Can we get back to the actual news?

I found it odd that he was listed on Facebook as single (this is relevant, believe me) since he comes across as pretty goodlooking (though I gather he favours professional Photoshopping). I suspect World of Warcraft and his other favourite multiple user game, together with the penchant for uniforms, might have something to do with it. As might his use of artificial testosterone, though this might be a result of not attracting women. But this set me off on a historical parallel.

Back in the years before the Norman Conquest, there was a trading settlement of Scandinavians in London, much resented by the locals for bringing their terrible multicultural habits to corrupt the local Engish. The local men went to appeal to King Ethelred to ask that he control immigration (yes, that King Ethelred, the unready ill-advised one), and he decided that he would solve the problem by massacring the newcomers across the country. So on St Brice's Day there was a concerted attack at Viking settlements across the country, including not only men but also women. One of the victims of the St Brice's Day Massacre was the sister of the king of Denmark, which is why Ethelred was soon old news. And what was the particular complaint about the London Scandinavians? On Saturday nights, to get ready for church the next day, they had baths (I imagine of the sauna type, but who knows). As a consequence, on Sunday, the local girls found them much more attractive than the local Mercian youth, to whom a massacre seemed the most obvious solution.

Breivik has, in his writings, held forth on the way that women are not as compliant and obedient, not as devoted to bringing up children as they should be. I suspect that his failure to find someone to put up with his attitude and lack of empathy was at least contributary to his selection of girls as his first choice of victim, as well as his view that killing the defenceless was more appropriate than risking death by taking on the more capable of fighting back. His attitude to divorce is curious, as he attributed it entirely to women leaving their husbands, where his own family was broken by the father leaving while he was only one, and he was brought up in a female environment with his mother and sisters.

I wouldn't want to say that a sense of failing as a man was the entire cause - he obviously has worked very hard to plagiarise the views of the Unabomber and find documentary support for his anti-Muslim views, and clearly has intelligence which he has applied to his purposes. Unfortunately, he never applied that intelligence to the likelihood of people not following his gruesome and wholly unnecessary actions. I'm not sure of the legal definition of sanity, but not living in the real world, and not recognising the lives he took as being of equal value to his, with as much right for their voices to be heard as his would look like not being open to a definition as not mad.

I don't know how society can identify these distorted souls and make sure that they do not have access to anything they can use for mass killing, or even single killing. Fiordman, though keen not to be confused with Breivik, and his followers, seem just as creepy.

Penny