Geoff's Blog

Was hopping down the stairs to catch the subway yesterday morning, getting a late start to the workday (again).

Got to the bottom and checked for arriving trains, minding my own business, looking past a fifty-something, heavily-built white man with blue jeans and a beard—more of a biker or a missing-link Great White Ape than a homeless dumbfuck or a harmless, aging hippie.

I turned and walked in the opposite direction. And as I headed down the platform he started talking, bellowing louder and louder as I walked—with such poor diction that I couldn’t understand a goddamned word he was saying—until the East Indian girl coincidentally walking beside me turned her head to look at the ruckus.

I don’t think it was meant for her anyway, though. Rather, I think the translation into civilized, coherent English would be something like … well, the kind of thing that could give Mark Knopler an idea for a song:

The lead character in “Money for Nothing” is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He’s singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real….

The observations of the character included references to a musician “banging on the bongos like a chimpanzee” and a description of a singer as “that little faggot with the earring and the makeup,” and lamenting that the artists got “money for nothing and chicks for free.” These lyrics were widely criticised as sexist, racist and homophobic statements [which they were—by the dumbfuck prole who made them in the first place], and in some later releases of the song the lyrics were edited for airplay; “faggot” for example is often replaced with “mother”: “little mother, he’s a millionaire”….

In a late 1985 interview in Rolling Stone magazine, Knopfler expressed mixed feelings on the controversy:

“I got an objection from the editor of a gay newspaper in London—he actually said it was below the belt. Apart from the fact that there are stupid gay people as well as stupid other people, it suggests that maybe you can’t let it have so many meanings—you have to be direct. In fact, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s a good idea to write songs that aren’t in the first person, to take on other characters.”

Yeah. But back to me: I can’t even blame that pig-fucking “biker like an icon” from that morning on immigration, either—this was homegrown Canadian, eugenics-worthy stupidity. (I need to get a cell phone that can take pictures, to really start documenting all this crap. I’m serious. I’ll probably have a company-issued one within a few months anyway, though, and since I barely need a phone at all, I sure as hell don’t need two; so I’m still waiting on that.)

The only thing to do, really, is to kill them all. Or at least that seems to be the conclusion that the Columbine shooters came to, back in their own day and time.

Very little of what those shootings were about ever made it through the pop-psych media filter. Even the world-class social psychologist Elliot Aronson cited a classic study (of delayed gratification in children, and its persistence into adulthood) in idiotic support of his conjecture that Harris and Klebold “would have been among those 4-year-old children who couldn’t wait to eat the marshmallow.”

But, you see, if you’re at the bottom of a dominance hierarchy, no matter how long you wait for your “marshmallows” in life, you never actually get them—i.e., the bullying (by people who have nothing to contribute to the world, and who are truly too stupid to live) never stops.

Here’s a few of the other things you may not have known about Columbine:

Dylan Bennet Klebold was born in Lakewood, Colorado to Thomas Klebold and Susan Yassenoff. His parents attended a Lutheran church with their children, and Dylan and his older brother Byron attended confirmation classes in accordance with Lutheran tradition. At home, the family also observed some rituals in keeping with Susan Klebold’s Jewish heritage….

Klebold attended Normandy Elementary School during first and second grade, then attended Governor’s Ranch Elementary School where he was part of the CHIPS (Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students) program.

Religious background, Abrahamic moral compass, and very smart. No wonder the jocks hated him.

According to early accounts of the shooting, Harris and Klebold were unpopular students and frequent targets of bullying at their high school. They eventually began to bully other students; Harris and Klebold had written diary entries about how they themselves had bullied younger students and “fags.”

Harris and Klebold weren’t actually homophobic: They were just trying desperately trying to find someone below themselves in the high-school dominance hierarchy, to not have to spend every waking, humiliating moment of their lives at the very bottom of that.

The two boys got into trouble with the law early for breaking into a locked van and stealing tools…. They both left good impressions on the juvenile officers, who offered to expunge their criminal records if they agreed to attend a diversionary program to include community service, receiving psychiatric treatment, and obeying the law…. They were so well behaved that their probation officer discharged them from the program a few months earlier than the due date. Of Harris, it was remarked that he was “a very bright individual who is likely to succeed in life,” while Klebold was said to be intelligent, but “needs to understand that hard work is part of fulfilling a dream.”

