Amarna Forum

We are long overdue to discuss this.

Before there was dbdr there was The Prophet who ushered in a new age of male/female relations, who taught the whole world what "Incel" means. A subject of mockery, sympathy, derision, and nowhere near enough serious scrutiny (though there have been some attempts here and there). And there is so much to scrutinise.

Elliot Rodger. Son of a minor Hollywood player. Perpetrator of one of the most pathos-rich violent rampages of the 21st century, left us by far and away the richest trove of personal testimony with which we could study and appreciate who he was and why he did what he did. Many people had a lot to say about Elliot, or more generally "guns" or "men", but I just want to listen. And that's what nobody did.



For those of you who don't know and are only vaguely aware of who Elliot was and what he did. Yes, he was the Incel spree-killing guy. But did you know he had a youtube channel where he uploaded recordings of himself driving around California talking about himself? Did you know some autist with access to his case files leaked old family photos of him on /r9k/? Did you know he wrote a novel-sized autobiographical testimony in which he laid out his entire life story, worldview, and motivations?

And good news, it's archived way too extensively to be scrubbed. And of course nobody but autists are interested in reading it, so there haven't been serious efforts to scrub it either. The recent pooner-shooter's manifesto was carefully guarded (but still leaked) because of the potential political fallout of their motivations becoming known, but, think of this, nobody cared about the incel shooter's feelings getting out. Perhaps we had less "shooter consciousness" at the time. But also perhaps, he was someone the world respected so little, speaking for a class of person so little respected, that his feelings were not worth repressing.

You see here I'm echoing what I had to say about Adam Lanza. This is a thread about the inner life of a man who decided to kill as many people as possible and then himself. A subject which most people either cannot or will not investigate or take seriously. "Entitlement, narcissism, rage", in the light of what we can read directly from Elliot these dismissive terms which constituted the bulk of the public and expert responses to his shootings are an insult to his humanity. And paired with the insistence that Elliot was an extreme manifestation of a somewhat mass phenomena (it's incels not incel) would also constitute a rather extreme burying of heads in the sand. America is now a place which can produce Elliot Rodger. Understand him or suffer him.



This is an excerpt from Notes from Underground, but that's not where I got it. This is how Brett Easton Ellis opens his novel American Psycho. If I were to have Elliot's memoir published, I would open with this nested quote as my only personal insertion. "Must exist" indeed.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/...-manifesto

https://schoolshooters.info/sites/defaul..._world.pdf

Links to this thing are not hard to find, as I said.

The thread is for discussion of Elliot and Elliot-related phenomena so I'll keep my own thoughts brief and let the thing develop.

I think that in his story we can see, as in the case of dbdr, systemic social failure playing out on a not yet catastrophic level all throughout his life. Things are going wrong for Elliot all along, but never to the degree that sets of culturally programmed alarm bells. He's not being beaten or raped, so everything must be fine. Supposedly some Africans had a saying "A child who is not embraced by his village will burn it down to feel its warmth". Maybe that's a bit quaint and limited, but it's the correct general direction. Elliot was not socially integrated. As has come up here before, perhaps much of what we call autism and the like is human social malformation that emerge consistently in response to disrupted or flawed socialisation (which should really be its own thread). And Elliot was what we would call an autist. Read the memoir, or hell, just look at pictures of him.



Was he missing warmth as an essential problem? Or is it something more complex? It seems to me like a lot goes wrong in this story. He's something between a latchkey case, a natural weakling perhaps, an introverted type with no attention or prompting to go beyond himself or accommodating ways to engage with the world. But this is Amarna Forum. The Global Hugbox Pigsty of Human Kindness is not our ideal answer to anything. Elliot was clearly not unintelligent, awkward and at times deranged as he could be. Was the problem that the world did not yield and relax its standards for him, or was the problem that the world didn't have standards worthy of him, which he could have risen to and grown into manhood through? How would he have gone if he were raised in an early 20th century British Boarding School? We can imagine many alternate scenarios to 21st century California, how many go this badly?

