
Someone, aptly, cited Parallel Play (above) I had thought of this while reading the manifesto. To me, it appears he did not even reach this stage of development, rather he stayed in the egocentric stage. Everything was all about him- incredible peek into a stunted life.
I’m glad your uncle had the benefit of an environment more suitable to his needs. We oft forget our hyper-stimulatant world does not work for everyone. (Plus, ut is a great place!) regards
The lack of affect isn’t necessarily that telling in itself. It is a common symptom of Asperger’s syndrome and is often a major factor in making that diagnosis, even in people without serious mental health issues. I have read that people with Asperger’s are more likely than the population at large to develop a number of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but I don’t know the reason for this.
gblock says:
i did not know that, thanks for bringing this up, gblock. i have clearly spent more time with bipolars and schizophrenics due to my family situation so i am much more familiar with the behaviors associated with those disorders.
i also want to be clear that while i may resort to a dark sense of humor as a coping mechanism, i do not think that mocking this young man has any benefit. discussions with my father during my teens consisted of him saying things such as ‘the dog told me that the neighbors are poisoning the well again’. my brothers and i found dark humor as our only coping resource and we have continued to this day. it’s likely that it no longer serves me as i am no longer subjected to such conversations and i am willing to look at that. i cannot emphasize enough though, how difficult that situation was. as a young pre-teen, i tended to believe my father as i always had, as i grew and applied my own growing wisdom, it did become clear that although the situations he presented were unreal, they were very real to him.
i would encourage you to read the ‘manifesto’ if you can find the time and energy. the parents are now stating that there was no official diagnosis of aspergers, but that they considered their son to be ‘on the spectrum’. what is very clear in rodger’s own writing the level of delusional thinking and mysogny, with a smattering of racism and self loathing. this, combined with firearms proved to be a highly combustible mix.
i will apologize if my own statements regarding rodger’s state of mind offended you. reading that document brings up a lot of old and painful memories for me and i know that i resort to old coping mechanisms when confronted.
Thanks for the apology and explanation, fauxie, I think I see how that could happen.
I’m surprised at the lack of an official diagnosis, especially considering that he was seeing therapists from a relatively young age. That could explain his not getting certain kinds of help – getting help through the public schools I think depends on getting a diagnosis, and it certainly depends on getting an evaluation. Was there something being missed there, or were the therapists already going in other directions diagnostically, even from the relatively early age of 8 or 9?
Do you think his therapist or current psychiatrist had any idea at all? I mean, is it possible to play a role so well that a person can completely fool a psychiatrist? I don’t know the answer.
I don’t think anyone who wrote that 141-page tantrum transcript and scripted that video could “completely fool” a psychiatrist on the first day of his or her residence. This guy was not good at fooling people. If he failed to get dates, it’s either attributable to that or to his inability to project “sexiness” as a male with valence. (I don’t care about the greek alphabet here; a male has to have a sort of “valence” to show a woman — or probably also a man — that he can get it together. This guy doesn’t project that.) I believe there was ONE mental health professional at least who tried to give a so-called “tarasoff warning” saying that the patient was dangerous. I’m trying to chase down the article where that was mentioned or hinted at.
One of the calls to police was from a mental health facility he went to. When a mental health facility can’t get action there is a problem with the system.
yup, i said the same thing. in california, a call from that doc basically would ensure a 51-50 (72 hour involuntary hold). i know — my dad went through several. the doc did his job, but the sheriff’s dept had a 10 minute visit where they decided there was no problem. therein lies the problem.
BTW, agree on your take on the document itself.
Annamari – As someone whose kids have grown up in Orange County, I can readily believe that Rodger did not learn much about sex in school. It is not that explicit everywhere in the state. When my kids were in school (and my son is close in age to Rodger), 5th and 6th graders learned about physical changes of puberty, accompanying hygiene issues, and ‘where babies come from’. High school health classes mostly talked about dangers of pre-marital sex, like sexually transmitted diseases. My kids got a much more comprehensive view through some excellent classes that were offered through our church. Otherwise, their understanding might have been sadly lacking.
I haven’t read Rodger’s manifesto, but it seems to me that multiple school changes could have been an example of ‘enabling’, letting him escape from situations in which he was having difficulties, instead of getting him help in working it out. Of course, there could have been other reasons – looking for a special school that they believed would be able to help him, or being pushed out of schools in which he was being disruptive.
Oh, just saw the comment on Risperdone- often prescribed with anti- depressants to quell hostility. It’s use has gone beyond the traditional scitz application.
Crane-Station here. Welcome to the site, and thank you for commenting.
Thank you. Looks like there’s a great deal of info here! I’m glad to have found it!
Thanks, and if you come back, I am wondering- an article today said that he had been in therapy since at least age 8. How would something like this manifest in such a young child?
fred — my neighbor’s child was born premature, elliott said he was 5 lb 4 oz (average birth weight is 7.5 lbs) and always small for his age. this has caused me to wonder about just that. my neighbor’s boy had been kicked out of every school in town by the second grade (seeing a pattern?) he was diagnosed as bi polar at age 7 in addition to having numerous developmental and behavioral problems. he is now 19 and can only be described as a deadbeat — much like elliott. i’m glad we moved from that neighborhood long ago, the boy was abusive to my girls and was a major motivating factor in opting to move.
i do think there is a problem today with too many kids being diagnosed for ADHD and bi polar, i have less personal experience with autism spectrum, so will not comment, but it has increased. i have conflicted feelings on this — it is hard to tell if such things truly have increased since my childhood, or whether something miraculous has happened in diagnosing such that it is caught earlier or whether it is simply easier for docs and parents to medicate their kids today. the one fact we do know is that more kids are being diagnosed and medicated for these 3 things specifically. the other fact is that elliott, like my neighbor’s boy, was not OK by any stretch of the imagination at any time in their short lives.
