Forgiveness in the Age of ‘Selfie Murder’

By Published on August 31, 2015

There is not much moral distance between a killer’s movie of shooting a former co-worker, and an ISIS promotional video featuring mass beheadings. Admittedly in the American context it’s a bit unusual: usually if you want to see mass murder on camera, you have to smuggle one into a Planned Parenthood clinic. In the age of Twitter and autoplay video, the instant sharing of yesterday’s murder footage was made far more horrific. It also raises questions about why – why an obviously disturbed individual would seek to spend their last moments trying to win a battle with the people they just murdered on social media, and then share the horrifying images of this act of violence, changing the act from murder to selfie murder.

You can’t confront existential problems without grappling with existence. The popular ontology of the day is deeply ridiculous and childlike — the phrase “I self-identify as” ought to provide sufficient illustration — and this will characterize much of the coverage of the selfie murderer. Now that we have some information on him and his motivations and history, we know that he bought into the assumptions of identity and modern grievance culture, differing only in the conclusions he reached with regard to his own personal imperatives. A gay black man who was repeatedly reprimanded for his harsh treatment of colleagues, he was an individual who consistently played the race card as a justification for how he was evaluated.

Read the article “Forgiveness in the Age of ‘Selfie Murder’” on thefederalist.com.

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