I believe that Elliot did not have insane or violent or narcissistic brain chemistry. What happened was not inevitable from the moment of his birth. I believe that, like The Underground Man and Patrick Bateman, his existence was inextricably bound with the general circumstances under which our society has been formed.

And my other reason for bringing up Brett Easton Ellis, the easiest alternative life-path that I can imagine for Elliot even in the 21st century, is that of a writer. If you read his book you might get the same impression that I did. That if he were to change some names around and add a pithy intro quote about suffering from the times, he could have been the next Brett Easton Ellis. This book could have been the 21st century's Less Than Zero. A challenging, striking, memorable, bizarre and perhaps frighteningly honest work about emptiness, narcissism, vanity, and hopelessness in an age that was supposed to offer everything. If he'd just written about shooting hot blonde girls rather than attempting to do it, then started mailing his manifesto to publishers, who knows where he could have gone from there. But maybe I'm getting carried away having some fun with my thoughts now.

Please do consider reading the thing if you haven't. And of course I'd link you his youtube if I could, but it's down. Searching his name will instead show you an army of content guys making those vapid, perverted "documentaries" of theirs. What an unfortunate fate. If anybody knows of an archive of his videos please share, it'd be nice to link here.

anthony Wrote:Before there was dbdr there was The Prophet who ushered in a new age of male/female relations, who taught the whole world what "Incel" means. A subject of mockery, sympathy, derision, and nowhere near enough serious scrutiny (though there have been some attempts here and there). And there is so much to scrutinise.

I just want to add as a historical note that it wasn't until Alek Minassian's Van attack four years later that the mass media began to use them term "incel".

(12-09-2023, 01:02 AM)obscurefish Wrote: [ -> ]

anthony Wrote:Before there was dbdr there was The Prophet who ushered in a new age of male/female relations, who taught the whole world what "Incel" means. A subject of mockery, sympathy, derision, and nowhere near enough serious scrutiny (though there have been some attempts here and there). And there is so much to scrutinise.

I just want to add as a historical note that it wasn't until Alek Minassian's Van attack four years later that the mass media began to use them term "incel".

Of course. Important detail. We didn't get a wave of stochastic terrorism composed of Elliot disciples and imitators, but we did get Alek Minassian. And that was enough for the media to run with it.



The media has done a very good job of finessing incel as a white phenomena. Adjacent to the issue of internet rage and "hate" cultures in general. The most extreme antisocial elements are almost always unsettled ethnic transplants into the first world. But that's an issue we're really not supposed to talk about. If he'd been born a generation earlier Minassian would probably have gone down screaming "ALLAHU ACKBAR", but thanks to the power of the internet social consciousness has become far more advanced, and Minassian imbibed a far more novel idea of who his oppressors are.

Eliot Rodger was the first mass shooter I really paid attention to. This could have been because his YouTube channel had been preserved postmortem for years, a digital tour guide of sorts.

I remember his aversion to puberty and sex ("the very word fills me with hate") being a pivotal event in his upbringing. He first had a willingness to imitate his peers through activities like skateboarding, then had a dim but growing awareness about puberty social dynamics. This neatly preceded the moments when other kids his age would show him pornography, much to his disgust. It took a few different times for this to happen before he started using it. But more importantly, all this time he had regarded girls with fear, which only grew stronger as the years went by. I don't wish to make this post an exercise in armchair psychoanalysis but I can only attribute his gynophobia to his stepmother; there's nothing to suggest his actual mother gave him emotional troubles. Soumaya (Moroccan) is usually characterized as an foreign intrusive presence.



His repeated travels to Morocco tended to harm his mood more than any other place. He enjoyed his time in England, and surprisingly had a similar feeling in France during his teenage years. For some asinine reason, his parents wanted to send Rodger to Morocco to adjust himself. It's such a preposterous and laughable idea, but nonetheless true. Later on, after Rodger calls for his real mother to fly him away from Africa:

Quote:Soumaya returned from Morocco, and she was very angry with me due to the way I acted while I was there. She effectively kicked me out of father’s house, and because I was eighteen, she was allowed to. Father didn’t do anything to stop her, being the weak man that he is. This is how it has always been. Father has always given Soumaya free reign to impose her rules on the household. He gave her all the power.

