How Women Tame Men, Pt. 1: Approval/Disapproval

Lazar-

Well, first off, it is worth putting it into perspective.

Although it is played up to dramatic fashion, it’s in fact a vanishingly rare phenomenon. Like shark attacks, killer bee deaths, and a bunch of other silly things the mainstream media plays it up to dramatic extent, leading to a fearful population that expects mass shooters around every school or workplace. You are almost 2x more likely to die from a lightning strike (43 deaths/year in the US) than a mass shooting (23 deaths/year in the US).

One good metric is if it’s in the news, it probably isn’t anywhere near as important as presented, and if it’s actually important it probably isn’t in the news.

In the US, media-reported mass shootings stick pretty close to the racial makeup of the country. According to this chart, the mass shooter breakdown from 1982-2022 looks like this:

• 53% non-Hispanic white
• 16% black
• 8% Hispanic
• 6% Asian
• 4% other
• 2% Native American
• 11% unspecified

US demographics have changed dramatically during that period, with non-Hispanic whites plummeting from 83% of the US population in 1980 to 62% of the population in 2020. But let’s pick a middle point, at 2000:

• 69% non-Hispanic white
• 12% black
• 13% Hispanic
• 4% Asian
• 7% other
• 1% Native American

So it’s mostly pretty proportional across racial lines, with a bit of overrepresentation for blacks, Asians, and Native Americans, and underrepresentation for Hispanics, others, and whites.

The closest thing to a smoking gun I’ve seen as a cause for mass shootings is the pretty much ubiquitous presence of psychiatric medicine use by school shooters. Psychiatric medication changes the brain, often in ways that aren’t communicated to users. It’s a given at this point that if you see a mass shooter, he’s on some kind of psychiatric medication. The defense against this is “obviously these people need help; that’s why they’re on medication.” But there are a lot of people who very severely need help, who are not on medication — these people pretty much do not ever commit mass shootings.

Everyone has intrusive thoughts sometimes. Someone who’s angry and desperate may have thoughts of, “I wish I could get back at everyone,” pop up. Normally the brain has safeguards against this: empathy, sympathy, fear of punishment, the realization how weak and impotent a move like this looks, the futility of this sort of action, and so on. When intrusive thoughts pop up, the mind’s safeguards activate to suppress them. The individual feels guilt, shame, horror, fear, etc., at even having entertained such a thought.

People on psychiatric medication report all kinds of dampened neurological responses. They feel duller; they feel out of touch with the world. Do you still feel shame, guilt, empathy, and perspective the same way when your emotions are dampened this way? In seeking to dampen depressive urges, I very much fear we are also dampening the emotions that act as curbs to thoughts that spring up in moments of desperation, then would ordinarily be shutdown by mental safeguards in place. We all sometimes have rogue bad /

I believe what is happening is the psychiatric medicine psychologists are putting people on are shutting down their safeguards, along with a lot of the other things they’re doing in the brain, and the cause is people doing things their normal (even depressed) thinking would inhibit them from doing.

Chase

Robinhood-

Yep. Attainability made its appearance in Part 2!

Glad you’re enjoying the recent content.

Do you reckon site traffic has improved due to you writing more frequently? I have been visiting it more often certainly.

It does not seem to have. Traffic’s down around the lowest it’s been in a decade.

I tried an experiment where I wrote 4x a week in 2014 and churned out an enormous amount of content. I was on daily responding to comments and very active on the forum. I was a total content machine, pumped out millions of words that year, and guys were loving the content. Our traffic stalled and declined that year, and sales fell by the end of it.

By the end of the year I’d burned out and took most of the first half of 2015 off from writing.

Unfortunately, the “run a content mill” and “churn out a lot of content” angle has some pretty steep limits that you cannot really overcome.

Chase

Marquinhos-

See my reply to you here:

Experienced Woman Tells

Chase