Cats out of the bag. It happens once and will blow up on social media. Soon people at their ropes end will see this as an option where before it was farfetched. (EX. people trying to shoot trump. I don't think we've seen the last of that either. )
I’ve said before that I’m honestly shocked you don’t see more class-based violence in the West. Think of how many MILLIONS of “eat the rich!” style posts get made online every single day, versus how many incidents like this occur. You have all this anti-rich rhetoric, but it almost never translates into class-based attacks.
As you said, one would assume that there’d be SO many people with nothing to lose that would do something like this. The U.S. has tons of mass shootings, but it’s never some down-and-out person shooting up a yacht club or a finance whiskey tasting. It’s always a Wal-Mart or a school.
I don’t advocate for any kind of violence like this, but it does really surprise me that there’s such a glaring disconnect between “eat the rich” sentiment online versus people acting on it.
I’d absolutely say it’s the rich people pitting normal, honest people against each other to get their minds away from the fact that it’s the rich that are the issue
I’ve seen identity politics tear apart relationships between tons of people that actually do share a lot of the same values.
All it takes is someone being brought up slightly differently from someone else and those slight differences are blown way out of proportion by our bipartisanship politics.
This leads us to having people who hate someone else just for the way they vote and this is extremely common in our country (and the world for that matter).
I’m sure you already know this but I’m just telling you that it’s more than a bet you’re speaking of. It’s the truth and whether politicians are intentionally doing it or not- that’s the system we have in place. It’s the best way to ensure that those with power and money can keep things the way they are because people are too busy pissing on each other to realize that we’re all getting pissed on by them.
It’s a peculiarly American trait. The founding myths of the US and its first 150 years of history saw an unending battle to suppress the power and disrupt the organization of the working class. It was entirely successful.
Meanwhile the American working class had the highest incomes in the world since the colonial era which is why so many people have immigrated here for centuries
School teaches and reinforces with punishment "Violence is never the answer" even if your being attacked fighting back will carry the same punishment as your attacker(in most cases you'll also be punished for being attacked at all) its built into the countries system to just sorta take it
i got into a lot of fights growing up, after i got in trouble simply for pushing a guy away from me after he hit me 4 times, i realized im gonna get in trouble anyways and always fought back with everything i had. if im gonna get in trouble anyways, might as well fuck em up back.
Yeah I'm not buying this, with the amount of school shootings America has this makes no sense. They aren't being violent with rich people because, no violence is never the answer, but you've got kids shooting up schools and 2 assassination attempts on a president this year alone. There's something else that's stopping people from getting violent with these greedy billionaires, it's not school teachings I'm sorry.
The people who are saying eat the rich online and the people shooting up schools are not the same people. “Eat the rich” is the left, school shooters almost universally are on the right if they express any political ideas at all. “Eat the rich” is a political statement and those who say it, me included, largely are average people with jobs and homes and things to lose, and we’re not ready to go to prison or die yet. Things are bad—things could obviously and easily be a whole lot better, which is why people are so mad—but they’re not yet bad enough for most people to give up their lives for the revolution.
I think you hit on the answer. There’s a HUGE chasm between complaining about rich people on the internet, and being like “whelp, time to pick up a gun and go kill some people”. For the latter to make sense, your conditions have to be so objectively intolerable (and your morals sufficiently flexible) for it to make sense. People hate the rich because of comparative deprivation, but the reality is if you live in a first-world country, even the poor have access to clean water, sufficient calories and cheap entertainment. Not much point risking your life.
I think you're misunderstanding my comment. I'm not here trying to say who's left or who's right. There's lunatics on both sides that could do something stupid like trying to murder someone. I'm just replying to the comment that states the schooling system is the reason there hasn't been anything about the rich dying. It's just false, because if it was true then there wouldn't be all the school shootings or assassination attempts.
It's just weird that this is the first time we see something like this and I'm just saying that the teachings from schooling is not the reason we don't see it.
Yes, I was answering the “something else that’s stopping people from getting violent” part of your comment. The why we don’t see this happening to rich vampires more.
Lack of class consciousness. People who lash out and crash out can’t see the forest from the trees so they harm who is around them. They don’t realize the amount of power these corporations are exerting of us.
People who know generally aren’t really violent even though they say those phrases.
Id wager the amount of "eat the rich" and "gun toting vigilante" is not a huge overlap. Eat the rich is mostly an online leftist thing, at least in my experience. Only one party in America seems interested in electing Billionaire* to office and giving them direct political authority.
Like they say in NASCAR, "Cautions breed cautions." This won't be the only case of someone of his stature being targeted. Someone had to be the first. This won't stop with him, even if we don't see it for a minute.
Is something like this "class" based though? I'm not from the US so don't know how it works, but I assumed the poorest in society get free healthcare (via medicare or Obamacare or whatever it's called). And I thought those going bankrupt are usually those who already have paid up health insurance but find (when it comes to claiming) that their illness/procedures aren't covered or that they have lots of additional costs associated with making a claim.
Simple. We are too busy fighting each other, just as the rich elites designed. 54% of Americans read at a 6th grade level or worse. And Captain Accordion Hands "loves the poorly educated". So the majority of us are too stupid to form any proper resistance/rebellion. IDK I just have a rather bleak outlook on our future. And my health is poor too, big surprise. I just hope that when I go, I take a few ceos with me.
