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May 30, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:07:28
Spree Psychology

Ed Dutton and Richard Spencer discuss the psychology of spree killers and answer your questions live. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are around the world.
Welcome back to Radix Live.
How are you doing, Ed?
Not good.
Okay.
Not good.
I went out last night.
I was going to have some beers with my Scottish friend.
And I went to the only place where I could get London Pride, which is these beers here, which is a series of...
A series of shops by the graveyard.
And I popped in just for a second, just for a second to get the beers.
And I normally lock my bicycle, even though I shouldn't have to.
And I didn't lock it and it was stolen.
Wow.
And I mean, what is the point?
What is the point of living in a country that is boring, that has no castles, that has no stately homes you can go to, if not for the fact that it has a high level of social trust?
Right.
But no, not even that.
Okay, I have a lock on my bike.
I normally lock it, but I just popped in just quickly.
I just didn't.
And then, to make matters worse, I put one of these cans sort of somehow hit in my bag and opened in a very small hole and started beer coming out of it.
So I had to walk home like this every few seconds going like this.
And then by the time I got home, I consumed 20% of the beer in that can through that half-hour walk or 20-minute walk.
So yeah, not very good.
So basically, lock all the doors, hang large pieces of crooked wood over the windows.
Northern Finland is now an unsafe society, and I might as well be in Chicago, to be honest.
There still is some trust out here where I live.
You can...
You can leave your car unlocked, even running.
I've done that, run an errand.
You can leave a bike around.
You can't do that near the graveyard in Finland.
That's for sure.
That is unfortunate.
So that's not been good.
Those two related problems of bicycle theft and then, as I say, the beer breaking open, so I had to walk along drinking like an alcoholic.
Can you drink in public in Finland?
You can do that.
I think in theory, no, but in practice, absolutely, yes.
So young people will tend to, at this time of year, there's like a beach, essentially, in the center of Olu.
They have sandy area by the...
And everyone just gathers in public and drinks.
So absolutely, you can drink in public.
All right.
Well, let's move on.
Two less amusing areas of discourse.
It's criminality, and what we're moving on to is just a more extreme kind of criminality.
Right.
So, first off, we will take Super Chats, and you can do those via Odyssey.
So, we are streaming live on Twitter, we're streaming live on YouTube, and Odyssey, of course.
But it is via Odyssey that we are taking your Super Chats.
So, if you If you just Google Radix and my name or Ed's name, I'm sure you'll find it.
But that's a way just to get to the channel.
That's a real simple URL.
So please join the discussion if you would like.
All right.
We already have an interesting one on Ukraine by Yehuda Finkelstein.
Longtime listener and super chatter.
But I'm going to save that one.
I want to get...
Get on track right away and just talk about what happened in Texas.
I think we've had a couple of days to process this matter, and so it's not merely one of shock, but as I'm sure you all know, 19 children and two teachers were killed in a small town outside of San Antonio,
Texas called Uvalde by an 18-year-old named Salvador He also shot his grandmother in the face before engaging in this heinous act.
from what I understand she actually might survive I think early reports was that she was dead so he went on an absolute rampage and as disturbing as it is these kinds of things have become
A part of American life in the same way of eating a hot dog or cheeseburger on the 4th of July and doing fireworks and trick-or-treating on Halloween.
It's a part of life.
Now, of course, it is ultimately exceedingly rare.
To die in one of these incidents is a lot like getting struck by lightning.
But it does have a kind of omnipresent I don't know what it would be like to be a child today and to, you know, whether it's rational or empirically accurate or not, but to at least think about your school being attacked by your own classmate.
That's something that I can't imagine.
This whole trend was started, of course, with Columbine.
In Colorado that shocked the world in 1999 with Harris and Klebold.
And they seem to have set a kind of standard or started this horrible trend.
I was actually looking back at that incident last night and you have...
All of the now kind of telltale signs of the spree shooter.
These are young men.
Men seem to be a little more psychotic around that age, that late teens, early 20s.
But the black leather trench coats, the promotion of what they're doing on the internet, it was still the...
Relatively early days of the web, but there were certainly telltale signs that they were using the internet to talk about what they were doing, whether they were radicalized on the internet, I guess, might be another question.
There's some other aspects to this, the theatricality of it all, which I've noted.
Karras and Klebold actually made home videos of their exploits, but it almost seemed like a rehearsal of what they would ultimately do.
And so a lot of these images of those two characters wearing black trench coats walking around, those aren't images of the actual event itself.
But of videos they made that were kind of fictional reenactments.
Now, I'll actually say this.
I remember making ridiculous, hilarious home videos like that when I was in high school.
I remember we had some assignment that we had to do.
I can remember this directly.
I don't know if the video exists, but we had, like, water balloons full of ketchup and water or something, and we were firing guns, and blood was splattering everywhere.
I remember falling, and I got shot, and I fell into a pool, and then I slowly drowned.
My hand went down to the water.
It was probably reenacted with Terminator.
You should try and find that.
I think people were watching this one.
Right.
I remember them pretty vividly.
They are really amusing, but, of course, I...
Because they were just for fun.
There was nothing else there.
But with these two figures, they were not just fantasy reenactments of 80s action movies, but they were a rehearsal for the actual event.
So I think there is a great deal of theatricality and perhaps even narcissism.
One interesting tidbit about Salvador Ramos that I read is that...
He was an unpopular, from what we can tell, we don't know a lot about it, but he was a, and he had no criminal record, and he had no, he was not engaged in any kind of mental health therapy or anything like that.
But one thing we do know, and this is interesting, I saw this in the New York Times, I think it was yesterday, the day before.
