A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.
Four days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.
Grim? WTF? The dude is a hero.
We need a French solution to the oligarchy problem and this guy moved us in the right direction.
He’s a god damn hero.
May I remind you Trump got re-elected? The US chose for more money to mega corps and the ultra rich. There is no dictatorship in the US (yet), this system is by choice. Anyone who wanted to create a more social support system including better healthcare is painted as a communist, a nazi and as corrupt and en masse people vote for the person to make a fucked up system even worse. The US doesn’t need a French solution, the US needs to vote differently when they don’t like this shit. When you vote for oligarchs, you get oligarchs.
The US chose for more money to mega corps and the ultra rich.
we never had a choice for anything different.
Yet out of the 2 bad options, you chose the one which is the worst by a landslide.
He didn’t get reelected by people who support the rich, he got reelected by people who want to push people who they feel are below themselves further down. They think Trump will do that for them, not to them. They think he is simultaneously rich and in their side. They are willing to ignore any evidence to the contract because ‘he just needs to act that way as part of his plan, in the end he’s secretly on our side’… As the wolf openly eats the sheep to ‘keep up appearances’.
Because most people follow the one that shouts the loudest. The person who claims to have the answer to all problems usually does really well during elections, especially when there are many things not going too well. It doesn’t matter whether these persons actually have a solid solution, they don’t even have to have a plan, only shout they know what to do. People don’t want to spend their time to figure out whether a poliyion consists of empty promises and lies, people expect politicians to be honest. Most of the time the populist politicians not just claim they have the answer and solution to all, they also make their competition look evil by claiming they are corrupt, nazis, communists, pedophiles, etc. “You don’t want to vote for a pedo, do you?” No matter the acts they committed themselves. For example, Hitler claimed to be a national ‘socialist’ while claiming the dirty communists are evil, winning the socialist votes. Putin, who is a full nazi based on his actions, invades Ukraine “to fight nazis”. Trump, who is an extreme right wing politician with a long friendship with Epstein and now a criminal record, claims his opponents are nazis, pedos and criminals and those should never hold office.
Facts don’t matter, it’s all feelings. The one who knows how to hit that usually is very popular during less stable times. So when billionaires claim they can end wars, bring us to Mars, fix the economy, drive out those criminal desease infested immigrants (or jews in nazi Germany setting) (see, making them look super evil, dehumanizing them, creating a villain only they have a solition to), people just think “he’s successful with all his money, lying on such a large scale can’t be possible right, the opposition apparently is super evil, he must be a good candidate”.
TLDR: Fueling hate and anger, claiming to be the only one with a solution usually works to get people’s votes. And the general public is too dumb to see beyond empty promises and they dismiss facts over feelings.
I don’t see assassin as “hero” or “heartthrob”.
Our high trust society has eroded due to massive corruption at the highest level (SCOTUS popularity/trust plummeted) , late stage capitalism and catering to billionaires, and incompetent politicians. The incoming administration will be without a doubt no help in this aspect.
The assassin has unfortunately become “necessary”. I don’t praise his actions but I understand why this person decided to take it into their own hands (ie, family or loved one impacted by “deny, delay, defend” policies).
I don’t condone murder, but I also dont feel sad about a mass murderer being gunned down.
That’s pretty much what condone means. From MW:
To overlook, forgive, or disregard (an offense) without protest or censure. synonym: forgive.
From Cambridge:
to ignore or accept behavior that some people consider wrong
So you’re perhaps not encouraging it?
Hmm… TIL The word condone means something slightly different than I thought.
That said, one can still want a murderer to face justice while also not being upset about the victim death.
But I suspect this story has quite few people realizing they do condone murder in some cases.
Heartthrob maybe going a bit too far considering this guy might be a total loon whether or not you agree with what he did.
But then there are people who propose marriage to serial killers after they’ve already been incarcerated.
If the disaffected lunatic fringe can be redirected from shooting up schools to targeting CEOs instead, simply by the promise of becoming folk heroes as opposed to villains, that would be a massive improvement.
Sure, but I don’t think people should be falling in love with lunatics even if the lunatic does something they like.
And for all we know, this guy is a lunatic. Or has done some horrible thing that has nothing to do with this. He could be a rapist or a pedophile or batters his kids… or he could be a nice guy who couldn’t take it anymore.
And until he’s caught, we probably won’t know.
But apparently people love jumping to conclusions. If this guy turns out to be some sort of horrible person for other reasons, I will not be surprised. Hero-worship of anonymous people is not very smart.
If an awful person ends their life doing something heroic rather than villainous, maybe they can be remembered for that instead. Maybe not. Probably the circumstances will be complicated in how they are weighed.
As for this fellow, I feel somewhat confident that the public will not accept whatever person they pin the blame upon as The Adjuster or Spartacus or whatever we call him, alive or dead. They cannot be trusted, so he cannot be caught. He’s well on his way to myth.
