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Journal mcgrew's Journal: The Motive 3

All the cops and newspapers are searching for a motive in the horrific mass murder in Las Vegas last week. No connection to any terrorist groups, no indication at all that it would happen, and the newspapers are all asking âoeWhy??â

        The answer is simple and I canâ(TM)t figure out why nobody else can figure it out.

        For well over a century the line between fame and infamy has been blurred. The eighteenth century James Gang were murdering thieves, but still well regarded. The reason was the hated Pinkertons, hired by banks who were also not well liked. The Pinkertons did some horrific things themselves, like killing an innocent fifteen year old mentally challanged boy. The Pinkertonsâ(TM) infamy caused the James gang to be famous despite their foul deeds.

        In the 1930s there was Bonnie and Clyde, also murderous thieves, but the people they murdered and stole from were bankers, who were hated more than anyone in the country, having taken away peopleâ(TM)s homes, crashing in 1928 to 1930 leaving the country in poverty.

        By the twenty first century, actually before, the words âoeinfamyâ and âoeinfamousâ have almost disappeared. We think of Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon in the back four times, killing him in 1980 not as infamous, but famous.
        Itâ(TM)s simple. The mass murderer last week did it to become âoefamousâ. Because he knew full well that the media would release his name, and by all accounts he wanted everyone to know he was the perpetrator.

        The media should stop printing the names of these monsters. But they wont; I
wrote about this two decades ago and nobody listened. Nobody will now, either.

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The Motive

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  • The Vegas shooter is more often - at least in news sources I turn to - referred to simply as "the Las Vegas shooter" rather than by his own name. I think a lot of news outlets have turned to this for pretty well exactly the reason you just described - to reduce the degree of fame that a mass murderer receives from their deed. The shift has been largely fairly recently, too - compare the Las Vegas shooter to the Orlando shooter to the Sandy Hook shooter. The last on that list was only ~5 years ago but mos
    • by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

      I certainly hope you're right.

      Odd, but yours is the only comment. I posted the same thing at S/N and got a ton of responses. Is slashdot dying?

      • Is slashdot dying?

        We both know the real question is whether it is dying at a faster or slower rate than before. I think the recent outages have slightly accelerated the process. Tragically the signal/noise has improved just slightly here as many of the trolls seem to have given up on this site. Unfortunately we've lost plenty of people who used to provide valuable discussion as well.

        (It occurs to me another possibility is that the conservatives that used to dominate discussions here by volume are either all still dr

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