This post isn’t really on-topic for c/technology. Please post it in c/Politics instead.

Just jumping in here to remind folks to Be Nice. We’ve had to clean up some comments in here already and if issues continue the thread will be locked.

This source was founded and is fully funded by the Heritage Foundation, and this article comes from the staff of the far-right Daily Caller. This is not a reliable source and anything coming from them should be taken with an entire salt mine.

I suspect their argument would be that they are more like a flea market. If you buy something fake or faulty at a flea market then the flea market probably isn’t liable, the seller is. Now, I don’t think this argument holds water, especially in light of Amazon’s practice of combining all of the stock of a single product into one place, regardless of who the seller is, so that there’s no way to know if you’ll actually get product from that seller.

I don’t think you’re trying to be xenophobic with this joke, but I feel like you should know that it’s probably not landing the way you want it to…

There’s some research that indicates that there’s a “contagion” effect with mass shootings that increases the more they are publicized, and that at least some types of mass killers seem to be motivated by a desire for notoriety. The FBI has backed a campaign for media to minimize coverage of mass killers’ names and faces and to focus more on stories about victims in an effort to reduce these particular types of mass killings.

This has definitely given me some things to think about, and really I appreciate you being patient with me.

I feel like the conversation is getting pretty far out of my depth, so again if I say something hurtful please let me know. If it helps, I’ve been diagnosed with a mild to moderate anxiety disorder, but I’m pretty functional and CBT has been enough for me to get through most of my rough patches. I also have a loved one who suffers from OCD (actual OCD, not the kind where you like things to be neat). I also know how unbelievably frustrating and hurtful it is to be told that you should just “think better” or somehow fix your own “bad thoughts” or “wrong feelings”, so if I somehow unintentionally communicated that in my earlier comment I apologize, it’s not what I intended.

My conception of mental illness has usually been that the problem is happening before volition really comes into the picture. So in your example of the videogame, it’s not necessarily that there’s a bug with the controller, but maybe there’s a bug with the display. What you’re seeing in the “game” isn’t accurate in some way, so you wind up in the pit because you didn’t see it, or because it seemed like it was somewhere else on the screen, or because something was indicating that the pit was the correct direction to go. The way I’ve always pictured mental illness is that the inputs on your controller might make perfect sense to another person if they could see what’s on your display, but because the display is bugged they lead to the “wrong” outcome. To exit the metaphor a little, I might be feeling intense anxiety about something (or nothing in particular, thanks brain) and avoid it, because anxiety is our brain’s signal that something is dangerous and should be avoided. But when that thing is an assignment for school, there’s a problem with the input or the perception of that thing. Now, my brain causing me to feel amounts of anxiety that are wildly disproportionate with the thing itself is not really something I can control, but once I understand that my “display” is fucked up in a certain way, I can work around it to a certain degree and remain pretty functional.

I tend to believe that if we were able to get inside people’s minds and understand all of the “inputs” they’re getting, from their emotions, stray thoughts, traumas, memories, etc that for the vast majority of people, we’d be able to understand why they’ve made the choices that they make and they would make sense, in light of the information their brain is giving them. That’s why the assertion that mass shooters don’t have any mental illness is surprising to me. I can’t understand why someone would make that choice if their display hasn’t gotten fucked up in some major way. Now, maybe it is, but it’s entirely environmental or social, or something along those lines. If that’s true, then I guess I could make some sense of it, although it’s hard for me to understand what experiences would lead to this kind of destructive decision.

Anyway, at this point I’m basically rambling about a bunch of stuff that I really have no expertise or deep understanding of, so I apologize for that, and I apologize again if I’ve said anything out of line.

Right, and I was already aware of several lists of mass shooting using that or similar criteria to determine what fits. It’s just a little strange to me to group so many disparate types of events into a list, and then do a study to say “most of these things don’t involve mental illness” when most of those events are wildly different from each other.

Yeah, I addressed that briefly in my first comment. This definition of “mass shooting” is much, much broader and very different from what most people are thinking of when people talk about mass shootings. Like, I’m fully aware of how serious the gun violence problem in the US is, but I’m not thinking of a domestic violence situation where multiple people got injured, or a gang related shooting at a club where some bystanders are killed when I hear the term “mass shooting”. Don’t get me wrong, those situations are tragic, and the availability of guns in the US makes them so much worse, but I understand the psychology of them pretty well, I think. It’s not a mystery to me why they are happening. But the kind of situation where a person goes to a place and just starts indiscriminately shooting people is what I don’t understand, and it’s what I tend to think of when people talk about “mass shootings”. Maybe this is just me being wrong, or maybe it’s a problem of imprecise terminology.

Thanks, I definitely skimmed the article, so missing that is on me.

It’s interesting that the profile they mention doesn’t really fit what I have in my mind for mass shooters, which would be younger men, not middle-aged. I guess the ones that really stick out to me, like the Columbine, Christchurch, and Uvalde shooters all fit this stereotype that I have, but apparently that doesn’t map to reality.

I hope no one takes this to mean that I am trying to stigmatize mental illness or people with mental illnesses, but it seems to me that if there are people who want to be famous or notorious so badly that they kill large numbers of people, that doesn’t seem to be the result of a healthy or well ordered mind. Am I misunderstanding how the phrase “mental illness” is being used here? I recognize that the headline is referring specifically to disorders involving psychosis, but they even state that only 25% of mass shooters are associated with non-psychotic mental illnesses. Are emotional/behavioral disorders not being considered here? Or is the mass shooting database they are using one of those that includes any shooting with more than a certain number of people involved, even if that includes events that the typical person would not consider part of the phenomenon of the types of shootings that most people are thinking of when they talk about mass shootings?

Seriously, I hope I am not stepping on anyone’s toes or saying something that will be taken as hurtful, because that’s genuinely not how I mean it. But I really feel like if someone is in a state that they decide the best course of action for them is to kill a bunch of people they don’t know, how could that be the result of a healthy mental and emotional state?

It’s practically a guarantee that this Sharon’s dog is the most obnoxious, poorly trained little shit to ever walk the earth on four legs, too. Nobody wants your fucking dog, Sharon, it’s an unholy terror.

I think pinned comments were added in a recent update, but in that case Beehaw hasn’t updated for various reasons that have been explained elsewhere.

I’m not sure about the flairs. It would be a very helpful moderation tool in a toolbox that is quite limited at the moment.

So IMO nothing has really ever topped the old Asmik Ace/AKI wrestling games from the N64 era. I played a ton of WCW/NWO Revence, and WWF No Mercy is still considered by a lot of people to be the best wrestling game ever made, and apparently still has an active modding scene.