Teenage laziness, note, is not the same thing as is the inability to delay gratification, even if the latter ability is certainly required in order to achieve one’s goals. But even if it was the same thing, if you’re smart enough to realize that people “grow older but they never really grow up,” you could already see that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, even as a teenager.

Some people, such as Robyn Anderson, who knew the perpetrators, initially stated that the pair was not obsessed with Nazism nor did they worship or admire Adolf Hitler in any way, although the attack occurred on Hitler’s birthday.

That’s actually a little surprising, just because Nazism would have given them membership in a group which had all the power which they lacked in their own daily lives.

In his journal, Harris mentioned his admiration of what he imagined to be natural selection and wrote that he would like to put everyone in a super [first-person shooter] Doom game and see to it that the weak die and the strong live. On the day of the massacre, Harris wore a white T-shirt with the words “NATURAL SELECTION” printed in black.

Yes, that’s been picked up over the past year by at least one real moron who, conveniently ignoring Klebold’s religious background, has tried to blame “godless evolution” for the lack of moral compass on the part of the shooters, etc.

Both Harris and Klebold clearly were intellectually superior to the jocks who took delight in making their lives miserable for no better reason than for their beta/gamma/delta status. The “natural selection” which those two very bright boys were fans of, I think, is basically the same thing as the Social Darwinism I’ve been drifting ever-more into over the past couple of years, where people with superior intellectual skills will succeed, and the proles will be left to their own devices, to sink or swim (i.e., to drown). That is, where mechanical engineers who can build better guns will “win” in life, while dumbfuck jocks and other higher-primate proles who only know how to use those tools, and who don’t even have the potential to contribute anything but gruntwork to the world, will lose. (Note: Both kids created levels for Doom and Quake.)

Harris wanted to join the United States Marine Corps, but his application was rejected shortly before the shootings because he was taking the drug Luvox (fluvoxamine), an SSRI antidepressant, which he was required to take as part of court-ordered anger management therapy. According to the recruiting officer, Harris did not know about this rejection. Though some friends of Harris suggested that he had stopped taking the drug beforehand, the autopsy reports showed that he had Luvox in his system at the time of death. Abrupt cessation of SSRI antidepressants has been found to interfere with normal social functioning in some patients. After the shootings, opponents of contemporary psychiatry like Peter Breggin claimed that the psychiatric medications prescribed to Harris after his conviction (ostensibly for obsessive-compulsive disorder) may have exacerbated his aggressiveness.

No; see below.

In his journal, Klebold wrote about his view that he and Harris were god-like and more highly evolved than every other human being.

Meh: Every spiritual guru who’s ever walked this Earth has believed essentially the same thing of himself. Including Jesus (if he had ever actually lived, that is, which he most likely didn’t).

His secret journal, however, records self-loathing and suicidal intentions.

And putting those two opposing perspectives together: How do you think you’d react to incessant bullying, and to being “invisible” to the popular world? How would you find a way to fight back, psychologically, against all the people who were treating you as a woeful inferior, with truly wanton cruelty, for no good reason—from nothing you had ever done to them, and with there being no way for you to make it stop?

Even the absolute stupidest people in the world—e.g., the Great Ape biker yesterday morning—find ways to feel superior to the people around them. As any evolutionary psychologist could tell you, the ability to fool yourself in that way has a great deal of survival value. The difference is just that people who are doing world-class intellectual work can afford to define their self-image with regard to that, and to look down on people who don’t even have the potential to do anything that will ever matter in the world. The latter potential-less, monkey-brained proles obviously can’t use the same accomplishments to feel good about themselves, so they focus instead on the jungle-attributes in which they’re superior. It’s the same psychological trick, just applied against different relative weightings of the values of diverse human abilities and attributes.

Of course, that does not mean that proles or jocks are basing their self-esteem on anything of comparable value to that which intellectually gifted persons are. No, what it rather means is that “genius complexes” rooted in fact are at least as valid a response to reality (even at a high-school level) as are “athlete complexes”—where only one out of a thousand cheerleader-dating high-school “star athletes” has what it takes to compete at a professional level, but they all think they’ve got the tools, in their “small pond.” (And even if they really do have those tools, a hundred years from now it won’t matter a whit whether they ever even lived at all.)