Not only did she kick me out of father’s house, but she forbade me to go there even for a short visit. And still, father didn’t do anything about it. Father kept saying that the house is her house as much as his, and that she has the right to kick me out. No! I am the eldest son! The house should be MY house before hers! This caused any respect I still had for my father to fade away completely. It was such a betrayal, to put his second wife before his eldest son. What kind of father would do that? The bitch must be really good to him in bed, I figured. What a weak man.

The inner life of Rodger, to be sure, was not accurately written in My Twisted World. It's a rather brief document and I would not expect him to be a memoirist in the first place — he had bigger priorities at the time of writing it, of course. You can still see significant gaps in the chronology provided, where he switches from isolated gaming to schooling. Each one works reciprocally because the school environments always involve people who detest him on every level, and the isolated world is soothing (though at the risk of sending him into further despair). At one point in his youth he was too involved with gaming to consider the arrival of puberty, which he kinda blames for his distorted puberty experience. You must wonder, though, what events at the home were occurring around these transformative events. I predict a volatile household.

Quote:On my last day working for Karl, I decided to stop by at father’s house to have a drink. I was quite parched from the bicycle ride. I entered the house without knocking because I believed I had the right to. As the eldest son, the house should be my house after my father. Soumaya was surprised to see me, and she got angry that I didn’t knock. To teach me a lesson, she ordered me to go back outside and knock. I refused, telling her that she has no right to order me around anymore. I then helped myself to a glass of water. Soumaya knocked the glass of water out of my hand and it shattered on the floor. Father clamored angrily up the stairs from his office demanding to know what was going on. The three of us had a heated argument, and of course father took Soumaya’s side. They both kicked me out of the house, telling me that I’m not to return.

His real mother had told him he should become a writer, which is probably the best advice he'd ever received. His father, in comparison, only gave him The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (haha). I am willing to believe that he did have creative impulses of some kind, but he had not invested any energy in them due to hopelessness — growing up in his environment, he was concerned first with success, and realistically speaking, nothing in his life had pointed towards that direction. Though the background of his life was in close proximity to Hollywood, the extent to which school life humiliated him was a harbinger of what would come. It is very plausible that he'd end up being at the lowest possible rung of the ladder, detested by his father and mother. He might have achieved his personal goals had he been born and raised in another country, but this was unfortunately not so.

I don't think he would have suffered the same fate in Malaysia, and his conclusion that "I am not a part of the human race" further illustrates the ethnic aspect of the Elliot Rodger shooting. That, coupled with the basic instabilities of his family life, sealed his fate.

---

There's more to say on this subject but I will leave this here for now. And, if this post was not clear enough, the school dynamics were very real. I do not doubt that his peers were cruel to him. I might discuss that at further length if someone replies to this.

anthony Wrote:

obscurefish Wrote:

anthony Wrote:Before there was dbdr there was The Prophet who ushered in a new age of male/female relations, who taught the whole world what "Incel" means. A subject of mockery, sympathy, derision, and nowhere near enough serious scrutiny (though there have been some attempts here and there). And there is so much to scrutinise.

I just want to add as a historical note that it wasn't until Alek Minassian's Van attack four years later that the mass media began to use them term "incel".

Of course. Important detail. We didn't get a wave of stochastic terrorism composed of Elliot disciples and imitators, but we did get Alek Minassian. And that was enough for the media to run with it.

There was Christopher Harper-Mercer, who was a big deal on 4chan(r9k) at the time, but he is not remembered like Elliot.

The Alek Minassian case is very weird and I think the media's then-new deployment of the term "incel" was a deliberate diversionary tactic to prevent anything embarrassing from coming to public attention.

Elliot Rodger was also the first shooter I became interested in as well. At the time I remember his manifesto giving me a negative impression, but I have come to develop a respect for him.