He actually went on a website that I had never heard of called Yubo, I believe is what it's called, where you can randomly live stream to strangers.
So it's almost like a chat room roulette or something like this, where you just kind of randomly connect with a stranger.
And he connected with a young woman in Germany, and he talked about buying all of these weapons and ordering ammunition.
And then they seemed to connect in some way, and he texted her on the day of the event, I've just killed my grandmother, and more is going to happen.
So it's this weird internet age relationship.
That is totally anonymous, yet strangely intimate and deeply personal and honest.
Although Ramos was not quite to the level of Klebold and Harris from Columbine, he too engaged in a kind of boasting about the event, or at least telling people.
There was a certain theatricality.
To what he was doing.
He wanted people to know about it.
One thing that stands out of, again, some of these various sparse reports that we hear, he mentioned to some of his colleagues at a Wendy's where he worked that, do you know who I am?
So there also just seemed to be a kind of hint of theatricality and narcissism, which I think is a very important aspect to this.
Ed, I'll pass the baton to you.
What do you pick up on some of the things that I've said?
Or do you disagree with my portrait of it?
There's another level to this.
It's not simply snapping in a moment of...
It's not necessarily a crime of passion where you snap.
Let's just say this.
A husband walks in on his wife engaged in an affair.
You'll be extremely angry.
You might lose it and engage in murder.
But that's a kind of crime of passion, and it's a snapping.
You lose sense of reason.
There's something else happening here.
It is premeditated to some degree, but there's also a level of lashing out at the world and theatricality, which I don't think should be underestimated.
Well, there was a study called by Glick et al.
in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, published last year, on domestic mass shooting incidents in America.
And they had, most, a lot of these people killed themselves, but there were 35 instances of survivors who have then gone to prison, and those survivors have been interviewed by psychiatrists and by psychologists.
And these academics interviewed the various...
Psychiatrists and psychologists, and also looked at the various cases.
And in 28 out of 35 instances of these survivors, there was a clear diagnosis.
The largest was schizophrenia, and schizophrenia was 18 of them.
Three was bipolar.
Two was delusional persecution, which in some ways is a kind of schizophrenia.
There was a paranoid borderline.
There was substance abuse.
One was post-traumatic stress.
So the largest amount of them was basically schizophrenia.
And what schizophrenia involves is extreme paranoia and also some kinds of schizophrenia, persecutory delusions.
And one way that they deal with these persecutory delusions, of course, is defensive.
So they will kill somebody because they are afraid that person is going to kill them.
And there is some research where you get what's called defensive projection.
So you feel you're persecuted, in a sense, by the entirety of society.
Society is persecuting you.
Everybody is persecuting you.
And you have to show society that you're not going to be persecuted so that they don't completely kill you.
And you become so wrapped up in this idea of persecution and being persecuted that you then, in a moment of...
Trying to stop yourself from being persecuted almost.
You go and kill a load of people because those people embody the society that is persecuting you.
But then, of course, you realise that that society is still going to persecute you even more now that you've done this.
So you've taken out your rage of being persecuted and so you kill yourself.
So that seems to be the significant one.
As for what you said about narcissism...
Yeah, I mean, if you look at some of the people that they found here, the borderline personality disorder was a number of them and a general persecutory complex.
And this can be related to the idea that you feel that you're powerful and important and special.
You feel disempowered.
This gives you a narcissistic injury.
So you therefore want to assert your power.
And what better way of doing this than killing a load of people in the easiest way possible via killing schoolchildren?
So those seem to be the two key things.
One is schizophrenia.
They're all out to persecute me.
I'm going to stop them first.
But then once you do so, then you realize that you're going to be persecuted more, so you kill yourself.
And the second is sort of a narcissistic injury and a response to that.
I think that was what we saw perhaps with that.
What was that guy called?
That young incel a few years ago.
Oh, yes.
I'm forgetting his name in the moment, but he attacked a sorority house, I believe.
Yeah.
Because the girls sort of damaged him, damaged his sense of self-importance by refusing to have sex with him.
Right.
He was lashing out at the Stacys and Chads or Bettys or whatever they call them.
That's right.
So you've basically got persecutory delusions, which you deal with because the society is persecuting you.
And so you rage out, you lash out at society in some form because it's persecuting you out of a sense of rage at being persecuted.
So I guess there's sort of narcissistic dimensions to that as well.
And these things are independent of each other.
I mean, schizophrenia can cross over with aspects of narcissism.
That dog is increasingly the bane of my existence, whenever I do this program.
Okay, keep talking and I'll bring this up.
He wants to contribute to the show.
Well, he can't.
He's a dog.
He doesn't have any kind of sense of self-consciousness.
Well, he does have probably a very vague sense of consciousness, but he wouldn't pass the mirror test.
So anyway, folks, what is it that is causing it?
Well, apparently the schizophrenia is very significantly heritable.
It's very strongly heritable.
In the order of about 0.7.
So it's mutants, basically.
I mean, if I'd had time to write, if I had another few months to write my Spiteful Mutants book, which is coming out soon, I perhaps could have...
We've done a chapter on school shooters, but I think that's a big part of it, because why would there be more of them?
Because there's just more of these crazy people around, and because of higher levels of mutation, that is part of it.
It's not all of it, but it's part of it.
Then there's other, the environmental components to schizophrenia, and okay, some of them are not schizophrenic, but the biggest minority, well, it's the majority even, 18 out of 35, that's basically the majority, isn't it?
Are schizophrenic.
So it's infections and a serious infection, particularly in childhood, that develops into encephalitis can make things go wrong and bring about schizophrenia.
