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Originally Posted by roachboy
...in this case, i am inclined to think that without seeing the clips, there is a way in which an answer this question would become impossible as the matter would be undecidable. what you make of this at a certain level turns on how lucis you imagine cho to have been--the more lucid, the more a reaction to a pathological environment it can become. the less lucid he is understood to have been, the more problematic this move becomes.
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In order to agree with you on this point, I would have to assume that the viewing public of broadcast news is at least as knowledgeable as you are and able to neutrally assess Cho's communication. My expectations may be to low, but I am certain that your expectation is to high.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
...emile durkheim wrote a book called "suicide" in the late 19th century--a sociologist--he posed an interesting question: given that we as humans are geared aroudn adaptation or accomodation of our context, how would we know if that context had become pathological? the implication is that we really wouldnt because our frame of reference would move along with the wider social context, to a significant extent. he points to spikes in suicide rates as an index--he posits a notion of anomie or sense of drift and displacement as a cause. this argument works best if the information you look at is aggregated, a simple numerical index because it implies that suicide can be seen as a reasonable response to an pathological environment.
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I fully agree with Durkheim's proposition as you presented it. I am unwilling to extend his theory of suicide to mass homicide. Suicide is the removal of self from the irrational environment; homicide requires a mindset that many others must die as well.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
can you say that an environment--a culture--is a single entity and so can be or not be pathological as a whole?
wouldn't it more or less always be the case that what this environment is is a function of the position you occupy within it, that from a position of being-dominated things would look one way while from a positin of domination it would look another? particularly if you think about the simple fact that not all positions shaped by domination explicitly involve the acts of domination--you might think about significant aspects of globalizing capitalism--from an american viewpoint, a middle class relatively stable american viewpoint, the system looks ok, while from that of someone working some shit job in one of these "free zones" it really is not ok. the midle-class viewpoint is contingent on all kinds of factors that amount to domination, but most folk do not participate in it or even see it...
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Well stated, and I agree that there is little uniformity of culture/environment in our country and others. Two blocks can make the difference between wealth and poverty. The relative sense of dominance and one's position on that continuum will relate to many other issues, but can't be assumed to be causative.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
so anyway, one result of thinking across aggregates like durkheim does is that it generates a sense of lucidity of motive behind the numbers of suicides. like these folk are the canaries in the mineshaft. it seems to me that this could easily get mapped onto a political framework IF the view of those who committ suicide are left as those which you construct across numerical indices.
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Again, this assumes a close relationship between suicide and homicide that extrapolates to the general or the particular.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
things look otherwise if you go into the details.
that's another way of saying the same thing about why i think it was not a bad decision to show the footage.
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But Cho is an individual, and therefore, a "detail" in a search for a wider context.
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Originally Posted by ShaniFaye
why is it when someone does something bad one of the first things another person asks is something similar to "what did his parents do to them"
I did a lot of shit when I was younger (didnt kill anyone) but you know what? when I got myself straightened out the first thing I would tell anyone was it had nothing to do with my "parents" it was things and situations I put myself in....they didnt do it.
For all we know his parents may have been as scared or disturbed as other people were (and I mean teachers, female aquaintances etc)
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I agree, Shani. This young man's problems are clinical, rather than social in my opinion. A case of nature, with less emphasis on nurture. But the family situation is unknown to us, so we shouldn't try to be guessing either way.