Elliot's face looks fine, he had a rich father, a nice car, nice clothes. He was 5'9" (which I will remind readers is the average height for men in the US), and could have easily overcome this despite how he obsessed over feeling short. I think most incels today would agree that it wasn't over for Elliot. His autism was plainly the primary reason for his lack of success with women, while simultaneously being a huge blind spot for him. The hand he was dealt at birth was playable even with autism, but had bad luck with bullying, a lack of support from family, and few friends. He bears a lot of responsibility for his own misery too. He had plenty of opportunities that were not available to many incels, but squandered them because he had to maintain his ego.

I don't think Elliot is nearly as representative of the failings of society, or as representative of incels in general, compared to someone like dbdr. Elliot fits the libtarded stereotype of an incel closely: he blamed his loneliness on his looks and height, when it was his demeanor and attitude that were far more repellent. The main reason he couldn't attract girls really was his entitled personality. More therapy and medications probably could have helped him (which can't be said for dbdr). Dating also wasn't as hard a decade ago, Elliot would be 32 if he were alive today.

The average normie probably only imagines a nameless caricature when they stereotype male virgins, but Elliot Rodger was the incarnation of this stereotype (even though it had yet to exist at that time). He plainly states in his manifesto that he hates women because they deny him sex, then goes on a murder spree after publicly posting a video stating that his specific intention is to punish women for rejecting him. Elliot is everything most people think an incel is, even though the overwhelming majority of incels are harmless and genuinely downtrodden folk like dbdr. I'm sure the video essays you mention are not helping in this respect. Elliot would post on bodybuilding/PUA/incel forums and get mocked by the regulars, he doesn't represent these people.

Elliot's manifesto paints a picture of someone who is at least somewhat measured and perceptive, and he had above-average intelligence, but you hardly need to read between the lines to start to get the impression that the way he acted around others must have been immature, and that we're dealing with an unreliable narrator. The missing parts of the story are brought to light if you watch the autistic mannerisms in any of his vlogs which are preserved on archive.org (half of them are just music playing while he drives, #10 is his last video so make sure to watch that one). Elliot often says he doesn't know why girls don't give him a chance, this isn't just a rhetorical question. He really doesn't understand what is wrong with him, even though it's plain to see for anyone who watches his videos.

I find the radical honesty of Elliot's desires and frustrations to be interesting. However, I think the comparison to Dostoyevsky would be more apt if the expressive purity of his writing wasn't so marred by his inability to introspect. I do find his videos very entertaining. I've watched through most of the good ones again now and I almost regret everything I've written so far, but I think I have been accurate. Elliot Rodger was a delusional narcissist, and he wasn't an inevitable product of his environment as much as he was an outlier with a genetic developmental disorder. He's also a fucking keyed hero and every couple in the West kind of does deserve to get coffee thrown at them at least once (though perhaps not killed) by some random virgin with rage. I don't pity him, but I cannot help but respect him.

If anything, Elliot Rodger is more of a cautionary tale of the dangers of miscegenation than he is a canary in the coal mine for modern society.

I also found this really funny album uploaded by ElliotSupremeLady who apparently uses archive.org like it's a social media site.

obscurefish Wrote:

anthony Wrote:Of course. Important detail. We didn't get a wave of stochastic terrorism composed of Elliot disciples and imitators, but we did get Alek Minassian. And that was enough for the media to run with it.

There was Christopher Harper-Mercer, who was a big deal on 4chan(r9k) at the time, but he is not remembered like Elliot.

The Alek Minassian case is very weird and I think the media's then-new deployment of the term "incel" was a deliberate diversionary tactic to prevent anything embarrassing from coming to public attention.

Took me a moment to recall this guy. I remember all of the jokes about his resemblance to TheNeedleDrop now.



Another ethniccel.