Being born in the winter or spring as opposed to summer or autumn is weakly correlated with developing schizophrenia.
Being an immigrant for some reason is...
Oh, that's surprising.
If it's a very strong cannabis and it's done in a developmentally sensitive time, such as a teenager, and it's done to a substantial degree, then it can cause a form of psychosis.
Let me jump in real quick.
Being an immigrant, if you're a kind of singular immigrant, it might feed a certain kind of persecution complex where you're not empathizing with your neighbors and so on.
But I don't think that played a role here.
I mean, in Uvalde, Texas, he seemed to be within a Hispanic community where they all had a very similar background.
I'm not surprised about...
Cannabis pot smoking promoting this.
The kind of Pollyannish view people have of marijuana, particularly the marijuana that's being smoked now, it just never ceases to amaze me.
It is not a good thing to ingest.
No, it's strong.
If it's very strong, if it's this skunk kind of marijuana, then it's taken, you know, a lot.
Then it can cause very serious mental health problems.
So, yeah, so those are the kinds of things that are involved.
I don't know if by his background was going on, but it's basically undiagnosed.
He's an undiagnosed schizophrenic.
And in the right...
Probably.
I think that's what's going on.
That's why he killed his grandmother, for God's sake.
It's more than just raging against the machine.
Maybe he had to kill her.
He's paranoid about everybody.
And then the problem is that immediately it brings in this gun debate.
And I think that this is concerning because Finland is awash with guns.
There's a lot of guns in this country.
But there were two school massacres, one after the other.
In 2007 or something, 2006.
And then 2008, right about then.
And then that's it.
Then there's been no copycat or whatever since.
And there's still no security at schools.
You can just walk in.
It's like what schools were like when I was a kid in England.
You just walk in.
There's no problem.
And that changed because of a school massacre.
1996, March 96, and this guy, this 42-year-old Scottish paedophile, walks into an infant school and shot dead 18 people, including himself.
Most of them were young children, you know, aged five, six, seven.
I don't believe that Finland is as awash with guns like the United States.
The United States has more guns than people, as has been repeated very often, as the highest number of guns per capita above Yemen, which I found a bit surprising as number two.
I seriously doubt that you can buy an AR-15 style weapon in Finland at age 18. I don't.
Well, you'd have to pass.
Yeah, United States has 120.5 guns per 100,000 people.
Yeah.
So it does have a lot of guns.
I've no idea about the specifics of what it is.
It is higher than Yemen, as you're saying.
Finland is ranked 10th after Cyprus, Uruguay, Canada, Serbia, Montenegro, New Caledonia, Yemen, the Falkland Islands, and America.
Right.
I would also...
I mean, we can talk about the gun aspect if you want to...
Finish up on this psychology.
They did a detailed analysis, and that is the conclusion.
Yes, you get people that have got paranoid disorder or borderline personality disorder, which includes narcissism.
Yes, substance abuse.
In one case, post-traumatic stress.
But in three cases, bipolar, which can cause people to have schizophrenic traits.
But in the majority of the cases...
They've had information.
It's schizophrenia.
And so you have to ask yourself, it's almost certain that the reason why there's writing schizophrenia, this is a condition, it's been argued that possibly didn't exist.
Some people have argued this.
I don't know what the general view is among practitioners, but this is a new condition.
Some people argue that 200 years ago there was nobody with the...
With a condition comparable to schizophrenia.
You had schizoid personality, things like that, but not full-on schizophrenia.
So schizophrenia seems to be some new genetic mutant development.
But that's basically the cause.
I don't know about that.
In a sense, on the one hand, your gunning debate, which is not a debate in Britain because we don't have guns.
Right.
It immediately gets into the newspapers and whatever, but it raises further questions, which is that if you...
To give the government a monopoly on guns is very much trusting the government.
And it's basically...
The government is a protection racket, and by keeping your guns, you're kind of saying, I don't want to be part of this protection racket.
Or at least I don't want to be fully part of it.
I don't trust it.
I mean, Ed, that's just libertarian claptrap.
No, no, it's not libertarian.
You keep it on a tank, Ed.
Why do these Americans want to have guns?
They must be some.
Because there's been a...
First off, America is a pioneer, kind of frontier society.
And I think there is a deep tradition of...
Owning a rifle and hunting and being an outdoorsman and so on.
That's very true.
But the kind of gun culture that has developed really over the past 20 years, I would say, and especially over the past 10, is just simply bizarre.
They don't like it when you call them assault rifles, but owning military-grade...
Rifles that you would never conceivably use for hunting and going out to ranges and not even working on marksmanship, just firing these big guns.
I mean, this is a uniquely American thing and is, I mean, from my standpoint, just bizarre and seems to lend a lot of credence to the you question your manhood.
Liberal critique, to be honest.
What are you doing?
You're firing an assault rifle at a dummy in a range?
This is what you do for fun?
Why do you need this thing?
In terms of the libertarian argument about a monopoly on violence, I mean, the state has a monopoly on violence.
I mean, period.
So, the idea that you're going to...
I don't know, they're going to start shooting off people who make them get vaccinated or something?
I mean, this is insane.
It is, but if you arm the population, if the population is armed, then it is less easy for a nefarious government, a really seriously nasty government, to do you in.
And also the other thing is that giving away all guns to the state assumes that the state is competent, assumes that the state can force law and order.
And everything will be okay.
And what if it can't?
Well, we are seeing that now.
I mean, this is something that...
Not just can't, but won't.
And so at the exact time where they're saying, oh, you shouldn't be allowed to have serious guns that you can defend yourself with properly, they're also showing that they're not prepared to defend you.
