The other night I got a message that some bloke in the US was shooting up a nightclub, along with a link to a web-page, where people were gathering info on the situation, including police-scanner recordings. I didn't bother following it up, since this sort of thing happens every other week now in The States.
Last night, I got a message that some bloke in Melbourne had attempted to go on a killing spree, along with links to three eyewitness videos of the event. This one I paid more attention to. According to the message, the bloke had unsuccessfully attempted to crash his car into a tram. He'd then set his car on fire, before stabbing three people, one of which eventually died. The videos depicted a man running around on a city street. From the neck up, he appeared to be African; and from the neck down, he appeared to be a religious Muslim. He was attempting to attack people with a knife, but was being held at bay by people with chairs and a shopping trolley. When a couple of cops showed up, he began attacking them. Eventually one of the cops shot him.
So, some Muslim immigrant goes off the rails and attempts to bag some infidels for the glory of Allah; but thankfully, he turns out to be pretty fuckin' crap at it, and only manages to kills one person before getting gunned down by Johnny Lopper. It seemed like everything I really needed to know about a major event had been summed up in one quick personal communication, and I didn't even need to consult an authoritative news source. Of course, I dunno how much of it was factually accurate, but that's an issue with any source of information. At least I'm getting the eyewitness videos unedited.
You see, recently, I've been working with a couple of fellas who are into these online communities where people collect and share information about criminals and the crimes they commit. And it's weird looking through what's out there in this age of social media. I dunno about the Muslim bloke, but that fella who shot up that pub in America, he'll probably have a Facebook and Instagram page, and he may have a Twitter and YouTube account too. Maybe he's a member of some specialist online community or social media forum. These people will collect it all, package it up, and then scour through it to find anything of interest. It's a weird thing, reading through chat logs, or listening to videos made by people who you know will go on to commit heinous crimes—not in the context of watching a documentary, or reading a book that's full of expert opinions by criminal psychologists or something—but just having all this primary data right there at your finger tips. Being able to just go through it and draw your own conclusions. It's fuckin' weird.
Two things that have stuck out to me:
1) A lot of mass-murderers are really fuckin' narcissistic and self-absorbed. I mean, it makes sense when you think about it, but it's one thing to think about it, and another to hear it with your own ears.
2) A lot of child-molesters are young men who are obviously retarded/autistic/disturbed. Like, you often think of them as being these cunning predators, and I'm sure a lot of them are, but a lot of them are also just fucked in the head. Like, they go on publicly-readable forums and talk about what they do, and they don't seem to have any understanding of what they're doing being wrong. Oh, and here's something I didn't know about before—have you ever heard of child-molester groupies? Young women who have this kink where they like to pretend to be a kid, and have their male partner "molest" them; and they hang out on these forums with these retards and egg them on, because it's, like, "so hot to think about".
Anyway, I don't really have much more to say on the subject right now. No well-thought-out closing remarks that bring the rest of the post together or anything like that. Looking into fringe online communities is something I've done in the past, and I'm no stranger to uncovering weird and fucked-up shit; but the last few weeks has been an eye-opener, even for me. There's just so much out there now. It can be a little overwhelming sometimes.
2 comments :
I heard about the incident at 5pm - 20 mins or so after it happened - because my husband texted me to say he was okay and already on a tram home and not to worry about him. But while I was driving home, I was already hearing stories on the radio from bystanders, and then I heard that there was video online of the shooting of the killer (for at this stage, there was no knowledge of his motives, but it was known that someone was already dead). So I googled the video and saw on youtube that someone had uploaded it already. But actually I only saw the last ten seconds of the police officers' brave struggle to subdue the terrorist, who was wielding his knife with the absolute intent of achieving death by cop. One of them was clearly trying to get a taser shot in as well.
The best bit of the lot of it was the trolley man and the memes that sprung up.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/trolley-man-and-the-strangers-who-tried-to-help-20181109-p50f6f.html
The terrorist was a nutter and I'm glad he's dead. I'm even happier for our tight gun laws that prevented him getting hold of a weapon that would have mown down all those bystanders and all the police officers who tried to stop him.
The best bit of the lot of it was the trolley man and the memes that sprung up.
It reminded me of a video I once saw about how Eastern Europeans react to terrorism. There was footage of a bloke running over pedestrians in Russia - other pedestrians swarm the car, drag the driver out, and beat the shit out of him. There was also footage of Romanian workers in London, hearing about a terrorist attack - they take up whatever weapons they can find, and start running in the direction of the attack, but by the time they get there, the police have dealt with the situation.
Post a Comment