Hard News: The A-Word
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The pampered simpleton Martin Bryant's 'alienation' didn't prevent him from begging his jailers for any scrap of news that might confirm his expectation that his crimes had made him some kind of hero.
Pardon!? Bryant has had a horrible life, including repeated psychiatric admissions as a child. His IQ was measured as 66. The one bit of luck he had - being befriended by an older woman and eventually inheriting half a million dollars when she died in a traffic accident - eventually only extended his catalogue of failure. He attempted suicide in prison six times, until he was placed in a solitary cell on suicide watch for eight months and remained in protective custody within the prison for a further 10 years. He is, by all accounts, a wreck.
I'm not sure if "pampered" is the right word Joe. I doubt you'd swap your life for his.
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i had the umm... "privilege" of attending an extremely wealthy high school in texas. there were a lot of good people in there, but some of the wealthiest kids were complete assholes.
pretty much the same kinds of characters you get at any nzl college, but with this particular arrogance that goes with extreme wealth.
You read any James Lee Burke books, Che? He writes really well but all his books are pretty much a carbon copy of a handful of themes. And this is exactly one of them. Super rich, arrogant and corrupt rich families in Texas and Louisiana who fell superior to the less fortunate around them, and above the law.
He is an English Professor at the University of South Texas so I suspect he's writing from experience.
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I believe what the aunt said was that Cho suggested to her that he might be autistic.
No, she said he was diagnosed after the family settled in the US. A HuffPo story has more detail than most of the coverage:
The first and most obvious of Cho's symptoms - from early on in his life - was that he was suffering from characteristics of Autistic Spectrum Disorder - difficulties with: social skills, communication, obsessive tendencies, adaptability and speech articulation, amongst other possible symptoms.
A high functioning autism to be sure, perhaps Asperger's, but certainly in the spectrum.
"From the beginning, he wouldn't answer me," Kim Yang-soon, Cho's great aunt, told the Associated Press. "(He) didn't talk. Normally sons and mothers talk. There was none of that for them. He was very cold."
"When they went to the United States, they told them it was autism," said Kim, 85, adding that the family had constant worries about Cho.
Soon after they arrived, Cho's mother took the boy to a doctor, who confirmed the diagnosis of autism. But the family was too poor and busy trying to set up its new life to give Cho the medical attention he needed. Cho's great aunt said she believed Cho's mother was 'not very determined to get treatment for him' because he continued to receive good school grades after the autism diagnosis and the family hoped he would eventually straighten himself out.
The same story notes that Yahoo issued a "kill story" order and other agencies acted similarly after protests from "autism activists". Perhaps the fear of subsequent persecution was justified, but I think that was terrible turn of events. We don't learn anything by refusing to have the story told.
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You read any James Lee Burke books, Che?
nope. but might look them up. glad to see a suggestion its not just my impression of texas isn't just my own.
if you already have a penchant for self-isolation (for any of the reasons being discussed here), then being exposed to eugenicists and cultural solipists is likely to be detrimental.
sure, cho is solely responsible for his own actions. none of the "freaks" i hung with at high-school ever took up a gun, but the american pseudo-aristocracy is something that has to be experienced to be believed.
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It's not good that some in the autism community in the US have reacted as they have but the concluding sentence of that Huffpost piece really does annoy me -
Cho is guilty of the greatest mass murder in our history by a lone gunman and he is responsible for his actions - but there is much blood on many hands from a failed system, which never gave Cho a chance - and 33 dead is the result.
The guy was one nasty fucker, he got more chances than a lot of other people around the world. I'm really tempted to make a few unwarranted generalisations about liberals who blame "The System" rather than accept that some people are just evil.
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I'm really tempted to make a few unwarranted generalisations about liberals who blame "The System" rather than accept that some people are just evil.
care to generalise why this doesn't happen with frequency in say, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand?
(and apologies for bad typing in previous post).
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I'm not sure if "pampered" is the right word Joe. I doubt you'd swap your life for his.
Well, naturally.