After reading the ‘manifesto’, several possible disorders are particularly evident. NPD (narcisstic personality disorder), antisocial personality disorder (APD) and sociopathy are real possibilities. When exhibiting this combination, with or without Aspegers, volatility is not a far fetched result. Sending him to a long term residential facility (lockdown) would have been preferable than ‘enabling’ him to fester in an environment which only fueled his delusions. As he was over 21, his consent would have been required. As a manipulative ‘tantrum-thrower’ it’s not clear if anyone could have garnered his consent. Ideally, he should have been sent to a facility during his early teens. Believe me- the signs were there. Hindsight is 20/20.
Very informative, thank you so much, Annamari.
ok, up to page 60 of manifesto. it’s hard to read because it’s so damn dull. i get it the dudes got issues — mommy issues, daddy issues, step mom issues, sibling issues … hell, he’s got everybody issues. yes there is racism, but it is the constant misogyny that overwhelms.
girls or women are referred to constantly as the ubiquitous ‘females’. yuck. he treats his mother like a servant and she allows it, the only sane person in this whole mess seems to be his step mother.
and then, i have to always remember we are reading this through his myriad of psycho filters. what is the truth?
i see this as a real failure of our society in terms of mental health. i’ve been up close and personal to more than a few involuntary psych holds and have no confidence that anyone from a sheriff’s department can accurately assess the situation. if the call from his doc could not actuate a 51-50, i do not know what could. surely, we can do better than this while still preserving the privacy of the mentally ill who are not a danger to themselves or others.
and finally — with all that free flowing cash, why didn’t he just get a damn prostitute?
I disagree entirely about his stepmother being ‘sane’. In fact, she told him his little brother, named Jazz, who was only 8 would soon be an actor with an agent and have lots of girlfriends. She said this directly to Elliot. Also, his father seems to have left the parenting up to step-mom, (HUGE mistake for even ‘normal’ children of divorce), while he played Santa Claus instead of ‘distant daddy’. And distant is how Elliot painted him. Remote, powerful, ‘successful’, able to ‘get’ women, etc. And what is stunningly absent from recollections of Elliot about his own life, is the total lack of physical affection. No mention of being hugged or held, having his cheeks pinched, (all kids say they hate that BUT they know they are being affectionately TOUCHED by FAMILY). There is zero, and I mean zero, memory for this guy beyond being taken places and given things. None of that,”And one time my dad hugged me and said he loved me, tousled my hair, wrestled with me’. No mention of sitting on laps, holding hands, kisses goodnight. Do a little research on ‘skin starvation’ in relation to being human, and this guyls obsession with what is really about being touched will, hopefully, not escape your notice.
In Japan there used to be a family tradition wherein younger members would give massages to the babies and elderly family members around 15 every day. But our sex obsessed culture reduces all touch to something with sexual over/undertones or is to lead to sex. Also, way, way too much is being done by his dad to protect his own financial interwsts in the wake of his sons shooting murders. Dad was already speaking through his attorney within an hour of the story breaking, protecting his money from possible responsibility taking. In point of fact, ALL the adults in Elliot’s life, related or not, are deflecting. NONE of them are even conceeding they, particularly the parents including stepmom, they f’d up in any way and are attempting to convince the public they ‘tried everything’.
That is the lie most people suspect it to be and I believe the victims families would be well within their rights to seek damages from the parents, the police, and the doctors.
BTW, Elliot mentions seeing a porno in a video game arcade. At 3 am. By himself, when he was TEN! Who the hell lets their little boy walk around by himself all hours of the night? He said he saw a man watching porno in there. In a place that attracts kids? Who was the man? Where was Elliot sitting? How did Elliot recall this porno so specifically and WHY could he cry about it for THREE damned days afterwards without his dad grilling him about? He was on his divorce visit at dads when this took place!
SO much was missed and whike it doesn’t excuse ‘a damn thing’, it most certainly points to why his rage would build and build. He slipped through the cracks. Now, if a rich spoiled kid can do that, what can we expect when deprived, constantly abused people do? You know, like veterans who kill themselves daily because VA’s ignore their symptoms or call them junkies? We could all list examples of various vunerable people in our society, and that’s MORE reason to pay close attention in the coming weeks to how this is all handled, not less.
mike, while you make some valid points, in order to believe them firmly, you would have to accept this manifesto as a document of truth. i would argue that one cannot do that because of the obvious mental illness and delusion of elliot rodger himself.
the step mother may have been abusive, but we will never know that by reading rodger’s words. i can tell by this manifesto that she was the only one who actually did discipline the kid. yes, that’s a tricky thing for a step parent, but we all know that it is necessary.
i have no issues with his parents speaking through an attorney at this time — they too, must be grieving even if they were imperfect parents (as we all are). i also have no problems with any attempt to protect his own assets, his child was now an adult and the parents are not responsible for their child’s debts or even their actions.
i am all too aware of people who ‘fall through the cracks’. i’ve stated on this blog and many others here that i was raised by a bi polar parent (and korean war vet) who was at times violent, delusional and hallucinating. he underwent several involuntary psych holds throughout my life, but could always hold it together well enough for 72 hours to be released back to his family and arsenal. in fact, my parents separated when i was 17 because my father held a gun to my head all night while suffering delusions.
