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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
Replying to
@oneunderscore__
You may have heard this by now, but the Buffalo shooter spent the six months before the shooting messaging himself on Discord. He did it the same way you would email yourself a reminder. It was every stray thought he had for a half-year, archived as a sort of handbook.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
In that Discord archive that’s over 500 pages, the Buffalo shooter wrote about where he wanted to attack, his true motivations, even how badly he needed a haircut. Minutes before the shooting, he sent it all to people he’d talked to on Discord, plus a livestream of the shooting.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
The Discord archive are more illustrative than the manifesto itself, because it’s what he actually believed, and not a knockoff term paper that plagiarized past mass shooters. And, in it, one thing kept coming up: The Buffalo shooter had a toothache he couldn't fix.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
The Buffalo shooter apparently tried to get his bad tooth treated. He went to the dentist, and whatever the dentist tried didn’t fix it. He didn’t, or couldn’t, go anywhere else. He alluded to insurance problems. But instead of blaming insurance or himself, he blamed the Jews.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
The Buffalo shooter blamed the dentist, who he said was Jewish, but also Jews in general, who he was convinced were the cause of all of his suffering. He openly admitted he started feeling this way at the start of the pandemic, because of 4chan.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
At the start of the pandemic, the Buffalo shooter said he moved over from 4chan’s gun board to the white nationalist /pol/ board out of “extreme boredom.” He was inundated with the ideas that Jews were trying "replace" whites on 4chan and social media, and he openly admits it.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
Some other shooters read white nationalist literature, the dumb books like The Turner Diaries, which are posted as PDFs on 4chan. But not the Buffalo shooter. He was a creature of the internet. The middle of his manifesto is just copy-pasted antisemitic 4chan memes.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
This is why the Buffalo shooter said he attacked the supermarket: He was, he said, “only shitposting in real life," serving a community of white nationalists he met online. He was killing Black people because that community thought Jews were “replacing” white people with them.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
Toward the end of his Discord archive, the Buffalo shooter was getting anxious. Initially he wanted to do the attack in March, but he kept pushing it back. He wanted to do it soon, though, because he thought he would finally get help for his tooth from the healthcare in prison.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
A new thing recently is to say that “disinformation” doesn’t it exist, that it's a "liberal" idea, or that it’s masking real problems. But disinformation is an accelerant. It provides facile, wrong, violent solutions to real problems that need solutions in our society.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
Disinformation exists, and it exists mostly to shift the blame of infrastructural decay and resource limitations from the powerful to the powerless. You can call it "information warfare" or "information operations" if you want, but it is real. People are dead because of it.
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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
The Buffalo shooter had a toothache. He blamed Jews because his online community told him they were the root of all evil. He shot up a supermarket for revenge, but also because he wanted healthcare in prison. Disinformation is real. So are the problems that make it seductive.
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ZDT - we want the cup
@mcsoxerhoff
I'd rather approach it as "Too bad he couldn't get it fixed with free at the point of service health care so that he never went down this rabbit hole to begin with"
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Slouching Towards Bed Bath & Beyond
@ScottLundin
According to the thread, he did go to the dentist several times and they did not fix his issue, and insurance didn’t seem to help. Obviously this doesn’t excuse his horrific actions, but it speaks to issues we all know need addressing that wouldn’t seem connected.
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Magdi Semrau
@magi_jay
Replying to
@oneunderscore__
I do not understand at all why you are centering the toothache in this thread. And, no, he didn't massacre people because he wanted healthcare in prison.
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Joe Carlin
@joe_nca
My take is that people have problems, -everyone- has problems. Some of these problems are hard to fix. So the solution is hard. -Blaming- someone or a group is easy. It doesn't solve the problem but it makes you feel better about it. And now we have an entire party...
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Jay Blackshire
@jayblackshire
I'm not saying this as an excuse for a man shooting others, but just so you understand something about those of us with rich parents: Not all of us can or would go to them for a dollar even in the most dire of circumstances because that dollar isn't worth the price we'd pay.
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grace kenny
@SloGrace
Replying to
@oneunderscore__
White nationalists exist in countries with universal healthcare fyi. There will always be a “justification” for perceived grievances that are based in racism. Racism is the root of the problem and the actions that come from it are the result of it.
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Elizabeth Arnold
@Ebetharama
Replying to
@oneunderscore__
A lot of the replies here seem to be missing the point. Op isn't justifying what the shooter did but pointing out that disinformation thrives in a social environment in which people experience suffering and are looking for scapegoats.
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Elizabeth Arnold
@Ebetharama
If we want to stop white supremacism from growing and spreading in our society one of the ways to do that is to reduce suffering for all people, which isn't just a default moral and ethical position, but one of strategic safety and social stability.
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CrystalT
@crystalizing3
Replying to
@oneunderscore__
I get the point being made, I guess, but it seems like one of those things that provides room to 'excuse' the killer. I had a tooth that hurt for years that nothing seemed to work for. You know what I never once considered? Killing anyone because of it.
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the gazebo of my father
@thiscoolirl
if you read the thread it elaborates beyond the first post. there’s nothing excusing him, but it shows how something totally unrelated can lead to tragedy
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TerminatorLX🦾🏳️‍🌈✊🏽🌊🍑🖖🏽
@TerminatorLx
Replying to
@oneunderscore__
Black people suffer all the time—many more than the avg white boy. But do you see us going to majority white establishments & shooting everyone? He could’ve spent the money he used to buy 3 EXPENSIVE GUNS ON A DENTIST! Everybody has problems. Everybody isn’t a damn mass shooter!
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Bookwyrm
@DrSwordopolis
Systemic problems can exacerbate stochastic terrorism. Nobody (aside from people who agree with the shooter) is trying to excuse his actions; we're trying to underline ways in which our systems are failing.
The media could not be played.
Reload
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