I mean, that's happened in the Black Lives Matter hysteria a couple of years ago.
You've got women ringing the police and saying, I'm in the car with my kids surrounded by angry people.
In this very event, and you actually have both sides of the debate lashing out at the...
I mean, what happened was really remarkable.
There is video and testimony of the parents desperately wanting to go save their children and being restrained by the police from doing that.
Now, that is defensible on some level.
You don't want just, I guess, vigilante justice, if you want to call that.
I mean, that could have made things worse.
I could defend that.
I would only defend those actions in the context of the police storming the building.
But what we have is the police never went into the room and they considered it not an active shooting situation, but a barricaded suspect or something like this that they were going to negotiate with.
While they waited for more than an hour While he was killing children in the room In which he had He was barricaded It was just awful How you can justify The Valde police, first off, they saved some of their own children, or got them out, at the very least, and they never went into the room.
It was actually the Border Patrol.
It was a statewide agency that actually solved the issue.
So we just have radical incompetence.
And cowardice, for lack of a better word.
Those police officers are cowards of the worst order.
And in a military situation, they would be shot.
I'm quite right, too.
I mean, you signed up for this.
You joined the police force.
We could risk our lives doing that.
Yes, you would.
That's why you're in the police.
That's what he wanted to do.
And that's why you get fetid and you get to wear a uniform and carry a gun and people let you get on planes early and they say blue lives matter.
That's why they do it, because you're taking a risk.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Exactly.
So in that context then, in the context where we have a collapse in the norms to which we're used in society, where we can't trust the police because they're infiltrated by cowards.
And people that aren't prepared to do their jobs, infiltrated by incompetent ideological nonsense, infiltrated by the...
Then people, even more than ever, need to have weaponry because they need to be able to defend themselves because they can't rely on the police to do so.
And that's an argument that...
He's more convincing to me now than it would have been 20 years ago.
As you're seeing the gradual South Africanization of parts of the United States, then more than ever, people need to have weapons.
If we have more spiteful mutants...
You know, in your term, in the world, don't we need to prevent them from buying assault rifles?
Well, or we need to have assault rifles in order to shoot them when they attempt to attack us.
Well, that's just insane.
I mean, that's madness.
Well, how can we...
You've got to balance those two things.
You have a society that's degenerating into chaos because of spiteful mutants, in part.
And you have a society which, and therefore people need weapons to defend themselves in that chaos, that zombification that we've got.
It's fail.
These things keep happening.
No one's defending themselves from spree shooting.
Spree shootings are...
No, I'm talking about the ability to have weapons.
That's the issue there.
A separate issue, then, is that we have a rising number, seemingly, of these schizophrenics, and this general, I don't know, part of it could just be social contagion that goes on every so often, where what should I do if I'm a schizophrenic, an embittered man?
I'll go on a spree shooting.
And in particular, I'll go for schools, because, you know, they're easy targets.
Appalling thing, of course.
And, yeah, I don't...
I would have thought that they should.
In all practicality about it, they are, in Finland, very careful about who has a gun licence.
Now, the next thing that the counter I'll get then is if you really want to have a gun, you'll be able to get hold of one illegally or whatever.
And I can't comment on that.
But in this country, they're very, very clear about it.
If you have a criminal record that has required, that has evidenced...
I'm not talking about fraud or something, but if you have a criminal record, even for something like serious drink driving, which evidences that you're one unstable kind of person, they take away your gun license permanently.
And I think that's how it should be.
They should want to know, if you're going to have a gun license, have you been diagnosed with a serious mental illness?
Have you had to spend time in a mental institution?
Anything like that.
And it should preclude you from having a gun license.
I totally agree.
Do they not have such checks?
No, they don't have background checks, and you can easily buy a gun at a gun show.
That's really the issue.
And, again, there's this...
I mean, I could go into the Second Amendment itself, if you want to, to get more context.
Who do you think was telling me that felons can't own guns in America?
So that's fair enough.
But, of course, this person didn't have a criminal record.
That's the problem.
No.
He may have seen doctors who were concerned or who diagnosed some condition or other, and that should preclude him.
Yeah, I mean, look, there are some things that you can't stop.
I mean, just to be realistic, there is a type of mental illness and deep social alienation that might not be picked up upon.
Because, look, the fact is, a lot of 16-year-olds are kind of screwed up and don't know who they are and are alienated and bullied.
But, I mean, you can easily...
I mean, you don't need...
If you're going to engage in self-defense, I mean, unless you're fighting off a drug cartel or an invading army, you don't need an assault rifle.
I mean, the best gun for self-defense is a pump-action shotgun.
And it's the safest gun that you can use for self-defense.
If you're firing a handgun, I mean, if you live in an urban area or you're living in an apartment, you're firing a handgun, I mean, you are absolutely endangering everyone around you.
The bullets go through walls pretty easily.
A pump-action shotgun is what you need.
We're not in a Mad Max scenario where we need AR-15s.
It's not that bad.
Not this year, no.
And you're not going to win against the government.
I mean, you might win against the Ivalde police because they're incompetent boobs, but if the government wants to do something to you, they are going to overpower you.
To be honest, I think the children at that elementary school could have overpowered the Ivalde police.
I mean, these are just feeble non-men.
It is pretty appalling.
I mean, look, this is the text.
It is two sentences or just one sentence.
The Second Amendment, 1791.
A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Now, you hear a lot of that, the right of the people to keep and bear arms and shall not be infringed.
So it seems to give you this...
It's this universal God-given right to protect yourself.
No, that's out of context.
I'm sorry.
Exactly.
It's very clear.
Militia.
Militia.
