Common Sense Prevailing In Norway Mass-Shooting Case?

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
Can it be? Another mainstream media outlet casting doubt on the ever popular "violent video game made me do it" defense? What is the world coming to? Thanks to [H] reader Christopher Hermance for the link.

"How can 'World of Warcraft' be considered 'training'? Unless he planned on looting gold and armor. Also, 'Modern Warfare' is hardly a training tool. Too linear and unrealistic."
 
I wonder if CNN would take this stance if they found out that George Zimmerman played WoW and CoD?
 
He claims to have killed in self defense. If this were a video game, then how did 77 people fail at killing him, unless of course it was murder? Self defense would imply that he was being attacked. How and why I don't know.

I don't know what Norway's rules are for death sentence, but there should be an exception to this guy. Training to kill isn't the same as intent to kill. It doesn't take much to kill a human being, just grab any large object near you and fling it at someone. Do it enough times and a concussion is bound to happen. You don't need to be trained for this.
 
This is absolutely feasible!

While he was at the summer camp did he do any fishing? Cooking? Resource gathering?
 
He claims to have killed in self defense. If this were a video game, then how did 77 people fail at killing him, unless of course it was murder? Self defense would imply that he was being attacked. How and why I don't know.
.

The term "self-defense" is just a poor translation of his claims--he's trying to claim it was a necessary action in order to stop the spread of 'liberalism' and 'multiculturalism'.

Kind of like stealing a life vest in order to save a drowning person, except it involves bombing a building and killing 77 defenseless people (many of them teens).
 
The term "self-defense" is just a poor translation of his claims--he's trying to claim it was a necessary action in order to stop the spread of 'liberalism' and 'multiculturalism'.

Kind of like stealing a life vest in order to save a drowning person, except it involves bombing a building and killing 77 defenseless people (many of them teens).

People have differences in opinion, and I know people get violent about it but that's just wrong. So fucking wrong.
 
...unless he's ruled too insane, but he seems to comprehend very well the gravity of what he did, and he'd obviously do it again if he were given a redo.
 
I see games in Norway being restricted after this.

Highly doubt it. Norway is a pretty smart country, they don't really put up with that kind of thing.

I'd prefer he be executed, but Norway will handle it their own way.
 
Highly doubt it. Norway is a pretty smart country, they don't really put up with that kind of thing.

I'd prefer he be executed, but Norway will handle it their own way.

He seems to WANT execution (or acquittal) though, which makes sense considering he didn't plan or expect to survive his attack in the first place. Someone in another thread had the insight that his constant WoW playing indicates he was bored out of his mind with his life, so his attack might have been his way of committing suicide and taking a bunch of people with him at the same time to make his statement. If that's true, the last thing he'll want is to be bored out of his mind in prison...without WoW. ;)
 
You know, you guys could read his manifesto (posted somewhere out there on the internets), and know exactly what his mindset was/is, or you could just keep reading the sensationalism on the "news".

Dude wants to preserve his people, is against integration of foreign people / religion into his world. I see it as this man fighting the inevitable... eventually all races, religions, peoples of the world will be a mixture of one another and there will be no black/white/yellow/brown/whatever. Everyone will be a "mutt" and "purebreds" will cease to exist. It'll take 1000 years, but that's what is going to happen. And then a disease will wipe us all out at once because we (as a species) didn't maintain diversity.
 
You know, you guys could read his manifesto (posted somewhere out there on the internets), and know exactly what his mindset was/is, or you could just keep reading the sensationalism on the "news".

Dude wants to preserve his people, is against integration of foreign people / religion into his world. I see it as this man fighting the inevitable... eventually all races, religions, peoples of the world will be a mixture of one another and there will be no black/white/yellow/brown/whatever. Everyone will be a "mutt" and "purebreds" will cease to exist. It'll take 1000 years, but that's what is going to happen. And then a disease will wipe us all out at once because we (as a species) didn't maintain diversity.

Do you admire him or something?
 
Point 1.5: Lots of people who play "FarmVille" don't actually farm.

Here's a related point: People who play other kinds of video games don't usually (or ever) act out the things they do in the games. "Shooters do not create real-life killers. Neither does "FarmVille" create real-life farmers," another Google+ commenter said.

Curiously, has there been a rise of free runners since Prince of Persia and Assassins Creed?
 
You know, you guys could read his manifesto (posted somewhere out there on the internets), and know exactly what his mindset was/is, or you could just keep reading the sensationalism on the "news".