after years of therapy, i do not blame my father nor his parents. in my father’s case, as well as rodger’s, i do find local law enforcement completely incompetent with these matters. mental illness left untreated (and no family member can force treatment) is simply devastating for all involved.
mike — i am going to ask if you have seen this video by stefan molyneux, ‘the truth about elliot rodger’ (http://youtu.be/oybAUKZhaMA) . you seem to be espousing the same beliefs. as i commented on that video, while you and he both make some valid points, i must in fact, reject your entire premise as it takes the writings of a delusional psychotic as ‘the truth’.
this manifesto is not truth, although i have no doubt that it was to elliot rodger. one must evaluate it objectively and realize that this is only his perception and question almost every aspect of it.
he does speak often about his mother and grandmothers comforting him when he in his own words ‘throws tantrums’. presumably, this includes touching. i do not know how you can draw any conclusion that he was deprived of being held, loved, and touched as a child. furthermore, as a child of the autism spectrum disorder (specifically aspergers), there is a very real chance that he found touch to be uncomfortable if not intolerable.
I agree. He was delusional, so his interpretation of events and people’s motives for saying and doing certain things would be deluded.
Real to him, but not others.
Mike, while I don’t take this all at face value, what you say does raise some interesting questions in my mind. I have noticed that while my son, who has Asperger’s, was growing up, he very much looked to family members as role models to help him make decisions, choose activities, etcetera. At age almost 23, he still calls his dad frequently to help him make decisions. While I may be making too much of this, I think role models in the family may be especially important for kids with Asperger’s because 1) compared to most people, they may have fewer built-in cues to help them figure it out, 2) many of them (as was apparently the case with Elliot Rodger) may have few friends to help them reach other interpretations of situations, 3) they may be more literal-minded than most teens, causing them to take things they hear or observe more at face value. So if his dad is seldom there for him, and may indicate through his words and deeds that he values money and being able to ‘score’ with sexy women, then there may be little to temper those ways of thinking in a son with Asperger’s.
I don’t know how any of this factors into the development of his mental illness and delusions, but it seems to very much factor into the content of his delusions.
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Surprisingly, his Facebook page is still up:
https://www.facebook.com/elliot.rodger.3?fref=browse_search
Well, wow. So, the legal test is- he knew what he was doing was wrong. That said, after watching the next set of videos, and reading portions of the manifesto, I do believe he was very seriously mentally ill. I am not a psychiatrist, so I have no idea, but he is so clearly not right. Now I am wondering how he slipped by, even though he had a psychiatrist- how he slipped by without proper treatment to get some of this stuff under control.
While acknowledging that his parents must be in tremendous pain, I have to say, buying him every goddamn thing they could possibly think of for 22 straight years likely didn’t help him either. It’s as if he has no clue at all, how to make himself useful or productive. He appears so over-the-top spoiled that he has no idea how to function.
At the same time, it is peculiar that he did not have a suit to wear to a red-carpet opening. Don’t mom and dad buy him a suit if they buy him a car? Who (outside of Korea or El Salvador) has NO SUIT at his age? Is there something I am missing? And then he calls a security guard some vile names because she wonders what people are doing there in “casual Friday” clothes? OK Maybe she was rude (if she even said what he attributed to her) but was it such a big deal?
Notice, by his own admission, he sneers at people who do not have as much as HE HAS. On the plane, he sneers. Whenever he gets something others do not have, he sneers.
Fogen-like.
Also, this site:
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was taken down:
Not Found
The requested URL / was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
After Rodgers posted racist comments to the site.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/ucsb-shooter-elliot-rodger-posted-racist-messages-on-puahate-website/
Huh, wow. That wasn’t his only video. Go here:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/alleged-shooter-left-behind-more-troubling-youtube-videos/
I have added a third update about the parents discovering the manifesto and driving to Isla Vista to stop him, but they were too late.
I have added a second update identifying the three victims found in Elliot Rogers’s apartment.
These sound exactly like the fantasies, delusions and extreme paranoia of a schizophrenic, not a spoiled rich kid. Spoiled rich kids aren’t delusional or full of anger and hate.
Most schizophrenics are not full of anger and hate, but a lot of rich kids are.
I think the mechanism working here is absence, in the “rich kids,” for the real basis of self-esteem. I remember an interview of Katherine Hepburn back in the day. She said to the interviewer, who had asked her something about her apparent lack of “celebrity flash and flatter,” and she said, in her sophisticated halting but authoritative voice: “It’s not really about how rich you are or how important you think you are or how much money you spend on lunch. Don’t spend sixty dollars on lunch. Come over to my place and I’ll give you two hard boiled eggs for free; that will only cost me ten cents and we can both have a nice meal. The real question to ask is what can you actually DO? If the window breaks, CAN YOU FIX THAT WINDOW? What can you really do that’s important in the world?” [words to that effect]
If the rich kids actually DO THINGS that are important in their families and in the world, nobody has to worship them or “give” them their every desire to help them become decent people. They’re as likely as anybody else to be decent people. Let them learn that they can do important things in the world and they will have unshakeable self-esteem and enough self-respect to not go around coveting their neighbors’ wives, writing racist stupid rants, or bullying, insulting and murdering people. Far better for this asshole had he learned to fix windows than driven around in a BMW thinking he should be a master of the universe.
Most schizophrenics are not filled with anger and hate but neither are most rich kids.
Unmedicated schizophrenics are, by definition, delusional. Most rich kids are not.
Unmedicated schizophrenics suffer from paranoia, often extreme paranoia. Most rich kids do not.
