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Anti-Evolution Fundamentalist Youtuber Anthony Powell Killed Girl, Himself
April 13th, 2009
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Very sad. Condolences to the family members.
His mother says she doesn’t think he went they to hurt her? He brought a shotgun. This is not something you carry around with you on a casual basis.
Couple other points.
1.) I’m more disturbed by his opinion on women. (Remain submissive? Fuck that.)
2.) The mentally ill should not have guns. If you were prescribed medication for depression, you don’t get a gun.
Dunno – he seems more insane than Fundamentalist. I personally wouldn’t give him a plastic fork, he’s so unhinged.
But certainly one of the fundies he hung with noticed?
Very sad indeed. In other news, no atheists have ever been mentally unstable or have ever killed another person.
C.S., why do you hate America? Our Second Amendment gives us the right to arm EVERYONE! What a great country it would be if EVERYONE could own guns. The insane. Children. Small animals. People in bars. In churches. On planes. Why won’t you let the NRA continue to do it’s job and bribe (er, convince) state lawmakers around the country to continue adding new and interesting places for us to legally carry automatic and semi-automatic firearms!
Look, I have no use for Fundamentalists or Creationists, but this is all about the crazy, not the fundie-ness.
This guy’s barely holding his shit together in that video. He happened to latch onto hatred of atheists and evolution and let it feed into his crazy, but he could just as easily have latched onto hatred of Christians and creationism if he happened to run in different circles.
If there’s a lesson to draw here it’s about how bad we need to improve the state of mental health care in America.
Ed H: “This guy’s barely holding his shit together in that video. He happened to latch onto hatred of atheists and evolution and let it feed into his crazy, but he could just as easily have latched onto hatred of Christians and creationism if he happened to run in different circles.”
Really?
Christianity says atheists are going to Hell forever, and they deserve it. Nothing in Atheism says the opposite is true.
I think this guy was pycho before he was a fundie. I have the impression he would have stepped over the edge no matter what belief he attached himself too.
Heartbreaking.
He happened to latch onto hatred of atheists and evolution and let it feed into his crazy, but he could just as easily have latched onto hatred of Christians and creationism if he happened to run in different circles.
Weird how he managed to latch onto the former and not the latter. It’s almost as if there’s more opportunity for the former than the latter for some bizarre reason.
The difference is that someone who goes this crazy on the left side ends up isolated from left wing political organisations, while an insane fundie is encouraged by other fundies. They’re a lot more likely to go on and never seek for help if they’re persuaded that everyone is behind them!
It bothers me the way people can dismiss the ideas, attitudes, beliefs, motivations, and ultimately actions of a person simply by labeling them “crazy.”
From what mental illness do you suggest this man suffered? Was he a paranoid schizophrenic? Those people can sometimes be violent, but I don’t see much here that would suggest such a diagnosis. To what mental illness do you attribute his actions? Give me a specific diagnosis and your reasons for it.
Because to me he seems like an angry, confused, intolerant, emotionally undisciplined kid who was not being served well by a system of beliefs that he had hoped would give him guidance and insight. And that’s not the same thing as being mentally ill.
Clearly the key to understanding this guy and what he did would be to understand the complex interactions between his character and his world view, between his emotional impulses and his attempts to rationalize them. That’s difficult if not impossible, but that doesn’t mean we just dismiss his actions by labeling him a lunatic. That’s the same as dismissing him as an act of God.
Rather, I think we should see this as an opportunity to think about, among other things, how people project their anger on others, how that doesn’t help them deal with their own anger, and how systems of belief that structure an individual’s relationship with reality in fantastical and absolute terms can contribute to tragedy.
Plenty of crazies, left, right and undecided.
Manson, the SLA, Weather underground on the left.
It makes as much sense to ask what ideology the Virginia Tech shooter held. What’s scary however is that the televised leaders of modern Republican ideology seem just as crazy (Glenn Beck) and nobody on the R side seems to notice. (Well, that’s an exaggeration. I apologize for that.)
Plenty of crazies, left, right and undecided.
The left and undecided go to prison. The ones on the right are on Fox.
Manson, the SLA, Weather underground on the left.
I’ll give you the Weather Underground, but Manson and the SLA were criminals using radical politics for cover. Can you find any liberals who supported them or apologized for their acts?
Well then, there you have it.
Charles Manson detested the liberal politics of the hippies. I don’t think he was a conservative, he is just nuts. But Manson hated the hippies.
The religion is secondary. The guy was unstable. There are plenty of Christians and atheists who would never hurt a fly.
Wow…
I didn’t know about this one. I may add him to my list.
What was the motive for the murder?
I am not a medical professional, but he seems manic to me, and manic is often half of manic-depressive, and that’s some really serious shit. He’s scary to watch.
I can’t help feeling sorry for the guy watching these videos, despite the fact that he murdered an innocent woman in cold blood, and the fact that I can’t help feeling sorry for him is pretty disturbing to me. But I get the impression that he’s being carried along by thoughts and emotions that he has no control over whatsoever, as if he’s not even *there* — all that manic glee and anger and hyperactivity, like the actual person is locked far away inside with all this stuff on the outside.
I guess it sounded like I was trying to set up some moral equivalence between fundamentalism and atheism, or the left and the right, and I didn’t mean to. It’s just that those issues just don’t seem very relevant to this guy.
This is in contrast to, say, the Pittsburgh shooter, who I think is likely crazy but his right-wing ideology *does* seem to be relevant to his crimes, very much so. Or any abortion clinic bomber type you can name, where their fundamentalism is very relevant to their violent crime.
There are lots of cases where fundamentalism and/or right wing ideology are connected to violent crime. (And there are *not* a lot of cases where you can atheism and/or left-wing ideology are connected to violent crime, kiss any moral equivalence you thought I was going for goodbye.)
I just don’t see this as being one of those situations.
Ed H and all, I wasn’t trying to get into a tit-fot-tat which side has the crazies thing. Just that the initial impression I got was that the craziness was primary, and it latched onto the ideology at present that fed it.
And in my living memory, the ideology that has produced the most headline killings has been right wing, with the occasional Unabomber going lefty. And I never figured out what “Squeaky” Fromme’s problem was, or Sara Jane Moore – both would be Ford assassins.
But I digress. The current magnet for looney violent ideology is the right wing, and nobody on the Right with any stature is trying to tone it down.