https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus

This is a simple fact that we’ve lost sight of. Generations ago, men and women like this would have likely been “peered out” from life, when their neighbors and kin realized what they were. And, that was a lot easier to do, when you had ten kids, and not as much invested in them as we do now. Today’s parents don’t have the same amount of dispassion that they did of old–I can recall hearing old-timers from families with ten kids, whose parents basically treated them like fungible and expendable farm implements, and the discussion about Carl, the one brother who liked abusing animals and younger siblings…? It was interesting, to say the least. Carl didn’t make it out of his teenage years, and you rather got the impression that the rest of the family made sure of that.

These days, that’s not gonna happen. The old-timers had ways of dealing with this stuff, and did it without apology or rancor. Only our enlightened idiocy looks at a damaged creature, and says “Oh, how sad… We must help them…”. In the old, more resource-constrained days of yore, you didn’t worry about whether it was nature or nurture; you just empirically identified the bad seed, and ensured it didn’t get planted.

I’d even be willing to be tolerant of the class that gets money by illegal means. There’s crime, and then there’s crime.

We might, collectively, usefully re-evaluate a social model that seems to promise young people they will get fame, or at least prioritizes it as a life goal more than was formerly the case.

I don’t see a road back to a world in which being an ordinary person has intrinsic dignity, let alone one in which every young person believes it.

Was it a more or less intact family or was there a divorce or abuse issue in there?

Did Ballenger conjecture about why somebody who went from “wanting to be someone” turned into wanting to be a killer? If it was just pure recognition you wouldn’t think most people would go for “killer”