ER was clearly delusional and paranoid. His family’s wealth may very well have played a role in his sense of entitlement — money has a way of doing that to people — but it did not cause him to believe he was actually going to win the mega millions lottery or “be a God.” That’s delusional.
ER had been seeing therapists since he was 8 years old. He was seeing two while in SB. Mental illness is the root of the problem, not wealth.
After viewing the additional videos and reading his manifesto, I now realize he was mentally ill with delusions of grandeur. In addition to behavior consistent with Aspergers, I’m also seeing evidence of a narcissistic personality disorder and an antisocial personality disorder. I agree with Annamari.
He was a complicated mess, in addition to being a spoiled rich kid with an enormous sense of entitlement, so I concede there could be more to his diagnosis.
Speaking as a lawyer, I can say that he could tell the difference between right and wrong, as evidenced by his realization that his day of retribution would not have happened if the police had discovered his guns and ammo. He concealed his plan from them because he knew it was wrong and he would get in trouble.
Therefore, he was not legally insane.
He realized what he was doing was illegal but not necessarily wrong.
How do you know that? Are you suggesting that he did not realize that committing mass murder was wrong?
If so, why did he conceal what he was doing until the last minute and then commit suicide?
He spent a lot of time in his Manifesto justifying and rationalizing the killings. He seemed, to me at least, convinced that he was righting the wrongs in the world. He was believed what he was doing was right and that he was making the world a better place. He was acting out his “desire to destroy the injustices of the world,” which in his case were any woman who wasn’t begging to be his girlfriend or sexual partner and any man who he suspected of having recreational sex.
At the same time, he knew it was illegal, but again, he didn’t believe it was wrong/immoral. He also knew enough not to get caught before he could carry it out. He stated,either in the video or in the manifesto, I’ve forgotten where, that the reason he was goign to kill himself was because he knew he would be put in prison when he was caught. He stated that he’d rather die than go to prison.
After saying all this, I want to make clear that I don’t think he was insane. Maybe insanity has a different meaning in the legal world, I don’t know because IANAL. He was very rational in all of his videos and writings. My opinion is extreme hatred was what drove him to act on the objects of his hatred. Somewhere in his life, I think he learned to hate women — but anyway, he came across as somebody who had to kill. If somehow he had a girlfriend and didn’t hate women anymore, it would have been blacks or Mexicans — his manifesto is full of racist comments…
To try to clarify the difference between what is illegal and what is wrong, what is illegal is what the politicians and courts say it is. For example, drinking alcohol during the Prohibition was illegal but not necessarily wrong. Rodger knew killing the objects of his hatred was illegal, but he had convinced himself that it was not wrong. In fact, he believed that he was administering justice. He was not insane, just evil. Calling him insane makes people who suffer from mental disorders like schizophrenia, most of whom are harmless, look bad.
Insane is a legal term, not a psychiatric diagnosis. You will not find it in the DSM-V.
When I say Elliot knew that his plan to kill others was unlawful and wrong or he would not have concealed what he planned to do until the last possible moment, I am saying that his conduct, including his eventual suicide, demonstrated that he knew what he was about to do was something that society would never tolerate.
As a matter of law, that awareness disqualifies him from being found insane, no matter how crazy we might believe him to have been.
The same can also be said about most criminal activity committed by schizophrenics, btw.
Thanks for clearing up those terms. Your explanation makes sense now.
Yes, Qampoc, it was a hate crime.
Actually I did come across something interesting in the manifesto. Rodgers said that recently, I think, a psychiatrist did prescribe risperidone. I am not a doctor, but just glancing, risperidone is an antipsychotic medication that is prescribed for schizophrenia, or let me check…here:
Risperidone (/rɨˈspɛərɨdoʊn/ ri-spair-i-dohn) (trade name Risperdal, and generics) is an antipsychotic drug mainly used to treat schizophrenia (including adolescent schizophrenia), schizoaffective disorder, the mixed and manic states of bipolar disorder, and irritability in people with autism.
Risperidone belongs to the class of atypical antipsychotics which are second generation.[2] It is a dopamine antagonist possessing antiserotonergic, antiadrenergic and antihistaminergic properties.
And then Rodgers refused to take it. So, there is that.
This guy has massive target fixation. He eliminates at least 99% of the female population and wonders why he is a virgin?
Looks are not everything.
I’ll bet he’s never even ASKED for a date with a girl he thought was “beneath” him. Somebody whose hair was not gleaming platinum, who carried 6 extra ounces around her sylph-like form, who wasn’t in Prada — after all, so MANY people are so INFERIOR to him.
Personally, I think most of the women I see in magazines, touted as the world’s most beautiful, are ghastly.
From what I can tell, he never asked ANY girl for a date. Seriously.
From what I have seen and read (the whole creepy 141 pages) he never asked ANY girl out, ever.
More racism:
My father drove up to Santa Barbara to meet me a few days later. The two of us went to have lunch at a restaurant in the Camino Real Marketplace, an area that I often frequented. When we sat down at our table, I saw a young couple sitting a few tables down the row. The sight of them enraged me to no end, especially because it was a dark-skinned Mexican guy dating a hot blonde white girl. I regarded it as a great insult to my dignity. How could an inferior Mexican guy be able to date a white blonde girl, while I was still suffering as a lonely virgin? I was ashamed to be in such an inferior position in front my father. When I saw the two of them kissing, I could barely contain my rage. I stood up in anger, and I was about to walk up to them and pour my glass of soda all over their heads. I probably would have, if father
wasn’t there. I was seething with envious rage, and
my father was there to watch it all. It was so
humiliating. I wasn’t the son I wanted to present to my father. I should be the one with the hot blonde
girl, making my father proud. Instead, my father had to watch me suffer in a pathetic position. Life is so cruel to me. When I said my farewell to father before he drove home, I felt absolutely miserable. I then went back to my room and sulked for hours.