Exactly.
And free state is actually very important.
And this is...
I don't know if you listened to my monologue on this, but...
So the original draft of the Second Amendment was actually a free country.
So in the United States, for whatever reason, whereas...
The words like nation and state and country and federalism and liberal, they're kind of mixed up from what you use in Europe.
But it was a free country.
The idea was that these militias, these state militias that actually did eventuate into the police force, in fact, that they could be used by the federal government to stave off, say, the Whiskey Rebellion or go to Canada or something.
And so that's what it was about.
Now, there was a controversy, and Patrick Henry was on the side of the free state.
So he wanted to maintain the police forces in the state so that they wouldn't be used abroad or federalized.
And it was a major contention.
And a lot of his motivation seemed to be that if you send the militia outside of the state to go invade Canada or something, that there would be slave revolts and chaos.
So it was a political compromise based on power relations.
It was never a kind of God-given right.
And also, you don't have a God-given right to a rocket launcher.
Or a tank.
The government will not let you do that.
So this notion that there's an inherent God-given right to one of these firearms is just ridiculous.
My understanding of what you just read is that the founding fathers' view is that the police should be allowed to have guns.
Right.
That's it.
And that's what a militia eventually became.
I became president and I said that like in England or like in England until relatively recently, the police have to have truncheons.
Then people would rightly say, no, that's unconstitutional.
The police should not be made to have truncheons.
It's incredible thinking now you get police with guns all over the place in the UK.
But when I was a kid, they just had truncheons, didn't they have guns?
And anyway, so they say that the police should be armed.
That's what it says.
Now, look, if I were president or...
I would want to codify gun rights in a sane way.
So it would be gun control.
So I do think that being an outdoorsman and so on is part of our deep history and should be preserved.
I do think you have a right in some way to defend your home.
But you don't have a right to own a Stinger missile or Go out like Scarface with two machine guns on each arm, firing away at an intruder.
I mean, I'm sorry, but there is going to be some kind of gun control.
And if it could just be codified for a handgun for home use, a pump-action shotgun is certainly the best.
And that being an outdoorsman can be codified into law that you have a right to do this.
This is part of being an American is that you get to go hunt stuff.
Now, would that solve the problem?
There'd be no more crime or whatever.
Of course not.
But it's just a reasonable solution.
And I just think the right on this is just deranged on some level.
I mean, the kind of gun culture that they are now engaging in is bizarre.
And I don't think you quite grasp it because you don't live here, which is, of course, not your fault.
And then also the It is my fault.
I've made strenuous efforts to not have to move to America.
It's entirely my fault.
It's actually kind of good.
Sometimes when I talk to you, it's almost like you believe there's a BLM riot in every neighborhood on Saturdays or something.
It's like that movie The Purge or something.
We're like, uh-oh, it's 3pm Saturday.
Get the kids in.
That's the impression I get.
You told me that a flat that I stayed in in Chicago was ransacked.
It's true.
That's close.
That's too close to home.
Sorry.
We got out of there.
It's true.
Who knows what would have happened in the BLM.
I'm glad I left.
It's not that bad.
Gun culture is deranged.
The ideology around the Second Amendment that God wants you to own a handgun or something.
I don't know where this is possibly coming from.
It's actually coming from the ideology itself kind of emerged in the 1970s to answer the question.
But yeah, I mean, and again, I don't know how we're gonna solve this.
The NRA actually filed for bankruptcy.
It's been attacked through lawsuits, which I think are justified to some extent.
There was a lot of self-dealing in the NRA.
Of course, I don't.
I don't know all the details.
And it certainly has political enemies.
But it is bankrupt.
But I don't even think the NRA is necessary at this point.
The mass of Republican voters are fanatical about this issue.
There's no need to lobby anyone.
They will go nuts.
It's symbolic of the...
A sense of power.
It's a trite thing to say, but it is almost Freudian.
That's why it was considered in the Good Friday Agreement in the UK in 1998.
The Unionists wanted the IRA to destroy their guns, and they wanted to film them doing it.
And the IRA didn't want this because they felt it was humiliating to have to destroy their guns.
Symbolic castration.
It was symbolic castration.
It was a sign of their disempowerment.
And it was bad enough that they should have to destroy their guns.
But the idea that they should be filmed doing it and people should be able to watch this was just absolutely wrong.
I think there was some sort of negotiation that it was done in front of various witnesses, but it was not filmed.
And I think that it's a...
Polarised society, the gun and the ability to hold these guns has become symbolic of the government is not touching me.
You know, of me being autonomous and watching my country, my once proud land, being destroyed.
I'm watching my own disempowerment.
At least I have my guns.
And they're not going to bloody well take that away.
I agree.
And I think it might even be more specific because so much of what we think of as conservatism arose in the 1970s and arose...
Post-segregation.
And basically was the people who lost the segregation battle creating the religious right and the gun culture.
I mean, it's a very significant thing, and I don't think...
They can be divorced from these things.
That's a very good point.
They've been humiliated in the 60s with all this desegregation.
They feel utterly disempowered and appalled, and so they deal with it by clinging to guns, which give them a sense of power.
Or abortion.
Remember, the Roe v.
Wade, the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed the Roe v.
Wade decision when it happened.
And then by the late 70s, there was this pro-life movement led by former segregationist Jerry Falwell.
So it's a kind of losing the real battle and then adopting these symbolic battles and saying that despite what it says in the Bible, God is...
Is against abortion and there's an unborn life or something.
Another way of putting it, if you have no power, if you're just a wretched human being with no power, and all of us evolved to fight for power and prestige and status, then the little things become important.