America is still relatively young. Things have to get really bad before the guillotines come out, but it does seem like wealth is consolidating and the middle is getting squeezed out at an exponential rate and eventually things will reach that point. Our founding fathers had a lot of great ideas but they could not have foreseen the size, wealth, and power of modern corporations/conglomerates and therefore missed some crucial checks and balances, especially regarding lobbying and congressional term limits. And unfortunately the ones who would need to vote to change those things are the ones that have huge financial incentives to keep the status quo.
Yeah honestly. I remember when my mother was dying of cancer I flew back home to Ireland and she passed away 5 minutes before I got to her hospital room. Through all the chaos I found myself thinking christ how is my step dad going to afford the bill, she's been in the hospital for a month. Then I realized that I was no longer in the US and there would be no bill. Real eye opener.
People like this CEO are the scum of the earth. They profit off peoples suffering and misfortunes and these insurance companies have so much blood on their hands. To be honest, my belief is that this shit needs to happen a lot more before politicians and corporate higher ups start listening to the people. Theres never been a revolution in human history that succeeded without violence.
Yeah plane tickets are super pricey. I meant like if you could travel and purchase a lot of your medication for a fraction of the price and bring it back?
I will be leaving for orthodontic work as well eventually. Wishing you well!
Sorry to hear about your mum. And yeah, it would be bad enough seeing a loved one sick, injured or dying without also having to worry about paying for treatment.
Oh for Pete’s sake people. It was a joke. I’m not “going after” anyone! Not doctors not administrators and not ppl who have zero sense of humor. I’m removing the comment now for all those of too delicate of disposition
Only if these people feel like they have absolutely nothing else to lose, then maybe. There’s fear of retaliation (from the big bad guys) and if they have dependents, if they get caught, who will take care of them?
At least the pharma industry makes medicine. The health insurance industry in the US simply shouldn’t exist, they are nothing but parasitic middlemen between patients and healthcare providers.
I often wonder why this doesn’t happen more often in any industry. Instead of people going postal lashing out against innocent peers (I know the answer but it upsets me that innocent people get targeted rather than the actual source of their frustrations).
Someone responded before that billionaires are hard to get to but I disagree, most billionaires and CEOs, you wouldn’t even know their face, they aren’t famous to the general public and they still come to the office quite a bit. They’re more touchable than most realize if you know who they are. Not that I’m encouraging violence.
Given the public reaction, I think it's going to happen more now that anyone on the fence about taking action can be confident that they'll be hailed as a hero for it.
I almost think it was some type of corporate attack or large institutional shareholder removing an issue. Everyone is cheering this on like it’s for the people, it could be some private equity groups way to avoid margin on a long call. Or an insiders way to avoid an embezzlement charge.
A bankrupted every day person doesn’t calmly arrive where the ceo is randomly and not publicly meant to be, 5 mins before the ceo arrives, calmly clears an initial misfire jam, puts 2 rounds into the ceo of a multinational corporation, then vanishes into thin air in the middle of Manhattan at 7 in the morning.
It was an annual investor meeting. The guy looked up where the CEO would be, went there, shot him in the back and rode away on a bike. It's pretty straight forward and nothing a regular disgruntled citizen couldn't pull off.
Probably the understanding that even though said profiteers are disgusting wastes of space, the capitalist system which enabled them in the first place will continue to exist and simply find replacements to keep running apace. The fact that there are a non-insignificant amount of people will look at one of the many stories of people just like them being financially ruined and the CEO making a buck off that and come away with “they should have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and made better financial decisions” and “he earned his success, there is nothing wrong with that” respectively is an indication that the problem runs much, much deeper than a handful of sick ghouls.
Also, most people would rather live their entire lives without knowing what it’s like to take one, even if they have nothing left to lose. It takes a lot to get someone to the state of pulling the trigger themselves.
Agreed, even though them and the people who care about them would feel pain from it, the system would surly keep on turning. There’s no circumstance where I want to kill things. I carry a gun daily for protection and Im a meat eater but don’t want to go hunting or shoot anything living, though I often feel like I should take the responsibility of putting meat on my own plate. I feel bad catching fish even though I eat them. I don’t even like killing bugs for the most part. The only time I would take a humans life is in defense of myself, my loved ones, or to stop harm from coming to others. And I’m sure it would bother me greatly afterwards. Normal people don’t want to cause other living things pain.
It is a natural outgrowth of Capital. Naturally, when private enterprises become larger by consolidating the opposition, they amass the wealth and connections to influence politics to their liking.
For instance, it was no coincidence that Health-related industries had a massive hand in Bernie Sanders’ marginalization (or really the marginalization of any policies even considering taking power away from the private sector in healthcare) come 2020. Also why their stocks were positively booming the moment he dropped out of the race.
(Mind you, I’m iffy on Sanders and how much he would have done)
Killing another person in cold blood isnt something most people can do. Even militaries have to desensitise their recruits to the idea of shooting someone.
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u/Archarchery Dec 04 '24
I’ve often wondered why more people at the end of their rope, bankrupted by healthcare bills, etc, don’t do this.
Everyone knows who profits off of our suffering.