His father probably didn’t even notice the couple.
Exactly, and his father probably didn’t know sonny boy was a virgin, if that’s to be believed and probably didn’t know, or at least wasn’t thinking…….”…..shit, hot mama…..and she’s with that guy……and my kid’s…………(insert compliment here). Wait, she’s doing this on purpose just to personally humiliate Elliot. That bitch”
No, it comes down to that old martyr syndrome to me.
His father married a Malaysian woman, and then a Moroccan actress, neither of them blonde white women, but el Narcisso is to busy staring at his mental self-image to notice much…
“I then went back to my room and sulked for hours.” Maybe he should of went back to his room and shot himself. What an EGO trip he’s on.
He hated any man that was with a woman he thought he should be able to get, Mexican, Asian, Black, white, it didn’t matter in his mind.
But note that the full Asian, the Black Man (he used “boy”) and Mexican were all termed “inferior’. The white men were stud athletes or handsome. And why the fixation on blonde women?
That seems to also put something associated with “white” on a pedestal.
Yes, he hated them all, but his basis for the hate is in the words of Spock – interesting.
Oh how I wish he’d have poured soda all over the heads of two customers in that cafe; he might have been arrested and then to get him off he might have been sent to a mental hospital for treatment as “NCR” — not criminally responsible because of mental illness or disability. Not that I think that would have gone well or even necessarily been handled properly, but there would have been at least a chance!
I see racism rears its ugly head in part 6:
“My first week turned out to be very unpleasant, leaving a horrific first impression of my new life in Santa Barbara. My two housemates were nice, but they kept inviting over this friend of theirs named Chance. He was black boy who came over all the time, and I hated his cocksure attitude. Inevitably, a vile incident occurred between me and him. I was eating a meal in the kitchen when he came over and started bragging to my housemates about his success with girls.
I couldn’t stand it, so I proceeded to ask
them all if they were virgins. They all looked at me weirdly and said that they had lost their virginity long ago. I felt so inferior, as it reminded me of how much I have missed out in life. And then this black boy named Chance said that he lost his virginity when he was only thirteen! In addition, he said that the girl he lost his virginity to was a blonde white girl! I was so enraged that I almost splashed him with my orange juice. I indignantly told him that I did not believe him, and then I went to my room to cry. I cried and cried and cried, and then I called my mother and cried to her on the phone. 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! …”
And what is this blonde fixation????
I mean there are a lot of men who seem to put a blonde on some sort of pedestal.
I am on a technical forum where there is a guy, he gives “tells” that he is racist, who will bring up OJ Simpson whenever an issue about black males comes up. Of course, the “OJ” fixation is a massive “tell” in and of itself.
Seriously, this is some sort of mental illness because I have met too many white males, or those who self-identify, as such with this sort of rage about black men and blonde women.
The worst was when I was in a bar full of Celtics fans when the “bad boy” Pistons knocked them off in a play off. This one guy just kept telling about a black Piston player and that fact that a slut blonde was his GF. Being from Detroit, I wanted to tell him to piss off, but it would have been 1 versus 10, and I am not that brave 🙂
Jeesh I missed that part. Even as it was this guy’s accurate inferiority complex came out of the page like a stink off shit.
*BlankStare*
Almost impossible to feel any empathy for this kid.
In scraping the bottom of the barrel on this one, you did state on a few occasions enough isn’t spent on mental health care and public defenders, but you nailed it on the empathy part here ‘coz this kid’s family has money, so the blame stays there.
It does? Could you please explain what you believe the family should have done?
I’ve been reading his manifesto. I’ve reached page 31 of 141 and I can’t take anymore of his rich-ass whining, crying and temper tantrums.
I felt that way too. I kept hearing my subvocalized outcries:
“Who fucking cares?”
“Shut the F UP, punk!”
“Worse things have happened to better people, you moron!”
“You deserved a lot less than you got, slimeball!”
Finally I just skimmed. Even that makes me want a shower.
If he talks anything like his Manifesto, it’s no wonder nobody likes him……or cares to share bodily fluid, to put it nicely.
I feel like I just read American Psycho, where Rodgers is Patrick Bateman. Only, the murders are real, and Brett Easton Ellis is a better writer.
OMG it’s hilarious I can’t breathe!
Meanwhile, over at TCTH (I don’t go there, hardly ever, but did catch this)- they appear pissed off because the media, which I assume they believe is entirely too liberal- covered this Rodgers story, but not the story about 3 people killed during the Myrtle Beach bike rally that is attended by AAs. So I checked. The top post, USA Today, The Guardian, Boston.com, plus 176 others, and they are still rolling in, the story is new. But, that is not good enough. The media was supposed to reach forward in time, and cover the Myrtle Beach event before it happened, and also the media was supposed to not cover the SB killings at all. Of course not! When you cover murders responsibly as a journalism outlet, you are supposed to censor the news, so that it only reflects AA killings and nothing else. Is that about right?
I won’t link it.
Eloquent as always, my dear.
Those killings in Myrtle Beach do not look like a “spree shooting” at all. They look like a fight that accelerated into homicide among people who knew each other and had some kind of hostility going on before the bullets flew.
I know. Completely different. Lost on the TH.
The family should not have called the police. They should have called a lawyer and gotten him on an involuntary commitment. They could have saved all of those kid’s lives.