While the term simpleton may be somewhat unclinical and pejorative, I believe it aptly decribes Bryant. I'd be inclined to doubt that claimed IQ of 66 though - Bryant was, for example, a capable driver.
As for pampered, all the tribulations you describe occured after Bryant was jailed. Of course no-one should be forced to suffer like that. My point is that Bryant had no apparent reason, prior to commiting his crime, for holding a major grudge against the world. -
3410,
Neil:
I'm not talking from much of a knowledge base but [...]
You should've stopped there. As an ASD person myself, I can confidently say that you don't know what you're talking about.
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__I'm not talking from much of a knowledge base but [...]__
You should've stopped there. As an ASD person myself, I can confidently say that you don't know what you're talking about.
Amen. You really have no idea what you're talking about and you'd do yourself a favour if you just stopped, Neil.
I don't put any credence in the he-was-surrounded-by-rich-kids theory (so are lots of people), but it seems clear that a failure to acknowledge the problem and intervene in Cho's early life (and you can blame his family for that) was a significant contributory factor to the disaster he became.
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If being a liberal is not accepting "evil" as inherent or genetic in someone Neil, then by all means label away. It seems to me actions that are unacceptable are more a product of conditioning,chemical reactions in the brain, and environment. Fortunately in the societies mentioned Che, there has been some effort to keep the safety net a bit wider,and perhaps catching more of the potential risks.
I make no bones about assigning personal responsibility when and where it is due, which is most situations. The difficulty arises when the environment, mental health and conditioning arrive in a torrid confluence that some are clearly ill-equipped to handle. This was not the first, nor will it be the last, and if it can't be described as a mental health problem, I don't know what can.
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The difficulty arises when the environment, mental health and conditioning arrive in a torrid confluence that some are clearly ill-equipped to handle.
Nicely put. What I find chilling is that in the case of Cho, the Columbine perpetrators, Martin Bryant, and the whole Aum Shinrikyo cult, this provides the catalyst for a purpose in life. The resulting crimes don't occur in a spontaneous moment of manic meltdown. They're the result of months, sometimes years, of planning.
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As for pampered, all the tribulations you describe occured after Bryant was jailed. Of course no-one should be forced to suffer like that. My point is that Bryant had no apparent reason, prior to commiting his crime, for holding a major grudge against the world.
Yeah, but doesn't the fact that he now lives (and presumably always will) in a secure hospital for the seriously mentally ill have a bearing on it?
Politically, all hell would probably have broken loose if he'd been declared not fit to stand trial, and there's no doubting that what he did was callous and evil, but I think it's clear enough that there was something seriously wrong in his head, and that that had been the case since childhood.
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Fortunately in the societies mentioned Che, there has been some effort to keep the safety net a bit wider,and perhaps catching more of the potential risks.
Actually, if he'd had a childhood autism diagnosis in, say California, these days, he'd have automatically become eligible for a range of services (which is one reason California autism diagnoses have spiralled in the last few years). It would have been much harder for his parents to ignore the problem and hope it went away.
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care to generalise why this doesn't happen with frequency in say, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand?
The US is the largest fully industrialised country in the world by far, and anyone who can breath can own a gun - so they've got more maniacs than most places to start with and all of them have access to an unlimited amount of deadly weapons.
If the European Union had gun shows in every town then I imagine we'd see similar massacres happening there too.
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doesn't the fact that he now lives (and presumably always will) in a secure hospital for the seriously mentally ill have a bearing on it?
Certainly, although it doesn't really shed any light on what that "something seriously wrong in his head" is. While it's fair to speculate how things might have been different if Cho had received psychiatric help, we know that Bryant did, and it plainly failed him and his 35 victims. Perhaps we could blame the woman who artificially raised his expectations by unconditionally leaving him a fortune - maybe early psychiatric intervention in her life would have prevented the tragedy.
With hindsight, only the most vindictive would disagree that Bryant should have spent all of his incarceration to date in the kind of facility where he was only moved to last year. For the common good, though, if there's any way that any further insight can be gained into why he behaved as he did, without causing him any undue suffering, then surely it should be done.
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care to generalise why this doesn't happen with frequency in say, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand?
