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In recent years, it really did seem like the media put in the effort to not glorify mass shooters by plastering their image all over the place, fueling speculation as to their motives, and generally making them look cool. There are major shooting incidents to which I don't even remember the perpetrator's name. It finally sank in that this kind of attention was counterproductive.
Which is why I am fascinated by the Luigi Mangione story. He cracked the code. News outlets are showing his face 24-7. Everyone is talking about the issues that he wants us to be talking about. This guy is the most famous, most popular, and, if the ladies are to be believed, sexiest criminal of the 21st century. Why? Basic competence at not being immediately apprehended? Selecting an unpopular target? Being attractive? Not being unattractive?
The mood on social media feels like the end of Joker. Full mask-off glorification of murder, but it's gleeful -- giddy even. Part of the thrill of voting for Trump was the idea that the people, through sheer collective desire, could will one person out of prison, to look at someone prosecuted by the justice system and say, "no, we have his back". Can it be any surprise that the left wants in on this intoxicating elixir?
Choice of target. Mangione isn't a mass shooter, he's an assassin, and he chose a target that almost anyone could at least understand wanting to kill.
I'm kind of hoping that Crooks broke the school shooter trend, and our disaffected white boys will start shooting ceos and politicians rather than children. Even assuming the CEOs don't deserve it, one dead CEO is an improvement over twenty dead kids.
I think this is a very bad trade. With spree killers, we at least had massive social opprobrium against them, such that the tactic was a resort only for the most nihilistic, dysfunctional and despairing among society. This new evolution is something different: killing for a cause, for an ideology, killing tribal enemies. The old sort of spree killing was a problem that was vexing but survivable, like wildfires or famine or organized crime; we could collectively band together to oppose it and to mitigate its effects. This version is corrosive to the very concept of society in the way that the old form was not, because the violence is fundamentally popular, and at the same time polarizing.
What this is leading to is more killing, not less. The killing will not constrain itself to such broadly unpopular targets as health insurance CEOs, nor to CEOs or senior politicians generally. It will most visibly start there, certainly, but some of the victims will be popular with one tribe or the other, and that tribe will then be motivated toward partisan revenge. Escalation will continue along this new axis, and people will realize that CEOs and senior politicians are increasingly hard targets, whereas it's much easier to just go for their supporters directly.
This is how peace and plenty goes away and never comes back within your (very possibly abbreviated) lifetime.
Like peace and plenty went away in my father's lifetime when he lived through the political murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Sharon Tate, etc.
Oh wait, no, the boomers who saw that in their youth lived through an unprecedented era of peace and plenty in human history.
No, not like your father's time, because your father's time was fundamentally unlike our current situation in a number of crucial ways, foremost among them the steep decline in trust and social cohesion, and the steep increase in polarization and tribalism. Our present system almost certainly cannot survive the kinds of hits society took through the 60s and 70s. We are at much, much higher risk of self-sustaining fratricide than they were.
Literal antifa gets frightened off from potential targets all the time- who do you think is going to be carrying out this tit-for-tat violence?
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