I don’t believe they could have gotten him involuntarily committed because the legal test is whether a person is a danger to himself or others. All he has to do is deny that he’s suicidal or thinking about hurting anyone.
Plus, the vast majority of people who are involuntarily committed are released after 72 hours.
They quickly figure out that the key to getting out is to deny that they are suicidal or thinking about hurting anyone.
It isn’t that easy, he was a legal adult and he passed 3 interviews with police by not saying any threats to the cops. One of the 3 was from a mental health office! Now when a mental health office can’t get someone evaluated then you know we have a problem.
I don’t think he had Aspergers. This kid was a true psychopath. People with Autism tend to be loving and gentle.
People with Asperger’s are not all alike. And Asperger’s can certainly coexist with mental health issues. By making such simplistic, black-and-white generalizations, you reach completely invalid conclusions.
I would like to hear how he tried to interact with others, especially women. I know one Asperger’s boy in scouts. When he first joined the patrol he was in all shunned him. They thought he was a general pain in the arse, know it all, etc. We sat the boys down to explain his condition and how he didn’t see things/interpret the same way they did. Once it was explained to them they accepted him fully, they even learned how to change his focus when he became too focused on a situation that was overwhelming to him. He also was seeing someone to help him understand social situations.
Most Aspergers learn, through help, on how to talk to people and it doesn’t sound like this shooter ever learned it and it continued to fester in his mind. He saw himself as a superior, good looking male who thought that was good enough to have a girlfriend when, I bet, his social interactions with people is what turned them off to him and he never learned that. On another blog, it was also brought up as to what kind of drugs he was on and whether or not this helped lead to this situation.
What is the outrage to me is that so many people, including his own family, raised red flags about his mental state and still nothing was done. 3 visits from cops and not once did they get the magic wording to haul him off to a mental hospital. It seems some of the videos that raised so much concern should have done it instead of needing to hear it from the person.
We had to do the same for my daughter’s class. There was a girl with Asperger’s. We had such a hard time making the children understand that she just did not understand cognitive empathy the way others do.
I have updated the article with Sheriff Bill Brown’s news conference yesterday, comments he made to the UK Guardian and information about Aspergers.
FYI: Adam Lanza was diagnosed with Aspergers.
But asperger’s is a common diagnosis nowadays, very common. The Public Health Service should really be trying everything to find out why it has increased so exponentially over the last few decades. It is a continuum of perceptual difficulties. Of course it is a liability for someone who wants to be socially successful but so are hundreds of other things, depending on time, place, conditions, etc. It’s not a tendency toward criminality at all.
I would guess that “Affluenza” was more germane in a post mortem of this crime than Asperger’s.
Asperger’s hasn’t increased exponentially, the diagnosis of it has. It may be diagnosed inappropriately in some cases, but it is something that frequently went unrecognized until relatively recently – if the person had difficulty coping, he or she was dismissed as just being weird or awkward.
I haven’t had time to read everything in this thread yet. I am surprised and extremely disappointed at the tone set by the thread, and the comments by Malisha and some of the others, that Rodgers was simply a spoiled rich kid to be mocked. Furthermore, by doing so, you implicitly made excuses for not give thought to the very real issues raised by this incident.
Being rich does not help to compensate for the isolation, and often, being picked on by other kids, that result from the social awkwardness and odd behaviors caused by Asperger’s syndrome. This can end up being very painful to the kid who may very much want to be accepted, but not understand without help why they are being rejected or how they should try to change. In addition, Rodger seemed to show some ways of thinking that are common in Asperger’s, such as obsessions and black-and-white types of thinking. However, there were also more serious mental health issues involved both with Rodger and with Adam Lanza. Several types of serious mental health problems are apparently more common in people with Asperger’s than in the population at large. It is easy to see how the problems that I mentioned above can contribute to something like depression, but with Rodger and Lanza, there was probably also delusional thinking such as is seen in schizophrenia.
It is not useful to stereotype all people with Asperger’s as being gentle. It is true that most are not inherently violent. But it is also common for kids with Asperger’s to have certain types of perceptual sensitivities and to get overwhelmed easily. Some of them, like my son, may react by “freaking out” or by losing their tempers and acting out in disruptive or violent ways.
I assume you are referring to my unfortunate choice of title.
I have changed my opinion since acquiring the information posted in the updates.
I missed this before:
If I gave the impression that “Rodgers was simply a spoiled rich kid to be mocked,” then I haven’t said my piece quite well enough. First of all, yes, he IS to be mocked. Yes again. Giving this kind of obnoxious killer (whether rich as he was or poor as Fogen was) the terror-filled or excuse-adorned or understanding-tainted post mortem that many articles have been giving him is, in my opinion, counter-productive. Let’s be clear about something: HIS IMMORTALITY PROJECT IS A FAILURE. I mock him. If he had lived I would want him NOT to get the death penalty but to be jeered at and mocked until he died age 99 of natural causes in prison.
“Simply” a spoiled rich kid? Not at all simple. He was — regardless of his financial situation — a grown man who felt that he was entitled to be rich. He was entitled to own others and to decide their fates. He was to be judge, jury, warden and executioner. If he had the nerve to rape and then stand trial, lose and be punished criminally, he would have been not as bad by half. He wanted to be granted the RIGHT to take away t he rights of others.
Nothing I said about him was contemptuous enough, disdainful enough, indignant enough, or mean enough to give full meaning to my real meaning. I stand by every word I said squared.
The Talmud says that if we destroy one life we have destroyed the world. If we save one life we have saved the world. This imponderable subhuman destroyed six universes and maimed many more. He would get my pity if he deserved a gram of it.
