A massive projection-extravaganza has started as a result of Sandy Hook mass murder. Traumatic moments often allow people to expel what bothers them by projecting it on others. Here is a brilliant example of such a projection:
Until the 1980s, when semi-random spree murders “inexplicably” became the province of young white men, there was no need for young white men to resort to this kind of thing. Whatever happened in society, they would be the winners. These days, it’s still not the worst thing to be a white male — not by a long shot — but it’s not nearly as cushy as it used to be. Women’s rights have grown by leaps and bounds in the last 30 years. Marriage has become more advantageous to women than men since no-fault divorce and custody policy favoring women have become the norm.
The author of this text seems completely oblivious to his own anti-women resentment. He believes that women’s rights turn men into losers and make men’s lives less cushy. It doesn’t even begin to occur to him that liberation from oppressive gender norms favors both women and men and that the easy dissolution of miserable marriages is good for all of the participants, irrespective of their gender. The existence of men who work for, promote and welcome women’s rights escapes his notice.
Of course, this author realizes that hating women is not a nice sentiment. This is why he disavows it by projecting it onto other men. As usually happens in cases of projection, however, his own writing betrays him and demonstrates that the male resentment he so passionately denounces is his own.
Clarissa's Blog 
I think the mainstream media politicizing this story and barely paying attention to the other shootings that happened this week where the gunmen were stopped by other people with handguns is just as nonsensical and disgusting as this article you’ve linked to in this post. They’re trying to make this Adam Lanza guy a martyr, therefore possibly encouraging other people to engage in similar shootings elsewhere rather than placing emphasis on the true heroes on these stories who save lives and such.
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What is he supposed to be a martyr of?
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I’m talking about in a metaphorical sense. Unintentionally, they are basically giving certain people these kinds of ideas that could possibly influence them to go out and kill people as well by sensationalizing the shootings whether it be on TV or Twitter. I think martyr was the wrong word for this and I’m sorry if I offended you with what I said.
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No, I didn’t mean to sound curt or anything. I agree with you that the coverage of this crime has been quite bizarre. Every article I read on it is even weirder than the one before it.
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Today I read in an (ironically Israeli) newspaper something, which seemed important. I can’t view his mother as non mentally diseased person now. Here from Internet:
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Yes, I read this on several blogs. Of course, I also heard that 10% of the world population believe that the world will end this year. Yet most of them and their children haven’t been shooting up any elementary schools.
Sadly, many people have horrible mothers. Yest not all of them choose to kill children as a result.
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By “mentally diseased”, I don’t mean a diagnosis, but being mentally unhealthy. Extreme paranoia is not normal.
Also, the only place the future shooter went to (with his mother) was a shooting range. Apperently he had problems at school before being pulled out. Irrespective of shootings, children with any problems should be helped more, not cast away, their futures hurt. Ditto about people with mental diseases.
And, like another commentor, I can’t call this irrational behavior healthy.
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I don’t think it’s our place to diagnoze normal / abnormal and healthy / unhealthy. I also think it is offensive to the victims because it removes the criminal’s responsibility. “The poor sick child, he wasn’t helped enough.” This all sounds very disturbing to me. This was an adult man who made a decision to kill people. Why can’t we stop diagnozing and justifying this?
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Here’s another massacre in the U.S. that left 38 schoolchildren and several adults dead, and injured a bunch of other people. The murderer, Andrew Kehoe, also killed his wife (who was sick with tuberculosis) and committed suicide:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
It took place in 1927. I wonder if anyone at the time blamed white men’s degraded position for it? Women could vote by then, and though there was still racial segregation there wasn’t slavery. Clearly Andrew Kehoe must have suffered from being an oppressed white male of the Flapper Era.
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🙂 Good point. It just demonstrates that people do, indeed, project a lot in such situations.
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I don’t think it has to be either/or. I think all the evidence is pointing toward serious mental issues (not helped by a surreal environment created by his mother).
That said, mental issues aren’t or shouldn’t be a get out of guilt card. Many people with far vworse mental issues manage to not kill large groups of children and those that do shouldn’t be excused because they have problems.
What strikes me is the omega rage factor. This case reminded me of those cases in China (one happened the same day IINM) of young men with no hope of marriage or reproduction killing children (acting out against those who they perceive as turning their lives into dead ends).