One official report suggested that Harris was a clinical psychopath and Klebold was a depressive. Investigators believe that their mental illnesses may have been the underlying cause for their rampage. This report suggested that all of the reasons the boys gave for the shooting were justifications in order to present themselves as killers with a cause…. On the fifth anniversary of Columbine, the FBI’s lead Columbine investigator and several psychiatrists went public with their conclusions in a news article…. They believed the plan was masterminded by Harris, who they thought had a messianic-level superiority complex and hoped to illustrate his massive superiority to the world.

Moronic analysis. Absolutely moronic. People that “professionally stupid” deserve to be shot. Heh.

Harris and Klebold affected U.S. culture in tangible ways. Marilyn Manson dubbed them “The Nobodies” in his song of that name from his 2000 album Holy Wood, echoing the reasons the pair gave for their spree in the lyrics…. He also stated later that if he was given the chance to say something to Harris and Klebold, “I wouldn’t say a single word to them—I would listen to what they have to say, and that’s what no one did.”

Manson, aside from his present model-dating, rock-star status, is surely speaking from his own earlier childhood experiences, there.

In more detail:

At the time of his death, Harris had therapeutic Luvox levels in his system.

Luvox has a half-life of 15+ hours, and a drug is regarded as being out of your system after five half-lives. (Ah, the things you learn as a lab rat.) But those numbers don’t even matter, ’cause if he had “therapeutic levels” of that in his bloodstream, he had obviously still been taking it in the (planning) days and months leading up to the massacre. So it’s idiotic to try and blame that drug for his actions.

Journal entries revealed that the pair had an elaborate plan for a major bombing rivaling that of Oklahoma City. The entries contained blurbs about ways to escape to Mexico, hijacking an aircraft at Denver International Airport and crashing into a building in New York City, as well as details about the attacks.

And yet, the similar use of jetplanes on 9/11 caught America completely by surprise … even when a couple of high-school kids had figured it out at least two and a half years earlier.

Many rumors swirled regarding the causes of the rampage, including the possible targeting of Christians. One such rumor was that the shooters first asked [Rachel] Scott if she believed in God, then killed her after she answered affirmatively. The FBI later concluded that this interaction did not take place.

Yes, there’s no tragedy so harsh that our religious believers can’t find a way to try and turn it to their advantage. “God never closes a door without opening a window,” etc.

Staff and students hiding in the library exterior rooms said they heard the gunmen utter things such as “Everyone with a white cap or baseball cap, stand up!” and “All jocks stand up! We’ll get the guys in white hats!” (wearing a white baseball cap at Columbine was a tradition amongst sports team members). When no one stood up, Eric was heard to say: “Fine, I’ll start anyway!”….

The pair went over to an empty table and began to reload their weapons. Schnurr, who had been hurt badly, began to cry out at that point, “Oh, God help me!” Klebold went back to her and asked her if she believed in God. She floundered in her answer, saying no and then yes, trying to get the answer right. He asked her why; she said it was because it was what her family believed. He taunted her then walked away.

Which is not exactly what he would have done if his goal was to kill Christians, eh?

At 11:37 a.m., the shooters moved to the center of the library, where they continued to reload their weapons at a table midway across the room. Klebold noticed a student nearby and asked him to identify himself. The student was John Savage, an acquaintance of Klebold’s. Savage asked Klebold what they were doing, to which Klebold replied, “Oh, just killing people.” Savage then asked if they were going to kill him. Klebold hesitated, and then told him to leave the library. Savage fled immediately, making a safe escape through the library’s main entrance….

[S]everal witnesses heard Harris and Klebold comment on how they no longer found a thrill in shooting their victims. Klebold was quoted to have said “Maybe we should start knifing people, that might be more fun”….

Alright, that’s pathological, I won’t try to deny that. But then, how is it not pathological to enjoy making other people’s lives miserable, as jocks do to nerds, when the latter have done nothing to you to provoke it? How the fuck is that not pathological? (Oh, right: Because if enough people—especially people high in the dominance hierarchy—do it, it becomes “normal.” Got it.)

[Evan] Todd was also wearing his hat which meant that he was a jock and when the shooters wanted to see his face he lifted the hat up partly so they wouldn’t see it. Klebold asked Todd to give him one reason why he should not kill him, and Todd replied: “I don’t want trouble.” The shooters continued taunting him and debated killing him, but eventually walked away.

And in that act, those two cold-blooded killers showed more human decency than any of the jocks who had mercilessly bullied them were even capable of.