As far as I'm aware, none of the above countries had a 2nd Amendment. Also, does Bowling for Columbine come to mind? Liberties may have been taken with some of the facts, but the general idea is obvious.
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I'm pretty sure this does happen in NZ (Aramoana), Australia (Tassie), and the UK (I don't like Mondays).
It's like how some people, when they go to war, they come home and kill their families, or take up sniping random strangers; some people when they get bullied every day for years with the consent of authority figures and the participation of all their peers, they go on a rampage. It happens.
It's not like he became president, invaded another country, and got a million people killed, for the only visible purpose of shoveling what approaches a trillion dollars in graft and stock futures to his mates, all the while encouraging nutcase rulers the world over to get themselves in the nuke game lest they suffer the same.
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Plus, mininova has all three of the noted Racism doco parts.
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I'm pretty sure this does happen in NZ (Aramoana), Australia (Tassie), and the UK (I don't like Mondays).
Er ... the last one was a song about a shooting in America.
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I don't think autism can be blamed any more than bullying can be. I think it is more likely a combination of various factors, including autism and bullying that got Cho started. I liked the following post on HuffPo:
Bully Rage: Common School-Shooter MiseryI also enjoyed some of the comments -- you'd think she had blamed Bush for Cho's massacre!!
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Er ... the last one was a song about a shooting in America.
That's true, but the UK has still had a bunch of mass shootings (Dunblane, Hungerford). Virtually evrey industrialised country has. The difference between those places and the US is that everywhere else has tightened up their gun laws since their mass=shootings occured; the US continues to drift.
MAYBE some people on the autistic spectrum ARE born with a predisposition towards carrying out this kind of act? Autism activists might not like to hear it but it seems pretty reasonable to me - but with the CDC estimating that 1 in every 150 US children are autistic and no firm evidence about what causes the disorder I doubt focusing on autism is a terribly helpful way to prevent furthur tragedies.
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MAYBE some people on the autistic spectrum ARE born with a predisposition towards carrying out this kind of act? Autism activists might not like to hear it but it seems pretty reasonable to me - but with the CDC estimating that 1 in every 150 US children are autistic and no firm evidence about what causes the disorder I doubt focusing on autism is a terribly helpful way to prevent furthur tragedies.
No, as I said before, autistic people are no more "predisposed" to mass killing than Koreans are. But it seems likely that a failure to intervene and address Cho's problems helped create the monster.
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No, as I said before, autistic people are no more "predisposed" to mass killing than Koreans are.
Replace the word 'autism' with 'pervasive developmental disorder' if you like: the fact remains that there are a very wide range of PDD's that affect neurological development in wildly variant ways. Most people recognize that killing other members of our species is a taboo act but it's easy to imagine how a developmental disorder could produce individuals without such an awareness.
I've no idea if that's the case - that's why I prefaced my statement with the word 'maybe', but it's certainly not impossible.
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I find it difficult to accept those (of whom I know several) that are in the "autistic spectrum" are pre-disposed to anything at all similar to actions regularly associated with psychotic pathological behaviour. One area seems to have more to do with power and control, the other with social connectedness (or lack of it).
Let us not forget the complications of brain chemistry as a finely balanced maelstrom of neurotransmitters that may (through a whole host of reasons) be affected in the simplest of ways that have the most tragic of consequences. Those of us who think we may be in total control of our mind at all times well, er, best wishes.
Toxicity in all forms - mental, emotional, physical and environmental - is reaching alarming proportions in societies that have the luxury to recognise and analyse them. Those that are not too busy with surviving, will realise the immunity against these types of dis-eases will take more effort as the fallout from ignoring them becomes too great. -
easy to imagine how a developmental disorder could produce individuals without such an awareness [that that killing other members of our species is a taboo act]
we don't even have to imagine Joseph Mengele, Pol Pot or Idi Amin. each of these people likely did have some kind of developmental disorder but i'm not sure it was of the pervasive neurological nature you refer to. PDDs are neither sufficient nor necessary conditions for Cho's behaviour. neither is capitalism ;)
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