Dude wants to preserve his people, is against integration of foreign people / religion into his world. I see it as this man fighting the inevitable... eventually all races, religions, peoples of the world will be a mixture of one another and there will be no black/white/yellow/brown/whatever. Everyone will be a "mutt" and "purebreds" will cease to exist. It'll take 1000 years, but that's what is going to happen. And then a disease will wipe us all out at once because we (as a species) didn't maintain diversity.

Scary nonsense; you certainly deliver.
 
Dude wants to preserve his people, is against integration of foreign people / religion into his world. I see it as this man fighting the inevitable... eventually all races, religions, peoples of the world will be a mixture of one another and there will be no black/white/yellow/brown/whatever. Everyone will be a "mutt" and "purebreds" will cease to exist. It'll take 1000 years, but that's what is going to happen. And then a disease will wipe us all out at once because we (as a species) didn't maintain diversity.

Good point here, but I'd say that being "for our own people" is just a way for racists to justify their xenophobia. If he was for Norwegian culture he'd probably write history books or do traditional dancing or whatever, instead of demonizing minorities by spreading rape statistics and complaining about how media doesn't report on the skin color of criminals.

The world view of these counter-jihadists is based on complete fabrications. There's a table in the manifesto with "Countries ranked after historic concentration of the Nordic genotypes" having Finland at 55% in 2010. Actually, 93.4% of the population are ethnic Finns and 5.6% ethnic Swedes. The country is ridiculously homogenous. Looking at the same table for the US and the Wikipedia page it gives as a source, it uses the percentage of blue-eyed people among the Caucasian population for 1900 and 1950, then switches to percentage of total population for 2010 to give the impression there's a rapid change.

The fiasco with psych evaluations disagreeing on whether he's responsible for his actions or not gave him the opportunity to talk at length about his views and bring in witnesses with similar views, since those things are now relevant for whether it's all voices in his head or shared by others. I don't think this is a bad thing though. There are lots of people spreading this counter-jihad propaganda and being associated with Breivik will probably discredit them somewhat. Having their nonsense debunked in public will also help.
 
There's a grain of truth to what lilbabycat said:
We DO seem to be going in the direction of "blending together" as a species. While this process increases genetic diversity within each community by introducing new genes, the long term result appears like it would trend toward averaging, at least at face value.

Some believe this averaging effect will eventually eliminate extremes like "very black, very white, or very Japanese" over a long period of time and create a monoculture...except for the "very Japanese" extreme, since Japanese culture is heavily biased toward keeping the Japanese people pure. ;) Anyway, even a total genetics noob like me knows that monocultures run a huge risk of being wiped out by the same cause, especially disease. It's why genetic diversity is so important to the long-term survival of a species.

However, I don't share the view that we're actually eliminating genetic diversity:
What's really happening is not that we're all mixing together and becoming homogeneous...instead, we're making a transition from segregated genetic clusters to a more continuous [multidimensional] spectrum, where each allele of gene A has a more random chance of being paired with each allele of gene B...as opposed to the past situation, where allele 1 of gene A is almost always paired with allele 1 of gene B, and allele 2 of gene A is almost always paired with allele 2 of gene B. In other words, the intermixing process is NOT destroying genetic diversity: In a way, it's actually increasing genetic diversity by making the gene pool more complex. By breaking up genetic clusters, we're creating a combinatorial explosion that would make it extremely difficult for a disease to wipe out all of us. Our genes are still mutating randomly as well on an individual level, so globally adaptive changes will still spread globally, and locally adaptive changes will still spread locally (assuming people stay in the same locality...and if they don't, a trait that's only locally adaptive to a local environment isn't especially adaptive to a migrant anyway).

Moreover, even people who want to preserve their particular race cluster still can: Western governments may be pushing multiculturalism pretty hard, but they're not actually FORCING people to have mixed children. As long as they don't, there should be no danger of a particular cluster being wiped out that people strongly identify with emotionally: You're always going to have white people, black people, Japanese people, Indian people, Peruvians, etc. who strongly identify with their own race and choose to mate with someone similar, and so the far ends of each genetic spectrum will be preserved. Further down the line, let's say just 1% of people left will be pure Arab (is that even technically a race? I dunno) as we understand it today. Eventually, some of that 1% will mate with what some fear will be a homogeneous blob...but that will not destroy Arab genetics. Instead, it will reintroduce concentrated Arab genetics into the homogeneous blob (which will not really be homogeneous at all), and it won't necessarily decrease the population of pure Arabs either, because many will continue mating with each other. For all we know, the remaining pure Arabs might even choose to repopulate and have more Arab children than the previous generation did.

