TweetRead this strory as it sounds like this author is blaming steroids for this killer's actions! Gotta love the media bs!
All the Hallmarks of What?
I think it’s in the story of ‘The Dancing Men’ that Sherlock Holmes finds a bullet hole in a window and a set of footprints outside it which the police have somehow failed to spot , and - when asked by Dr Watson how he saw them when nobody else did - replies ‘Because I was looking for them’.
So, here I am, looking at the misery, loss and grief of poor Norway, and wondering what could explain this quite astonishing and exceptional behaviour. Want my answer? Hang on a second. First let’s see what the answer isn’t.
Part of me is sneering at the ‘experts’ who initially assumed that this was another Islamist attack. I’d be unsurprised to find that one such proclaimed that the event has ‘all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’, a phrase which invariably causes me to conclude that the user has no idea of what he or she is talking about at all.
What are these ‘hallmarks’? That a terrorist murder has been committed, and that a Muslim has committed it. Well, if it’s that easy, then that means it isn’t helpful either. If ‘Al Qaeda’ can be detected with such extraordinarily broad clues, can it really be said to be a meaningful concept? (No, actually).
Then, when the undisputed culprit turned out to be a podgy-faced blond Scandinavian body-builder and general loser, with some half-formed ideas about Islamism, off we go into the realms of a sinister ‘right-wing’ menace, not to mention neo-****s and Christian fundamentalists. Well, you worry about that if you like. Dingy attics are full of mummy’s boys and fantasists hunched over keyboards whose impact on the outside world (apart from the bad smell they usually give off) is likely to be minimal.
Others proclaim that he is ‘mad’. An unhelpful idea in such cases. Plainly it is reasonable to assume that someone who has done such cruel things is not fully human. But it is also circular, and avoids the interesting question of why this is so. It has no practical application, either. Nobody said he was mad before he did his murders. Nor can I see what objective diagnosis would have concluded that he was, until it was too late. So thanks a lot.
Now, here comes Sherlock Holmes (who I’m sorry to say is not a professor, nor even a neuropsychopharmacologist, but can still tell a hawk from a handsaw and so may still have something to say on this subject) He’s looking for something. And these days he has the wonderful facility of ‘Control F’, which finds the very few important words in vast 1,500 page manifestoes of drivel.
What is he looking for? No, not our mass killer’s views on ‘Cultural Marxism’ or Antonio Gramsci. Such views do not cause any normal human being to go out and murder nearly 100 fellow-creatures with pitiless calm. Rather the contrary, if he has actually understood what this dispute is about.
He’s looking for suggestions that the killer might have been using legal or illegal mind-altering *drugs*.
And because he is looking for them, he finds them.
The entry for July 3rd makes it plain that this unlovely creep was taking Anabolic Steroids and a stimulant (similar in effect to amphetamine) called Ephedrine, in his case mixed with caffeine. Follow these references up and you find a great deal about a substance he calls Winstrol, also known as Stanozolol, an anabolic steroid derived from testosterone and favoured by some body-builders as it doesn’t lead to weight-gain.
Our mass murderer has settled on this as his steroid of choice after much experimentation with others.
I think it fair to say that the use of anabolic steroids is correlated ( I know correlation doesn’t count with the cannabis crew, but you can’t please everybody) with aggression and violence. In the weird language of Psychiatry, in which I am unwilling to trade, it is correlated with ‘Hypomania’, which grandly describes a rather worrying state of mind for anyone to be in while carrying a gun and a lot of ammunition. Ephedrine, meanwhile, is said to be associated with delusions, paranoia, hostility, panic and agitation. It is similar to amphetamine and to the SNRI type of antidepressant.
Once again, it strikes me that if you’re taking this stuff, especially along with testosterone, it’s not a good thing to be armed.
I can do no more than point out these facts. They seem to me to be highly significant, and to warrant serious research into the effects on the human mind of various types of drug which are too readily available in our civilisation.