The "incel" thing after Minassian was very pushed. Maybe they were trying to cover something specific with Minassian. Maybe they just had it ready to go and were waiting for anything that resembled an incel to pull the trigger on their new meme. Maybe they were trying to cover the more general phenomena of "hey all these angry internet guys shooting people seem like brown imports from fucked up families".

anthony Wrote:Please do consider reading the thing if you haven't. And of course I'd link you his youtube if I could, but it's down. Searching his name will instead show you an army of content guys making those vapid, perverted "documentaries" of theirs. What an unfortunate fate. If anybody knows of an archive of his videos please share, it'd be nice to link here.

My head is in a fog so my apologies I can't contribute much just yet, I'll post said archives as you requested and two additional resources I find are interesting. I have not and never will watch any of those 3-hour long Mexican YouTube contentumentaries so I can't care if these are already brought up there. I find these, in addition to his autobiography-manifesto you linked, to be more than sufficient for those to gleam what they can.
 
His YouTube channel:
https://archive.org/details/ElliotRodgerYouTube
Most FOIA videos (including Day of Retribution at the end):
https://archive.org/details/elliot_rodger_foia

Next perhaps interesting reference for those inquiring, Dale Launer's recounting his experiences with Rodger as a family friend.

Quote:The Elliot portrayed in the manifesto and in the video he made was not the Elliot that I remember. The person in that video was cocky, arrogant and hateful - the Elliot I knew was a very meek, timid and awkward kid. I first met him when he was aged eight or nine and I could see then that there was something wrong with him. I'm not a psychologist, but looking back now he strikes me as someone who was broken from the moment of conception. It appeared to me that he had an overwhelming lack of confidence but not in a particularly endearing way. Sad, but not endearing. You were hoping that inside there was a normal kid wanting to come out - that he would overcome his shyness and bloom in some way. What became evident, only after reading the manifesto and watching that video, was that what he was actually hiding was this horribly twisted little monster. 

In the past, at times, he showed some bitterness and even some veiled anger but that anger wasn't remotely acted out in any way. He never raised his voice - he didn't even seem capable of raising his voice. He didn't slam doors or pound his fist. I couldn't imagine him making a fist. In retrospect, you can point out a few clues, a few cracks to the malevolence percolating underneath but they were overshadowed by someone who seemed incapable of any kind of action.
...
People did try to help him, he was getting support, but he was such a sad little character - whenever you saw him he was always unhappy. I recall a mutual friend saying to me once, "I've never seen Elliot smile."

Another resource is his now-defunct blog with only a single post, as usual you may take a look at the comments to find typical angry normalfaggots and scant sympathisers, I was amused to find Volound of all people here.

Lohengrin Wrote:Most FOIA videos (including Day of Retribution at the end):
https://archive.org/details/elliot_rodger_foia

Never seen some of these videos before, I like how excited he sounds receiving the asoiaf book. In retrospect it seems offing himself rather than waiting for the series to be concluded may have been the right decision.

Rather than looking at polished thoughts and manners of Elliot, we should look elsewhere, where he wasn't trying to impress others or give a false image of himself. Where he was as honest as he could be. Fortunately he kept two journals, wherein we can get a more accurate look at his psyche.
https://www.massshooternarrative.com/wp-...lPart1.pdf
https://www.massshooternarrative.com/wp-...lPart2.pdf
The Sorrows of Young Elliot...

anthony Wrote:Before there was dbdr there was The Prophet who ushered in a new age of male/female relations, who taught the whole world what "Incel" means. A subject of mockery, sympathy, derision, and nowhere near enough serious scrutiny (though there have been some attempts here and there). And there is so much to scrutinise.

"To go Sodini" was long ago used on the internet.

anthony Wrote:The media has done a very good job of finessing incel as a white phenomena. Adjacent to the issue of internet rage and "hate" cultures in general. The most extreme antisocial elements are almost always unsettled ethnic transplants into the first world. But that's an issue we're really not supposed to talk about. If he'd been born a generation earlier Minassian would probably have gone down screaming "ALLAHU ACKBAR", but thanks to the power of the internet social consciousness has become far more advanced, and Minassian imbibed a far more novel idea of who his oppressors are.

