thelastpsychiatrist.com - Cho Seung Hui: It's The Movies, Stupid. Adnotated.

I still haven't had time to really look at this situation, but I have to address this nonsense about his psychiatric history: it's irrelevant.

He didn't do this because he was on Prozac, or he was Bipolar. Look at it the other way: are we going to say that people with bipolar are more likely to go homicidal? If so, should we do a Kansas v. Hendricks for bipolars? (in which the Supreme Court said it was ok to lock up pedophiles indefinitely, even in the absence of a crime, since "pedophilia" makes you a priori dangerous.)ⁱ

If you want to really understand why he did it that way, you have to find out what article of media he was imitating. Take the photos, the manifesto, and google it until you find the movie the handguns came from; the book (or comic book) the manifesto came from. He didn't come up with this stuff on his own, he is imitating something.ⁱⁱFor Klebold and Harris it was the Matrix and Doom. What movie is he imitating? Find it.

Because it isn't about mental illness, or genetics. It's about identity, it's always about identity, and sometimes the identity you choose doesn't work out that well. So, emergently, you grab an identity which has appeared to work -- you imitate a movie, a game, a comic.
I'm not saying movies made him do it; I'm saying he was looking for an excuse to do itⁱⁱⁱ, and he went through the usual catalog: movies, comics, games. Come hell or high water, he was going to kill someone. But in terms of prediction, the operative question is, if this guy goes homicidal, how will he do it? He didn't strap explosives to his chest, not because it wasn't available, but because it didn't match the identity he wanted to have^iv -- that he got from a TV show or movie.

Ismael Ax, handgun to the head, hammer cocked like a bat to the right, knife to the neck -- all those stills from his video clips you see on CNN aren't random, they're a specific imitation of something else. Find the thing he was imitating, and you have found him.^v

Because he didn't exist, that's the problem. He picked an identity, and no one liked it, it backfired -- no chicks -- so he moved to plan B: pick an identity that absolves him of the guilt of shooting 30 people.
Stop looking in the DSM. Start looking in IMDb.

Cho Seung-Hui is Ismail Ax.^vi

I know nothing more about the case than anyone else with a FIOS connection, but for what it's worth, "Ismail Ax" seems like a gaming avatar. I know a lot of people are trying to link it to Islam, who knows, maybe, but if anyone out there is tight with the gamers -- especially True Combat and Battlefield 2 -- or if you have a teenage son -- I'd ask around.

1. Pretty shit democracies come up with, huh! Now explain again how nazionalsocialismus is different from pantsuittwitterismus or whatever. [↩]
2. The theory seems persuasive on the face ; esltards are trivially little more than meat-powered shannonizing machines, and if you have any doubts on the matter just fucking listen to one talk for five straight minutes -- if you can manage that. [↩]
3. This is an exceptionally astute point, even though in classical Ballas fashion of "doesn't see what he doesn't want to see", he fails to take it to its natural conclusion.

   Here's the fact of the matter : deranged thought, infantile thought and female thought are not actually distinguishable. They're the same fucking thing, when you're "encouraging" girls to "think like a woman" you're not encouraging them at all, and not towards anything worth being called thinking. And he plain knows this, too, it's just... you know how it goes, he can't know it is all.

   Don't encourage women to "think like women". Explain to women instead that thinking "like women" ain't thinking, at all, and their only hope to ever participate in this far reaching psychosocial game called thought is to think like men. Unlike the mentally ill, girls are born with a chance at being good, you know ? Don't fuck it up for them. [↩]

4. I think this narrative approach drastically overplays what's ultimately deffective if at all present agency. It's not so much a matter that "here's the options, these do and these don't match the identity I want to have", as far as the pantsuitards are concerned. It's rather a matter of "out of the entire field of possibility I'm only aware of like... three things ; the specific three things in question function as a substitute of a personality when seen from the outside, even though I am not aware of this myself". A point Ballas is, as it's rapidly becoming the rule, quite aware of. [↩]
5. Well... "him".

   The problem with the simps, as any human female can tell you if she's capable of self expression to any minimal degree, is that there's nothing really the fuck there. "Find the clothes stand and you have found him" umm... you can't hump air, even should there be some clothing floating among it. At the very most you'll overturn the pole holding the shirt up and feel like an idiot for playing the elephant in the china shop -- which, I suspect, is the deep reason for all the Ana Thinspiration chicks out there : it's not that "they're trying to get back control over their own body", it's that they perceive their body over-substantial for mating with the thoroughly disappeared males of their generation. If stuck in a house of echoes, just faint whifs of thoroughly ethereal males anywhere, the average female might even go on a diet, I can totally see it. [↩]

6. Adding this in here because really, not worth making a whole article for. There's relatively little to say, besides taking the time to observe how exactly "the news cycle" works to break human thought as an activity. Why is it that Ballas sports these confused one-liner pieces and I don't ? [↩]