this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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This is tragic. Nobody should be gunned down in the street like this. I expect the NYPD, the media, and the politicians to spend exactly as much time and resources on this horrific crime as they do for every other individual that has been murdered in NYC this year. Not a fucking minute of police work more, not one fucking dollar of resources more, not one fucking article more, not one fucking minute of airtime more than any other person.
I agree. Which is why we should address the problem by dealing with the absolutely ghoulish situation that is American health care, profiteering, and late-stage capitalism writ large. If there's one thing I am very happy about, it is the fact that the number one thing being talked about due to this – besides the shooting itself – is the problem that caused it and so many other deaths; not a preference for vigilante justice, not guns, not terrorists, but a desire for profit above all else, regardless of how many die from lack of care as a result.
To be clear, I suspect you agree, at least with the "ghoulish situation that is American health care" part. But what I want to highlight here is that I don't think almost anyone wants to live in a world where things like this happen, much less one where so many of us are happy about it. In the end, though, we don't get a choice. We live in that world, and it is far more important for us to worry about fixing that than it is for us to wring our hands when one of the 1% dies while the millions he's killed got nowhere near as much sympathy.
Murder is obviously bad. Even when it's justified, it is a tragedy, and indicative of a failure to find a better solution. But this is a failure of the system people like Brian Thompson helped to create. On some other sites, I see a lot of people saying things like what you've done here. They spend time focusing on how his death is tragic, prefacing anything else they wish to say with statements to that effect as though they were warding against a curse. Individually, I don't find this to be a problem. But when a lot of people are doing it? I think that's an insult to his victims.
Is this sarcasm? I'm going to assume this is sarcasm.
I'm dead serious. I oppose the misanthropic celebrations of someone's killing. At the same I resent the classism of treating this particular killing as more important just because it is a rich person.
I've been thinking about this today. The chickens really are coming home to roost. The US military has spent decades dumping cash and assets into our media to convince young men that the best way to solve problems is to kill "bad" people. We're primed to celebrate death already. Even in the 19th century when Anarchists were going around killing people who literally hired private armies to gun down strikers, the public was generally unsympathetic to violent retribution. Nowadays violence is the standard even when it's visited upon the investing class that the military was established to serve. Americans see a bad person getting killed and we're happy about it because we as a culture now believe that this is the way to solve problems. Considering that this is the public reaction, this could contribute to a solution where it wouldn't in a more sane culture which would not have allowed a mass murderer like Thompson to kill thousands every year in the first place.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bullies-baboons-retool-their-culture.html
I always think back to this story and wonder if the same could happen for humans in some way. Maybe one day we'll figure out a way to fix our societies
The suffragettes are remembered fondly. They even had a rail line named after them in London.