It also reminded me of Breivik (another sexual outcast) whose goal was also to kill the children of his perceived enemies (the bomb in town was to suck up the emergency response units so he could go about his sick revenge unimpeded).
A bunch of unattached young men have always been a dangerous thing for any society to have (which is why so much time and effort has been traditionally spent trying to yoke them into marriage or other productive endeavors).
I don’t think this is going to be the last sexual outcast who kills a bunch of kids.
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The “sexual outcast” theory you are advancing is the one I find the most insightful and interesting of all theories advanced so far.
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I think that availability of the weapons is also important. Where do you go to buy a rifle just like the one that was used in Newtown? Why just hop down to your friendly local Walmart where you can purchase bread, milk and the latest hot assault rifle!
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I have noticed that a lot of people, let us say young men in this instance, tend to create the situations they fear. I told you about my experience on a YouTube site where people were attacking a skeptic woman for making fun of evolutionary science. These guys immediately began projecting their weird stuff onto me about how assumedly I wasn’t “logical”. Well, you would have needed to take a much greater sample of my ideas than they had to come up with that conclusion. All they had was my suggestion that perhaps they were, after all, trying to turn skepticism into a religion to keep people out, as one of them had joked about doing.
So, they attack me — someone they don’t know anything about,apart from my gender — for qualities conventionally associated with stereotypical femininity.
Consequently, they create an enemy out of me, when only a disagreement was intended.
My view is that perhaps a lot of men are creating enemies out of those whom them perceive as feminists. Perhaps they fear that feminists will take away their freedom to think. Therefore they go out of their way to get feminists to oppose them and make their lives miserable, perhaps even to the point of provoking retributive anger.
Something doesn’t have to be true for it to develop all the aspects of seeming to be true. Alternatively, some things are true, whilst seeming to the majority of people not to be. Mass projections may be more common than individual, isolated projections, because the individual projection involves more risk. People generally like to encounter the outside world as a group, on the basis of consensus, rather than as lonely, isolated people — as Nietzsche points out.
What I’m trying to get at in a round-about way is that belief in feminism taking away men’s rights can suffice in many instances to make men act out aggressively, even when the majority of feminists have no interest in taking away men’s rights. It’s the fear many people have, about their changing world, that can cause feminism to seem threatening.
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See what I mean?
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/12/17/1347161/james-dobson-blames-marriage-equality-and-abortion-for-newtown-shooting/?mobile=nc
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Young white males are not the only ones who shoot children at schools. There was also Brenda Ann Spencer
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Have you read this article?
http://gawker.com/5968818/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother
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Oh yes. What an incredibly horrible woman this is.
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Why is this woman horrible? Your perspective is so different from my own, so I always find your opinions on these sorts of things extremely interesting.
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Imagine the kind of bullying this kid will undergo after she plastered the internet with his real name and photo. How will other 13-year-olds treat a boy whose own mother says he is a sociopath?
Plus the vicious animal pumps the child full of dangerous drus for the simple reason that engaging in actual parenting bores her.
Just imagine what it must feel like for the poor kid whose own mother would vilify him in this way just to make a quick buck.
It’s a mysetry why this disgusting creep keeps popping out these kids that she neither wants nor needs. Just to abuse them? Where the hell are the social services?
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(Hm, I hope this shows up in the right place in the comments thread…)
Well if what you say is true, then yes, she is a horrible person. And I definitely think that plastering her son’s name all over the internet labeling him as a psycho is… problematic (which is quite the understatement).
I guess I just tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, and I certainly could be wrong. I assume she is a good parent (it sounds like her other two kids don’t have behavior problems), has given her son as much of her time as he needs and she can give, tried every non-drug treatment she has heard of (though I am only going off this one document – I haven’t read her full blog), and without knowing a person I tend to take their word on their motives. If she has truly done all of that, and her son still has violent rages… I would probably be tempted to write a desperate plea to the internet for help as well. Perhaps I am just niave.
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Good parents don’t have kids with violent rages. Children behave a certain way as a result of parenting. This purely American myth about a parent who did everything right and ended up victimized by a “bad ” child is just that, a myth.
As for her “plea for help “, she did not write this anonymously . She branded the kid for life to become famous and make money . Twenty years from now, when he tries to find a job, who will want to hire him? Did she care about that when she published the story?