If he had lived and been sentenced to death, I would have fought alongside his defenders for years to gain clemency for him. That said, I mock his memory and his (if) soul.
He was a young man who had developed a serious mental illness and was delusional. Of course, the things that he said in his manifesto seem ridiculous. They are based on delusional thinking! Are you saying that a severely mentally ill person should be mocked for having delusions?
No, Gblock, he should not be mocked for having delusions. He should be mocked for saying and believing and acting on the notion that he had (a) a right to be GIVEN what he wanted even if what he wanted was the physical and mental being that belonged to someone else; and/or (b) a right to PUNISH people who did not stop doing what THEY chose to do so they could do what HE chose for them to do; and/or (c) a right to KILL PEOPLE because he was unhappy. FOR ALL OF THOSE THINGS he should be mocked, YES. And if you want to talk about deterrence (and probably you do not), mockery of people who decide to kill others because they didn’t get what they wanted out of life is a GOOD thing and it shows that society will not glorify, excuse, tolerate, or condone that conduct.
I MOCK HIM. I DESECRATE HIS MEMORY! How DARE he make his unhappiness the cause of someone else’s death!
I see. So in other words, you are saying that if his delusions fall into certain categories that you disapprove of, he should be mocked for them.
What I am saying is this:
If he kills a bunch of people who have not ever harmed him, and HE alleges that he does so because they have not made him happy and therefore deserve to die, THEN yes, he deserves to be mocked for that, yes.
If he says all these delusional things and does NOT kill people because of them, alleging these are his reasons, then NO, he should NOT be mocked.
If you want to re-state what I said to mean something else, go ahead; at least I won’t kill you for it.
Here’s another gem from Rodger’s 141-page pile of bullshit:
So the plan is: Either: (a) get everything you want because there is justice in the world; or (b) rise to power and dominate the world to “right the wrongs” and make sure you get everything you want; or (c) get some guns and kill a bunch of people.
Hmmmmm… did I skip a step?
http://gma.yahoo.com/santa-barbara-killers-friend-think-hes-really-lonely-121421934–abc-news-topstories.html?bcmt=comments-postbox One of his few friends said he became obsessed with the movie “Chronicle” and this is the movie that he got the idea to dominate the world…”In the film, three high school students gain superpowers and one character – who’s bullied, shy and lonely – eventually uses them in a robbery and in an attempt to kill his father. He dies at the end of the film, killed by one of the other students.” He saw himself in that character.
malisha — somehow, this particular paragraph caught my notice
yeah, cause it’s not every day you see an ad for ‘psycho killer’ in the help wanted section
Good Zinger.
“Suitable job”: Perfect man needed for sexy blonde women everywhere to worship. No experience necessary. Salary commensurate with candidate’s wildest dreams. Ordinary humans subject to slings and arrows of outrageous fortune need not apply.
just watched this vid with the husband. we were both creeped out. we could just imagine this guy trying to get a date (which should not be that hard if you’re driving a beamer in college, let’s not kid ourselves).
we could imagine him doing and saying something really inappropriate as a first move and college chick saying ‘hey, i like your beamer and all, but the fact that you appear to want to turn my skin into a lampshade kinda creeps me out. see ya!’
i don’t know that i can handle a 140 page manifesto.
BTW I forwarded the seven-minute “POOR ME” video to my friend who is an actor/director and she said she was so bored she couldn’t finish listening to it, had to quit around minute 5.
This is not an excuse but he had Asperger’s. They are known to have a difficult time in social situations and personal interactions. He wrote a disturbing 140 page manifesto, http://www.scribd.com/doc/225936731/Untitled
He had been under a psychologist care for some time and I read one ABC report where one also went to the police about him. To me, this is a problem where the rights of a mental health person takes precedence over the general population. When his parents and the one doctor went to the police of his increasingly disturbing videos, the cops go and interview the person. If the person doesn’t make a threat to themselves or another then their hands are tied and nothing is done.
I know one boy with Asperger’s and their social skills are extremely lacking and they can appear “weird and annoying” to a person if they don’t know why. This is probably why most people ignored him. It appears, to me, he never got any help to deal with social interactions and it just continued to fester in his mind. He saw nothing different between himself and others when in real life I bet there were huge differences on how he talked to others.
This begs the question of why any person (with or without any particular condition) thinks he must have whatever he wants. I have a good friend (whose baby-sitter I was from age 2 until 16) who has asperger’s and this guy would no more hurt someone for not giving him what he wanted than he would drink bleach. Various challenges or even disabilities may change the way a person lives his life, and perhaps have an effect on how much satisfaction he derives from relationships, but doesn’t explain premeditated mass murder, and comes close to making a case for the tarring of all people with asperger’s with a brush that should not even be picked up.
A fabulous music editor for the Washington Post wrote a book about being an adult with asperger’s — “Parallel Play” by Tim Page. This same intellectual previously wrote an admirable letter to the editor (For some reason I cannot find the url for that — maybe someone else can) in which he took responsibility for something he had written that got him into trouble, while very credibly pointing out that it was NOT asperger’s that gave rise to his conduct; he owned his own behavior as the work (and it was not even a really bad thing, just the kind of thing that catches negative attention in our culture) of his own personality and NOT some aberration attributable to an emotional condition.
This is what I have to say about the conduct of this common mass murderer: It was NOT asperger’s that caused these inexcusable murders; it was the murderer himself and those who irresponsibly armed him and those who gave him the stupid notion that he was entitled to treat others’ lives as his own property to dispose of as he liked.
