This is beautiful because is subtly reminds readers about the false claim that Gabby Giffords was politically targeted.

Awful. That guy is saying it was ok. My god I’m shocked at everything...political leaders all over the world justifing these actions. Damn. So fucking confusing times.

The Daily Mail e-published the guy’s manifesto. What the actual fuck

Fraser Anning is a pathetic nobody who only received 19 votes yet found himself elected to the Australian Senate by a bizarre and unpredictable sequence of events. A political leader he isn't.

The manifesto — which I won’t quote on general principle — is an especially bizarre piece of debris, as it seems to have been custom-tailored to make a particular group of extremely online right-wing users laugh, while stunning and horrifying the confused, oblivious media. It is littered with oblique references to memes, sarcastic asides and episodes of apparent satire — despite the fact that the attack it aims to explicate was extremely real. Any manifesto belonging to an extremist will naturally be more legible to members of the same fringe. But few in recent memory have seemed as clearly geared toward eliciting a laugh from fellow radicalized memesters.

Among all the different expressions of evil — from the carefully planned and executed and colossal to the impulsive and rash and small — what binds them together is their fundamental thoughtlessness. Above all else, evil is unreflective, shallow, empty. The damage that it causes is forever out of proportion to the consideration that spawned it. It never really perceives itself, though it always considers itself an exacting and scrupulous judge of others. Evil is the simple adherence to orders in the course of a genocide, and it is the rattling off of dumb jokes in the run-up to a mass murder. There is always so much less there than it seems.

Seeing this all over today. Not just US.

It’s a ‘mass shooting’. Not a terrorist attack.

Shit needs to be called what it is.

Terrorism.

The Venn diagram on trolls and Nazis remains heavily overlapped



https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... sness-evil

And it’s also worth mentioning that a lot of the document is akin to what’s known as “shitposting” — intentionally throwing out red-meat content to readers to distract them or draw them deeper into the same online pits where he himself was radicalized.

For example, the Christchurch shooter mentions a popular YouTube personality and a popular American right-wing figure before joking that he was radicalized in reality by the game Fortnite, which taught him to “floss on the corpses of my enemies” (flossing being a dance move that the game helped popularize.) He also describes himself as an expert in “gorilla warfare.” Many people reading the manifesto jumped on those mentions immediately, which is, as Robert Evans, a journalist and expert on far-right terror communication argued, exactly the point.

While “shitposting” is a common thread in far-right online culture — meme-ing racism and anti-Semitism is how white supremacists hope to spread their ideology — jokey characteristics of the manifesto are in line with similar language used in older far-right groups as well.

In short, everything in the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto is what the Christchurch shooter wants us to know about him. Like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber who killed three people and injured 23 others in a nationwide bombing campaign from the 1970s to the 1990s, or even Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, published in 1925, the point of these manifestos is not to be factual or realistic about the inner worlds of their authors. In Mein Kampf, Hitler portrays himself as a talented artist and lover of architecture. In Kaczynski’s manifesto, he portrays himself as a man profoundly concerned about the material problems of industrial society. Manifestos aren’t honest. Manifestos are for mass consumption.