In other words, I think the genetic homogenization argument is a false one. The "genocide" rhetoric that some use is particularly extreme: Genes are not being eliminated. They're just being spread out. Moreover, genocide doesn't just mean elimination of a race. It means VIOLENT elimination of a race through murder, not through individuals choosing to mate with someone outside of their particular genetic bubble.

However, the people making the [IMO false] genetic homogenization argument still may have valid concerns about culture: Multiculturalism really does seem to be destroying cultural diversity, from a certain point of view: Individual works of creativity, art, culture, and thought are now spreading throughout the entire world, and individuals can pick or choose their own favorite cultural elements to make their own. Instead of a huge geographical population sharing the same worldview and cultural sense while other geographical populations share another, people are increasingly differing on a more individual level. (That said, there's a limit to this process, because we naturally trend toward groupthink and group identification: This can be largely innocuous or feel-good, such as with the emergence of hazily definable "nerd cultures." It can also be destructive, such as in the nonsensical, inconsistent clustering of disparate political views in the Republican and Democratic parties.)

While I personally think it's a good thing that culture is becoming more granular, that also means it's eroding any sense of distinct national or ethnic cultures...and some people take distinct pride in a specific, concrete culture that they can call their own as a community/country/ethnicity (rather than individuals) to the exclusion of others. I strongly oppose any efforts to preserve any particular group culture by force against individual choice...but I can still sympathize with people who want to identify with a cohesive, definable culture and preserve it. That's becoming increasingly difficult to do nowadays, and some people panic and go batshit crazy...like this guy, who went and killed 77 people.
 
I should add something. There are a several areas where culture is not just becoming more granular, but where some cultures are becoming eliminated: Those are language, religion, and government.

Minority languages require deliberate effort and dedication to preserve when they no longer effectively facilitate communication. For instance, only diehard cultural preservationists would teach their kids a dying local dialect or language when there are one or more popular national languages (e.g. India). In that sense, some languages can become a burden in a practical sense, but it's still a shame when they die out and are no longer spoken (e.g. Latin).

Religion requires effort and dedication. While that's easy enough to instill in and of itself - and many religions will survive - many other religions or denominations require parochial judgment/prejudices or cognitive dissonance which open-minded people cannot maintain in the face of constant outside influence. It's why cults (for instance) have to isolate their members to instill and preserve their belief systems.

Finally, we're becoming more homogeneous in the realm of government as attitudes become more geographically diverse (and especially as power is centralized), by virtue of what government is and does (an enforcement tool and source for the law...which everyone in a government's jurisdiction must follow by threat of force). The difference here is that unlike other cultural aspects, even governments who tolerate dissenting speech do not tolerate dissenting practice. Minority artistic aspects of culture like Iraqi pottery may just become minority cultural aspects, but other minority practices like slavery are totally outlawed. That's a good thing when the minority practices are barbaric (like slavery)...but one-size-fits-all homogenization under the law also creates a mediocre system that caters to the least common denominator of "moderate" regulation over every aspect of everyone's lives, such that eventually no one will be able to live in a place where they can set up a lemonade stand without a permit. (Also, because of the expansionary nature of government, the definition of moderate continually shifts toward the side of more restrictions on behavior.) This isn't really the subject of the thread, but I figured I'd be complete about the ways in which culture is or is not being homogenized. :p
 
Well said minime , and points taken. The last part about us getting wiped out was meant to be a bit sarcastic, with a hint of truth in it.
 
I don't understand the debate. The logic is simple, people who are prone to violence tend to be attracted to violent images, videos, books, and video games. Would serial killers and mass murderers from the past have played violent video games? Most likely, yes.

As the population increases, so does the likelihood that we will see more sociopaths commit atrocities like this. It's not like killing-sprees are new to society, they just tended to be less public, and in the form of serial-murders. It was easier to get away with those crimes in the past because there was a lack of investigative methods designed to catch those criminals. Even though DNA analysis, Crime scene investigators, etc didn't exist, many of those killers were caught. Why? Because they wanted to be caught.

They wanted to kill lots of people, then get caught/killed. Today, you can't get away with that quite as easy, so the sickos go for the mass-murder instead of the much slower and riskier serial-murder. If the police use modern investigation techniques to catch a potential serial-killer after just one or two murders instead of the killer's intended dozen or so, then it's just a blip on the local news. If they successfully kill many people, it's national, or even international news (which is the ultimate goal)... It's easier to plan and execute a killing spree as well.

So, the methods have changed, but the result has not. Instead of serial-killers, we have more of these people going in to populated areas and taking out as many people as possible before being cornered.
 
Back
Top