Thanks for the link, TF.
Yup millionaires have no chance of catching the attention of the oposite sex.
No insentive there at all ..
OMG this guy should have saved his bullets and reworked his life to become a stand-up comedian. Read this heartfelt comment from his “manifesto” [which shall hereinafter be referred to as the “manibarfo”]:
OMG HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!! OMG STOP STOP YOU’RE KILLING ME!
LOL.
and here:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/elliot-rodgers-written-manifesto-is-141-pages-long-and-absolutely-terrifying/
Here:
The police who responded to his Family’s calls for help found him “polite and courteous” HA
http://news.sky.com/story/1268553/elliot-rodger-shooting-family-in-shock
The statement from a father, who lost his son, has been added to the post. It is also a video clip.
I liked Richard Martinez and I liked the way he spoke. I also think that in a sense it is lucky that Richard Martinez is a white man with a middle-class look and whose child was a son who was close to a four-point average in college. This means that his views can be referred to without extraneous bullshit cross-hostility-apologetics entering into the mix. Simply put: His son’s life interest in walking-down-the-street-without-being-killed-because-in-some-other-person’s-judgment-he-deserved-it-because-he-had-not-devoted-his-total-attention-to-making-sure-that-other-person’s-wishes-were-fulfilled was extinguished WITHOUT DUE PROCESS.
The best thing that he said was, “This is my last video.”
But…There were others?
He says DRAMATICALLY “this is my last video” to which the obvious response is, “Who cares, asswipe?”
Why does he feel so privileged to get what he WANTS?
Wait a minute…is there a message there? Should boys like him be entitled to get what they want perhaps?
Who are WE?
“You all did not obey me; you did not make my wish your command; therefore I destroy you.” Sound like anybody we know?
I will leave it at that. Saying more makes me a heretic.
CS here, Hmmm. Yes, it does remind me in fact. Just, wow.
Oh! Fred put the link to the manifesto into the post. I am going to have a look…
Okay, time for some questions. He says, “College is the time when you’re supposed to experience…”
But wait. He is 22, right? And, he says he has been in college for 2 1/2 years, roughly. So…what was he doing before that. I mean, if he wanted to experience things that a lot of people experience in college, it may have helped a bit, if he had gone to college, after high school graduation.
*goes back to clip*
-I can only take this thing in small doses at a time.
“….what was he doing before that….”
In a word………..Bitching.
Driving around Pacific Palisades in a $45,000 Mercedes, on his way to get a $400 haircut, …..bitching about how deprived he is.
Fixed it for you!
My bad…….I need to be more specific sometimes. ThanX
He most likely was set back in primary education due to Asperger’s, the boy I know was. They can very intelligent but the “maturity” level/social skills can be a hinder acne.
Hinder acne=hindrance
Okay, I see now and thank you.
It is quite common for psychologists to encourage parents to start children in school a year later if they would be young for their grade or if they have behavioral issues. The claim is that they are likely to do better in school if given the extra year to gain some maturity. So, for instance, Rodger may not have started first grade until he was 7.
Hell to the hell no.
Oh my God, what a spoiled self-centered sanctimonious smirking whining scumbag. Sitting in a black BMW worth multiple thousands of dollars, in a wealthy community, running his mouth about how he has been so deprived. GTFOOHWTFBS.
Is it me or does he seem the oddball type who couldn’t even have a nice civil introduction line, like “…hey……how you doing. My names Elliot. Man, I just love the band playin’ tonight, how about you, you and your friends like this………………..wait, let me get them to get us a seat up closer and the 1st rounds on me…..cool with that ??”
Nooooooo, he’s got a serious mental issue and as always, it everyone else’s fault.
Yep.
Speaking of hateful people, we’ve been following the kidnapping and murder of Hailey. The pictures don’t show the Westboro Baptist Church folks, but they do show how the town responded.
http://www.viraltank.com/town-comes-together-to-shutdown-protesters-who-tried-to-interrupt-this-ten-year-old-girls-funeral/
Thank you!
Here are my impressions of this punk:
1. He assumes himself to be properly empowered to judge others and to pass sentence and execute it as well. My my how unusual.
2. He was a terrible actor. Only when he said he “hate[d]” everyone was there a feeling of truth to his pompous script.
3. Because he WAS such a terrible actor, it is my suspicion that he was failing with his “love and be loved” plan because others could sense his fakeness. I sure could.
4. To me he was just an unsuccessful (perhaps physically cowardly) rapist; he wanted to take what he felt should be HIS but he didn’t have the alpha-criminal-aggression necessary to do so.
5. I don’t see where one concludes that he was teased and bullied. It seems to me more likely that he was assuming that he should get whatever he wanted (right, Professor) and therefore, anybody denying him the ability to have what he wanted was hurting him.
The question arises: Who died and left him King? Many, many, many, kings did.
Malisha You are right on. Just by watching him I wouldn’t date him either! UGH!!!
This idiot was only 22 years old and acted as if he was a 90 year old virgin! Geesh! His life just begun. Well, he was a pre-meditated mental case. Self centered is right.
He is the center of his universe and wants retribution b/c no one else appreciates his view of the universe. No wonder the girls weren’t lining up to date him. Yech!
We only have HIS WORD that he couldn’t get a date, etc. He does not appear to me to be a reliable reporter of facts, either.
Why do you call the girls there sluts? Blonde = sluts? Santa Barbara UC = sluts? Generally girls = sluts?
WTF! He called them that and I’m making fun of him because he is so pathetic and disgusting.
Listen to the video and you will realize what I am talking about.