It's like in prison, they want to sleep on the top bunk.
Okay, I'm in prison and I have absolutely nothing, but at least I'm not on the bottom bunk.
And it's childish.
Who cares?
But it does matter in that context.
I mean, think about when you're a child, how much little things that really aren't important in the general scheme of things seem to matter.
Oh, God.
If one of my children gets a larger slice of cake, they could cry about it.
By a nanomillimeter.
It's as if I, like, dispossessed them or something.
As an only child, I find this very, very difficult to get my head around.
Right, because you just got the whole cake.
Absolute extreme.
They're very left-wing children.
Absolute extreme equality that they seem to desire.
Kids are little monsters, Mr. Finkelstein.
Yes, you're quite right.
Yeah.
All right.
We actually have a ton of Super Chats.
It's awesome.
Let me get to these.
So, this is...
I'll just go through them in order.
Yeah, we almost have $100 of Super Chats here.
Okay.
Yehuda Finkelstein.
Richard.
Was the recent statement by the 99-year-old Henry Kissinger that Ukraine must cede land in a peace deal with Russia that of an elder statesman or merely that of a very elderly man?
It's funny.
I more or less agree with Kissinger.
And I was saying you can go back on my Twitter feed days after the invasion of Ukraine.
I was calling for a German solution to the Ukraine question.
So what I mean is divide Ukraine into a western and eastern half, recognize the reality of just geography, but also recognize that there is going to be much more Russian sympathy in the Donbass region and so on, and that the western half could be a part of NATO and we would just...
I agree with Kissinger.
The way that I've seen it, all the kind of Z people and Russia files, they're basically being like, oh, we hated Kissinger a week ago, but now he's based or whatever.
He's telling the truth to the West.
I see it very differently.
Yeah, I do see it more as an elder statesman.
As someone who's reaching a reasonable solution.
Now, I understand why a Ukrainian right now would say, we will see nothing.
Well, nothing.
They invaded us.
They're to blame.
Go to hell.
I get that from an emotional response.
But looking at it as a non-Ukrainian and non-Russian, I think dividing the country is a sensible solution and would prevent further bloodshed.
I don't want to see a 10-year guerrilla campaign.
I would much rather see a hardly ideal but less bloody division of the country.
You can jump in any time if you want to.
I'm very, very bored of talking about Ukraine.
Yehuda, again, Ed, if you can't find real English beer in the Arctic where you live, the American malt liquor Old English 800 is a good substitute.
Well, I'd like to be able to find Old English 800 here in Northern Finland.
I can find London Pride.
And Kentish Ale.
And this one shop, but it does involve getting my bike stolen.
But not that I ever paid for that bike.
I inherited it.
But the point is that now I have to go and get one.
My daughter probably won't let me have her old one.
You inherited a bike?
Wow.
It was my wife's cast-off bike.
Oh, okay.
So, yeah.
I can get it here.
It's increasingly complicated because I like shopping at Lidl because it's the only shop where you're not being overcharged severely.
You can't rely on them.
They just have things in for a bit and they don't have them anymore.
It's the nature of Lidl, I'm afraid.
You don't have Lidl in America or anything like it, but if you do, you know what I'm talking about.
Well, I'm sure we have things like it, yeah.
Yeah, I like a good Pau Laner.
Okay.
Harold, are modern depictions of pre-Christian Germanic religion intentionally designed to make whites feel like savages that were civilized by Christianity?
Okay.
That's an interesting question.
That might be, in part, at least a reference to the Northman film.
And I do, I mean, you can go look at, I just wrote this up on Twitter, but I do think that there was a kind of symbolic messaging in the Northmen.
Keep in mind that the protagonist's antagonist both killed each other before a volcano.
So it was almost as if it was a kind of sacrifice to...
There was a kind of subtext of the rise of Christianity in the Northmen.
So Yahweh is a volcanic god to a large degree.
So I do think that there is a kind of depiction of that.
Now, no doubt the Germanic religions were a bit rough around the edges.
But yeah, I do think that there is a kind of subtle messaging going on.
But it was more the Romans.
It was the Romans that portrayed them as particularly savage.
So it's Roman propaganda with regard to Celtic religion and also with regard to the Germanic religion, I think.
That damn Claudius.
Yeah, it's Roman propaganda, I think, more so than Christian propaganda.
It's pre-Christian Roman propaganda.
Right.
But keep in mind as well, I mean, we don't know.
We really kind of don't know much of anything about the Germanic pre-Christian religions.
And I say that because what we know of them, we get through Christians.
So it's kind of like...
Oh, that's interesting.
The modern-day major pagan religion that has survived is Hinduism.
So it would have had probably things in common with aspects of that.
Right.
Okay.
Again, we've got a lot here, so I'll...
We'll go through them.
Yehuda again for five.
Two 18-year-old deviants, two mass shootings.
Is it time to regulate internet and video game use by children and teens, much as societies regulate alcohol and tobacco consumption for young people?
Well, you know how I'm going to answer this, but Ed, do you want to jump on that?
Well, we do regulate it.
I mean, you have 18 certificate computer games and things like that.
So, if you're saying, should computer games basically not be allowed to involve violence?
Is that what we're saying?
He might be saying that.
They should all be puzzle games, like Dizzy and the Yoke Folk.
Then, yeah, why not?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not necessarily against the depiction of violence, and I think you could make an argument that, you know, Fantasizing about violence makes you less violent, in fact, that you get it out of your system, as it were, in that way.
But no, I think there's a deeper issue.
And yeah, I think absolutely it's time to seriously regulate the internet.
But at the very least, you should regulate it among your own family.
I mean, I don't know.