She is a narcissist, that’s all.
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I have mixed feelings and am trying hard to give her the benefit of a doubt but I’m fnding it kind of hard. She’s writing about a difficult topic in the backwash of a traumatic national event (nb when you’re that intensely emotionally invested in a subject you should run anything you publish by another set of eyes first).
Posting a picture of the kid and using his presumed real name was beyond the pale and the whole “I am X’s mother” seemed like attention whoring (as do a lot of the comments trying to one up each other in the personal suffering or psycho kid sweepstakes).
Still… parenting a child prone to violent outbursts and emotional meltdowns over pretty trivial stimuli has got to be disorienting and freaking terrifying. The terror is less for yourself (I imagine) but for what is liable to happen to them later. It is not normal or acceptable for a child to repeatedly voice violent sentiments towards immediate family members but I profess total ignorance on the best way to deal with that kind of situation. I distrust instituions, medicalization (and pathologization) and many of seeming quacks offering ‘helpful’ advice.
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“Still… parenting a child prone to violent outbursts and emotional meltdowns over pretty trivial stimuli has got to be disorienting and freaking terrifying. ”
– Once again: children don’t have emotional meltdowns for no reason. THIS IS A RESULT OF THE UPBRINGING THE CHILD GOT. he is the victim here, not the narcissistic mother. She brought him up,not vice versa.
” I profess total ignorance on the best way to deal with that kind of situation”
– If you don’t abuse a kid, the situation will not arise. If this woman posts this kind of a story with total disregard for the kid’s future, just imagine what she subjects him to on a daily basis.
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“Good parents don’t have kids with violent rages”
How do you explain families with several children where most of the children don’t have violent rages but one (or two) do?
Having kids does not give parents ultimate control (conscious or not) over the entirity of their childrens’ development. Some children have problems that their parents cannot deal with (without the parents being horrible people).
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“How do you explain families with several children where most of the children don’t have violent rages but one (or two) do?”
– Children get assigned different roles within a family. One gets assigned the role of an outcast, while another one gets assigned the role of a good boy (girl). Both end up equally miserable.
” Some children have problems that their parents cannot deal with.”
– This is a myth invented by lazy, immature, narcissistic parents.
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The Conservative view on Sandy Hook school massacre – too many women!
From a leading Conservative paper, The National Review:
“There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. ”
and
“a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335996/newtown-answers-nro-symposium#
I’m sure that your students don’t see you as helplessly passive! These conservatives want to live in some mythological fifties.
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Thanks NG for posting that (I think.) It’s so offensive that I am agast. This quotation floored me: “Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.”
What does the author think “football players” are going to do against a semiautomatic weapon that can fire loads of bullets in a round??? If “men” had “converged” on the shooter, there would just be men to add to the bodycount. Even if it were NFL football players. A bullet is a bullet. I am truly floored that something this repugnant was published. I know the National Review is conservative but it’s a legitimate publication. How could they publish this????
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“Thanks NG for posting that (I think.) It’s so offensive that I am agast. This quotation floored me: “Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.””
– I decided not to read this piece after I saw quotes from it. Just reading about the “feminized environment of schools” that makes “women and children” “sitting ducks” made me want to vomit. I’m afraid my blood pressure will go up if I read this garbage.
I understand that stressful situations make people react in all kinds of weird ways, especially if their psyche is already compromised by stress, depression, etc. However, it is wrong to allow an obviously disturbed person to dump her emotional and psychological garbage on large audiences of innocent readers. This author solves her psychological problems at our expense, and that is just wrong.
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I think what has been forced out of my situations is not male aggression, but female aggression. In Western Australia, male aggression is still given a pass in some situations, but women are required to fight negative situations in an underhand manner.
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“The author of this text seems completely oblivious to his own anti-women resentment. He believes that women’s rights turn men into losers and make men’s lives less cushy.”
Seems that you have some support from the scientific community.
“A new study led by Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology, suggests that men’s insecurities about relationships and conflicted views of women as romantic partners and rivals could lead some to adopt sexist attitudes about women.
The study was recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121219174331.htm
What will those psychologists discover next? 🙂
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Yes, this really big news. 🙂 Kudos to the eminent scholars for proving the obvious.
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