Not necessarily. Besides Minassian being Armenian and thus not Muslim, haven't you heard of Marc Lepine? He committed a mass shooting in 1980s with a very incelish, externally irreligious motivation, and he was part-Arab.

T. L. Wrote:

anthony Wrote:Before there was dbdr there was The Prophet who ushered in a new age of male/female relations, who taught the whole world what "Incel" means. A subject of mockery, sympathy, derision, and nowhere near enough serious scrutiny (though there have been some attempts here and there). And there is so much to scrutinise.

"To go Sodini" was long ago used on the internet.

anthony Wrote:The media has done a very good job of finessing incel as a white phenomena. Adjacent to the issue of internet rage and "hate" cultures in general. The most extreme antisocial elements are almost always unsettled ethnic transplants into the first world. But that's an issue we're really not supposed to talk about. If he'd been born a generation earlier Minassian would probably have gone down screaming "ALLAHU ACKBAR", but thanks to the power of the internet social consciousness has become far more advanced, and Minassian imbibed a far more novel idea of who his oppressors are.

Not necessarily. Besides Minassian being Armenian and thus not Muslim, haven't you heard of Marc Lepine? He committed a mass shooting in 1980s with a very incelish, externally irreligious motivation, and he was part-Arab.

Lepine actually had a movie made by Denis "cheeto dust" Villeneuve about his rampage. I was even talking about that with people recently. I feel kind of stupid for not mentioning it in this thread now. And as for Sodini, I was not aware that he had a meme. These guys are interesting for being kind of more like the typical old shooter types despite the incel pathologies. Offline loners who were a lot more normal despite being the weirdos of their times (Yes Sodini was online but older internet).

And yes I know Minassian was Armenian, but I see Islamic terrorism as something more like a browncel solidarity movement than anything to do with heritage. Key word being solidarity. Sodini and Lepine were both lone wolves which I think makes them a fundamentally different phenomena to what Rodger and onwards were a part of. Islamic Terrorism strikes me as adjacent to inceldom because it was a stochastic (largely) movement united by a loose collage of ideas.

I've thought for awhile that the incel issue is really about the ability to play a character, i.e. personality is more important than any other particular factor like looks or height. Normies can do this automatically and unconsciously. Through autoproduction of the unconscious they can assume a character and can even flip from one type to a completely different type (which they will typically refer to as "growth," maturing, etc.) without ever really having to think about anything. 

Ethnic and hapa incels are an interesting illustration of how this works, because in their case it clearly isn't a "narcissistic" Oedipal or archetypal neurosis (related to the family or whatever). They have the usual neurotic desire for female attention, of course, but they don't know what they're supposed to be to obtain attention; they don't have a character. There is nothing they could reasonably pull off that women would recognize as attractive. Not out of any deliberate racial oppression, of course, but because the roles haven't been created for them. No one has apparently ever considered how you would go about attempting to sexualize these people. It is easy to induce the desire for female attention, but apparently much more difficult to create roles that will function to this end, yet both need to be done in synchrony to have anything resembling a coherent society, at a minimum.

The fact that the roles you are expected to perform for women might be humiliating or unsatisfying (or that this whole charade might be beneath you) is another issue, but it seems that people like Elliot don't even get that much.

anthony Wrote:For those of you who don't know and are only vaguely aware of who Elliot was and what he did. Yes, he was the Incel spree-killing guy. But did you know he had a youtube channel where he uploaded recordings of himself driving around California talking about himself? Did you know some autist with access to his case files leaked old family photos of him on /r9k/? Did you know he wrote a novel-sized autobiographical testimony in which he laid out his entire life story, worldview, and motivations?

I have read it in its entirety a few years ago. Have you? Has anyone here?

---

There is an excerpt from My Twisted World, that I think is underdiscussed, as it shows that Rodger was not just evil by nature. It is in the chapter covering him being 15-year-old, and it is about Rodger saving his half-brother from drowning. Assuming that it is written without gross inaccuracies, I find it puzzling that no one in his family acknowledged that. How much did it influence his views on the world?