18-year-olds, they should be...
Obsessed with baseball or whatever.
They don't need to be just endlessly discussing politics in the most toxic manner possible, unfortunately.
Which many of them are.
Okay.
Ryan Thompson.
See, the problem is these crazy fucks don't have a war where they can go and blow off some steam so they just randomly shoot people.
Okay.
Bluntly put, but I do agree to some extent.
Wouldn't you say, Ed, that from a group evolution perspective, that it's good to have some psychopaths within the society?
Yes, that is definitely true.
Well, not necessarily pure psychopaths, but certainly people that have some psychopathic traits.
Sub-psychopaths, as it were.
Sub-clinical psychopaths.
But the flip side of being able to have sub-clinical psychopaths is that you will have some psychopaths.
And that's why East Asia, for example, which is such a harsh ecology and where cooperation is so important, doesn't have many geniuses, i.e.
subclinical psychopaths with high IQ because the flip side of that is actual psychopaths and that's so damaging in a society where you've got to cooperate so yeah that's why these things are in the gene pool and what we have now is just a more weaker Darwinian selection pressures and so we're going to get more psychopaths and more schizophrenics and more whatever.
It's good for the group level.
Genius and so on.
Okay.
Conflict consensus, YouTube star shooter, livestream reality show fame-seeking, jackass movie-level spree-killing, Yeah, I think what he's doing is suggesting what we're going to see in the future, and I unfortunately agree.
I mean, this is something that I was stressing.
Ed was stressing the schizophrenia, which is interesting, but I was actually stressing the theatricality and narcissism of the spree shooters.
They do want to be known.
And they want to lash out in a theatrical manner.
I think that's just a key aspect to them and their personality.
And yeah, all of those things you've described, we're basically seeing.
The Christchurch shooter live-streamed, the Buffalo shooter live-streamed.
Yeah, I'm sure there's Facebook live streams of suicides and mutilations of all sorts.
I mean, we're basically living in a Bosch painting at this point on the internet.
Okay, let me see this.
Okay, Ryan Thompson.
If this were a proper government, well, or he mentioned some controversial regimes, I would be happy to give up all 31 of my guns.
But we have anarcho-tyranny.
I like to get high and shoot things, but just relax.
Okay.
Enjoy yourself.
Thank you for the five bucks.
I do find this...
I get kind of tired of the argument that, you know, our government's crazy and thus...
We can't have healthcare, or thus we can't have gun control, or thus we can't do this or that.
It just seems to be an excuse to be a conservative.
You know, the government's nuts, but otherwise I would be a patriotic citizen, but I'm kind of tired of that.
It just seems like an excuse to me, to be honest, of not offering an actual solution to serious problems.
Okay.
Ryan Thompson, the spree shootings are happening.
Oh, sorry.
I like guns, but I don't really have a dog in the fight in terms of gun control.
But don't guns prevent a lot of violent crime each and every year?
No.
I mean, you can certainly...
There are absolutely cases of a guy robbing a liquor store and the manager has a gun or a person, even a bystander, has a gun.
And these...
I get it.
It's good to stop a crime and to be dedicated like that.
But look, more guns, more gun crime.
I mean, the argument that is sometimes made by the wacky wing of the conservatives that we just need more and more guns so that we'll have less and less crime.
I mean, that is just total silliness.
And removing a lot of these guns, yeah, the criminals will...
We'll still get them, but there's just less to choose from.
I mean, if you remove, if you get rid of 80% of marijuana, there's going to be less marijuana smoking.
I just don't understand how someone could possibly make the argument that more guns equals less gun crime.
And again, some of the things that people like Ted Cruz are promoting, I mean, some of it is just ridiculous.
We need one door to a school or something.
Absurd.
But just arming teachers and just getting...
Who wants to live like this?
There are other solutions to these problems outside of arming everyone.
Okay.
Okay.
Harold, most mass shooters That is true.
There is no background check that would have stopped this.
I think not selling AR-15s would have...
I think it should be 30. Or possibly even 35, because that's when your frontal lobes are fully developed.
Right.
35. I get it.
I mean, it is...
Well, yeah, sure.
But I mean, that is very true of the young man who goes through a kind of psychopathic phase.
That's also when schizophrenia emerges in that time of life.
So doesn't it emerge around the time of 18 to 24 or something like that?
Yeah, early adolescence.
And not just that.
Other things often as well, like depression and that sort of thing.
Yeah.
Dickie Spencerstein.
Richard, is the only solution for school shootings to either A, arm all elementary school teachers, or B, hire armed security to change schools away from a soft-target status?
Militarizing schools seems the only watertight short-term solution Oh, sorry, we got another one in here.
To stop lone wolves and to maybe raise the age to 25. No, 35. I think it's a brilliant idea.
I agree.
I totally enjoy it.
I have solved this problem tonight.
This is important today.
35, you can own a gun.
Because by then, if you're going to be a schizophrenic, it will have emerged.
So we know about it.
You can't have a gun.
And by then, if you're a weird incel, you've probably accepted it.
And by then, you're emotionally mature.
You're cognitively mature.
You can own a gun at 35. That's it.
If you're a weird incel, you would have already committed suicide.
You have to be 35 to be president.
Nobody questions that.
So why can't it be that you have to be 35 to own a gun?
Right.
Look, call me nostalgic or something, but militarizing schools just strikes me as utterly heinous.
And what did we see in Texas?
Very recently, we saw local police acting like buffoons and cowards.
Those are the types of people who are going to be at a militarized school.
I mean, there are thousands of public schools and private schools across the country.
We can't just dedicate the entire army to these groups.
