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Manifestos

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These mass shootings are clustering together.

A garlic festival, a mall in El Paso, a bar in Dayton .... one has to imagine a news director asking whether it even still can qualify as "news"?

One novel feature: the shooters all seem nowadays to have posted some drivel on the internet, which gets deemed each new one's respective "manifesto."

These guys aren't the Unabomber. Those of us who are old enough to remember, think of a murderer's manifesto as the product of a rare sort of murderer, one with a Ph.D. in mathematics, and who walked away from an academic career to live in a cabin in Montana and eat antelope he killed himself (I'm not sure about that last bit -- but the song says antelope "roam" out there).  Ted K.  produced a manifesto that looked like an academic article written for peer review.

Ted K. was the real world's closest  yet approximation to the comic book notion of an evil genius in a secret lair cackling maniacally upon the death and devastation that will make the respectable academics rue the day they shunned him. [Or think Professor Chaos on South Park.]

But the mass murdering kids today post social media screeds derived essentially from each others screeds.

Let's just not call those "manifestos," okay.

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