18 Comments

Admittedly not the first to say this; I think he's very much within the fuzzy-edged range of what's been dubbed "coworker beliefs".

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Yes 100 percent, wish I'd added that to the piece

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Cushy tech job from Ivy League education -> feels that he is beyond that, goes to co-work on a startup in Hawaii -> liberated, dabbles in mushrooms while hiking (podcasts say this is epic), is injured and realizes how expensive healthcare is without "a job" in America -> forced to reckon with his material condition for the first time in his life, shoots CEO.

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Michael Mann coded indeed.

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Sometimes the destination really is more important than the journey.

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The almost compulsive reasoning from first principles thing is a key trope of tpot people. You can see this in his comments on japanese urbanism etc.

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oh my god “high decouplers” make me want to clobber them. “high decouplers” are an argument for violence in and of themselves

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Certainly not your fault, but drives me crazy that 95% of the stories and memes and little Etsy crafts out there still say one of the bullet casings read “DEFEND” rather than “DELAY”, even though it was corrected pretty quickly. “Defend” doesn’t even make sense in context, and now I’m going to be seeing it on tote bags at the farmers market for the next year.

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"Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy."

The media fascination with this guy will be brief and intense, especially because he targeted a man who leads a company that has systematically made millions of lives unbearable. Will be become a symbol for the anti-capitalist movement? Will there be a 1970s-style rash of anti-establishment kidnappings, murders, and bombings?

Remember that for as much adulation as the press gave Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, they didn't do anything to get the farms back or reform banking. That came from the New Deal. The Panthers and other militant Black movements were waiting in the wings as MLK took center stage with his sit-ins and marches, but it took LBJ's mastery of the Senate to make civil rights the law of the land. Was the threat of violence a factor? Look at BLM to get th answer, and look how racism in the US has continued unabated (and has even become a badge of pride for a certain contingent).

This kid is going to Rikers Island where they don't get news feeds. The reality of living in the NY state prison system will bleach any social media ideology out of you. His fame dies down and he's less famous than Stephen Paddock, who had no reasons to do what he did. His high body count from the bump-stock spray'n'pray in Vegas did nothing to change the trajectory of American culture in any way; he's another forgotten maniac like Charles Whitman or the Trench Coat Mafia. The only change I can see happening is that CEOs will hire more private security.

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This is the most Gen X comment I've ever seen. Stick to zines.

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Any indication that he followed, quote-Xd, read, listened to female, LGBTQ+, and/or non-white people with any regularity? Does not having any interest in perspectives besides some type of bro perspective raise any flags to other bros?

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He's a lifter baby

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He's a rarity. Assuming he self determined his decision to kill, he's a murderer and sufferer of a sociopathy that is not common. His intellectual level is clearly genius. His planning and his execution is evidence of his ultra high IQ. His choice is unhealthy in the extreme, exposing himself essentially to his own loss of life. If convicted and he surely will be, he will never be free again. But he's also a folk hero. He knew all of that. He's closer to the character Hannibal, but he's not a torturer. His mistakes that caught him are now understandable. But only in hindsight, because he didn't calculate the unusual effort that would be added to the investigation and his capture. People are murdered and the investigations don't typically look like Law and Order episodes. His has. And, every Health insurance Executive will now hide so their avarice and their own sociopathy is not exposed. What a story. The future is not yet written about him and if his bold and homicidal actions make a difference. His story for a TV movie is worth tens of millions but he will not get paid. The writers and producers and actors will though. My bias, as a plaintiffs trial lawyer, is that the greed and corruption of health insurance practices is a much bigger economic and cultural problem that we have ever been able to confront. Will his actions change this? Not with Kamala and Hillary sidelined.

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Nowhere have I read this assassin shot his victim in the back . His reason(s) are secondary to his cowardice.

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Agreed, if he had wrestled with the CEO and strangled him with his bare hands, we'd be having a different conversation right now. What this society truly lacks is hand-to-hand, mano-a-mano combat to the death. Then I'd be able to take his reasons seriously and we could really talk substance.

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If he was motivated by denial of treatment of crippling back pain, shooting the CEO in the back is entirely apropos.

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this assassin is very ungentlemanly

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This isn't the movies

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