It is deeply distasteful, for one.
And you could say, oh, you're merely Making this a matter of taste or something to have a militarized school.
But it's also just absurd.
And it's just easier to not allow people to have AR-15s than to militarize the school because of our God-given right to own weapons like this.
So I don't know.
These conservative solutions just keep getting worse and worse.
Okay.
This is Ryan Thompson.
But big guns with lots of bullets are fun to shoot, and I love them, and I don't hurt anybody.
Well, I'm sure that's true for you.
I'm sure that's true for you.
That's true for you.
When you attain the age of 35, I will be more than happy for you to, assuming you pass the relevant background checks, to own a gun.
I think I've solved the problem.
I think this is, you know...
Yeah.
President Biden, you don't need to thank me.
But just, I don't know, just go lift weights.
That really raises the T-level.
Mow the lawn.
Or, you know, go take part.
You can do competitive sports as an adult.
You can go play flag football or take up CrossFit or something.
There are just all these ways of expressing manhood.
Go for a drive in your motor car.
Right.
I agree.
Just everyone, yeah, just get in your Bentley and drive through the countryside with your mistress beside you.
And honk the horn loudly when you drive past the field of horses.
Repeal the 19th.
Okay, Ed, that was interesting what you just said about Northeast Asians and the ecology being very hostile and requiring cooperation.
Can you elaborate a little on that?
They're high IQs, and as opposed to Southeast Asians.
Okay, so I look at this in my book, Making Sense of Race.
So, yeah, Northeast Asia, cold winters theory and so on, predicts that the colder it is, then the harder are the problems you have to solve, and therefore you develop higher intelligence.
But in order to survive in a very, very cold ecology, you have to be able to cooperate with other people, and there's a stronger level of group selection, and you have to be able to cooperate with other people, get on with other people, and so on.
And so if you have psychopaths...
Then that's a very serious problem for you.
So they get selected out.
So the personality in that cold ecology is pro-social and intelligent.
That's what you have with the Northeast Asians.
Now, and you have a very, very small gene pool as well, because if you deviate at all from adaptation to that specific ecology, then you're dead.
So that's why they have...
High intelligence, and they're very, very pro-social, and they have a very small gene pool.
Now, what you get with Europeans is slightly lower intelligence, because it's not as harsh an ecology, slightly less pro-socialness, because there's less extreme selection for pro-socialness, and a larger gene pool, because there's less need to be strongly adapted to the ecology.
What that then means is that you get, just by genetic chance, people that have outlier high intelligence, the Japanese don't have outliers, their standard deviation is...
Smaller IQ.
And moderately psychopathic traits.
Geniuses.
Now, you can't have that among the Northeast Asians because the flip side of those people that have moderately psychopathic traits is literally low IQ, very low IQ psychopaths.
And that's utterly dangerous.
So that's the distinction that you get.
I've done a lot of research on that.
And as for Southeast Asians, well, it's warmer in Southeast Asia.
So Southeast Asians have a lower IQ.
They have about the same IQ as Greeks.
And they are...
Highly pro-social, though, and that may well be to do with being evolved to a very, very dense ecology that's very crowded, and so this makes people more cooperative.
You get the same thing with Indians.
They have very high conscientiousness, very high impulse control.
Right.
Okay, Harold.
Any semi-auto gun can be as high or higher capacity than an AR-15.
Okay, yeah.
There has to be some form of gun control that goes beyond just the AR-15.
Dickie Spencer-Stein, if Fox News offered 50 solutions to stop school shootings and none of them are gun control, and let's face it, there are Democrats at Fox, then how do you expect there to be a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers of Congress to codify the Second Amendment?
Ghost guns and 3D printers are problematic.
Yeah, there are a lot of things that are problematic.
There's no question.
And obviously...
We're just at this impasse in terms of gun control and abortion.
But things can be done, and you certainly can convince people to move on from this issue.
The other aspect of this is just the Supreme Court.
It is interesting that the Heller case from 2008, basically Scalia...
Much like Roe, who found a right to abortion within the 14th Amendment, they found this individual right to a firearm within the Second Amendment.
And much like Roe, it can be regulated, so you can't have an abortion, you know, the day before birth or something like that, and you can't own a stinger missile.
But it is interesting that both of those cases, you know, equally important in a way.
And they both are using this kind of interpretation of an individual right from an amendment that was not written about those things at all.
So, interesting.
I mean, I agree with you.
The simple answer is that we can't get anywhere because conservatives are really obsessed about this issue.
It's fundamentalist biblical interpretation.
They made that constitution with the knowledge of the world as the way it was at that time.
Right.
Not as it is now.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think that is it.
Let me just see if anyone threw in...
Yeah, we're getting some good super chatting going on.
We appreciate it.
Let me see.
Yeah, that's it.
Okay.
Well, we've done our little hour.
I like to keep them...
Right here at this hour-long thing.
Okay, so you can buy Spiteful Mutants on Amazon.
And it is available.
It will be shipping June 6th, I believe.
And also, if you want to take a course by Ed on the origins of religion, do you want to talk a little bit about your course?
Well, it's a brilliant course where it will be a series of seminars on the origin, i.e.
discussions on the origins of religion.
But at the moment, it looks like it will be me and two other people.
So it would be good to have slightly more people on the course.
That would be good news.
Yes.
Yeah, we need some more sign-up because it's going to be awesome and you get to talk and interact with Ed.
About this fascinating issue.
Yes.
Okay.
Thank you, Ed.
And thank you, everyone, for listening.
And thanks in particular to those who offered Super Chats.
And we will see you next week with another exciting discussion.
Bye-bye.
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