[lbo-talk] German school gunman 'kills 16'

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Thu Mar 12 19:53:27 PDT 2009


One type of killing, school killings are actually lower today than they were in the 60's. (Of course the 60's and early 70's had especially higher levels of internal U.S. violence than the present - at least the present through 2007. Don't know figures for 2008, or the past few months, yet.) So I'd want to see statistics before I was convinced that this kind of "spree" killing is higher today than at other times in recent history.

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
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>
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> --- On Thu, 3/12/09, Philip Pilkington <pilkingtonphil at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> model. With no society there are no "Others" as
>> such and if there is no
>> "Others" as such there is only the self and thus
>> no responsibility. Without
>> the proper ability to communicate with "Others",
>> with society if the self
>> feels like it needs to lash out and kill, then the self can
>> lash out and
>> kill... no problem.
>>
>
> [WS:]  One may also argue that an act of "anomie" killing is a perverse form of "contact" with the other (as we are by nature social animals,) one written in flesh and blood if you will (cf. Kafka's _Penal Colony_).  That is to say, extreme alienation and the lack of contact with the "other" produces a strong desire to establish such contact "for real" as opposed to fake interactions of a consumerist society.  It is the opposite of a "frivolous" killing, especially that it often ends in the perpetrator killing himself at the end, achieving a sort of communion through death. In other words, what is natural (social contact) but denied in actual life (thanks to alienation) is ritualistically reaffirmed by death.
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> But we are getting awfully speculative here....
>
> Wojtek
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