/lit/ - Literature

Elliot Rodger's manifesto is the most unintentionally brilliant piece of writing I've ever read. It's so dense with hilarious, pathetic, pretentious shit and he's so oblivious to how humiliating the lot of it is that the fact it even exists at all borders on surreal. When you add onto that the knowledge that his whole retribution turned out to be an insane comedy of errors, it's a masterpiece of black comedy.

I expected to get some similarly entertaining /lit/ out of Christchurch, but this new guy is different. Memes aside, he's not crazy or pathetic like most of these guys are. Whether you agree with him or not, he gradually came to the conclusion that violence was the ideal solution to a legitimate problem and he acted on it. That scares the fuck out of people because it makes him more lucid than all of the other recent shooters put together. He comes off as a passionate guy who saw the state of things, lost faith in civility, and succumbed to evil. That's not how this is supposed to work. We're all used to shooters being easily dismissed lunatics, and now here's one who actually showed up with- again, whether or not you agree with him- an actual, studied argument for mass murder. He's also the only shooter I know of that meaningfully accomplished what he set out to do. Though it probably won't have the long term ramifications he hoped it would, he got the entire worldwide media to straight-up do his bidding, and his manifesto is undoubtedly going to inspire imitators. This creates a really bizarre forecast, because this isn't some one-off Kaczynski shit. This guy addressed a problem half the world is already fucking angry about. We're probably about to enter a new era of mass shooters who aren't motivated by mental illness, but the genuine belief that they're saving the world.