As they got into trouble, the two teenagers started to get their computer access restricted. Jerald Block believes that anger that was being projected into the games was now unleashed into the real world. In addition, the computer restrictions opened up substantial amounts of idle time that would have otherwise gone towards their online activities. They increasingly used that time to express their anger and their antisocial tendencies likewise increased. This, in turn, generated more restrictions. Finally, after being arrested and banned from their computers for about a month, the two teens became homicidal and began documenting plans to attack the school. Of note, Block also writes that the plan to attack the school first appears in Klebold’s writings, and that Klebold may have considered using a different partner-in-crime than Harris.

Well that at least is plausible … though the last part blows a pretty big hole in the “Harris was the mastermind” theory.

As Python once put it: “Soon, even the police began to take notice.”

Early stories following the shootings charged that school administrators and teachers at Columbine had long condoned a climate of bullying by the so-called jocks or athletes, allowing an atmosphere of outright intimidation and resentment to fester which, they claimed, could have helped trigger the perpetrators’ extreme violence. Reportedly, homophobic remarks were directed at Klebold and Harris.

“That little faggot, he’s a millionaire.”

Finally, from the moron who thinks that Darwinism drove them to it:

[I]t is not unusual for homicidal maniacs to cite great writers when seeking to justify their crimes. The Chicago spree-killers Leopold and Loeb (the models for Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope) claimed Friedrich Nietzsche as their muse, as did the Moors murderer Ian Brady. Other deranged misfits have nominated Albert Camus, Jean Genet and André Gide. But it may take a keener intellect than was possessed by Harris, Klebold or Auvinen to negotiate such a reading list.

Of course, see the above for the intellectual potential which Harris and Klebold had, in their pre-“homocidal maniac” days.

[L]ike Darwin himself, [Harris] noted how vaccination might be interfering with nature’s weeding process. In his rantings Harris said he wished there were no vaccines, or even warning labels on dangerous goods, “and let natural selection take its course. All the fat, ugly, retarded, crippled dumbass, stupid f***heads in the world would die… Maybe then the human race can actually be proud of itself.”

But again, Harris and Klebold didn’t target the fat or ugly students in their massacre: What they wanted most of all was to get back at the jocks who had made their lives a living hell. And if the phrase “dumbass, stupid fuckheads” doesn’t apply to jocks (and proles/bikers) … well, who the fuck would you apply it to?

You may already know that in many significant ways “it’s tough to tell a high school from a prison.” If so, then consider this letter sent to the social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, by a former prisoner from Ohio:

“I was recently released from solitary confinement after being held therein for thirty-seven months. The silence system was imposed upon me and if I even whispered to the man in the next cell resulted in being beaten by guards, sprayed with chemical mace, black jacked, stomped, and thrown into a strip cell naked to sleep on a concrete floor without bedding, covering, wash basin, or even a toilet…. I know that thieves must be punished, and I don’t justify stealing even though I am a thief myself. But now I don’t think I will be a thief when I am released. No, I am not rehabilitated either. It is just that I no longer think of becoming wealthy or stealing. I now only think of killing—killing those who have beaten me and treated me as if I were a dog. I hope and pray for the sake of my own soul and future life of freedom that I am able to overcome the bitterness and hatred which eats daily at my soul. But I know to overcome it will not be easy.”

Now that’s pathological. The unprovoked, sadistic abuse meted out by the guards for no reason other than that they could do it and that it increased their own standing among their equally vicious peers, I mean. The reaction of the prisoner is not merely understandable, but is absolutely justified.

So, do you know who the real villains in the Columbine massacre are? No, it’s not even the jocks—they were just stupid kids, after all (who would grow up to become stupid frat-boys and drop-outs … and later, too-stupid-to-reproduce parents). Rather, the real villains are the parents and administrators who knew that that inhumane bullying was going on, and who did nothing to stop it. Those worthless, unfit-to-give-care-to-children fuckers should seriously do jail time—or be shot—for allowing all that crap to go on, and in doing so teaching their children that their bullying behaviors were not merely forgivable but outright acceptable. Their unfit parenting and incompetent administration is what caused that tragedy, and cost the lives not only of the explicit victims of the shootings, but of the two very bright young men who were driven through unremitting abuse to “only think of killing.”

P.S. If you want a good reason to not go out to strip clubs: In Toronto, at least, those clubs are generally owned by the Hells Angels. And if we’ve learned one thing from Altamont….