I was really ready to agree with the article as it got started. But it took a turn for the usual. I was hoping it would go into how Americans cheered people like Bonnie and Clyde, how america has always had a soft spot for "justified" lawlessness, a disdain for the corrupt upper echelon that has a disdain for them, that sort of stuff. Instead I got what I probably would've expected had I not been born an optimist. I guess tomorrow is a new day.
eloquent. celebrating someone's death is base, but oddly forgivable in some cases for its relative honesty. the people who "abhor violence" and appeal to some imagined sense of shame always seem insincere to me. as though affecting disgust could elevate them above something they are mostly both incapable of and at the mercy of.
there's a reflexive self-serving lie some people reach for when they "condemn violence," and I think it reveals a deceptive instinct. they have no problem with it being done on their behalf and for much lesser offenses. I guess if there's one thing reasoning with violence cures you of it's sanctimony.
what the effect of the killing of this CEO (literally, a symbol, his job is all anyone remembers about him) more closely resembles is the idea of a Girardian scapegoat, where the tensions in the society are so unresolvable, it's going to start sacrificing individuals to let off the tension so it can cohere again. that's about as american and human as it gets. six weeks ago the US was on the edge of a civil war. today, less so. it's sad for the guys family, but maybe there is comfort for them in the sheer randomness of it. to me the killer and his manifesto are not meaningful. the popular hatred of the insurance business is not meaningful. they are as random as a car crash, a robbery, or a stroke.
I'm saying that affecting outrage or shock at violence is as morally culpable as celebrating the death of a stranger, because they both reveal a latent weakness and lack compassion or fortitude.
> The killing of Brian Thompson was the act of an apparent madman whose confused ideology defies social media ambitions to make him some kind of hero. In my view much of the celebration of the killing is self-indulgence. I doubt it accomplishes anything. But treating it as an aberration is self-delusion. It’s as American as cherry pie.
This sort of argument is half-way to a Thompsonian act.
Given a large enough population, the entire spectrum of human behavior, from moral to depraved, will be on offer.
We have liberty to do much. We want minimal legal constraints on liberty. Yet without some sort of moral compass to keep us more or less on course, we can rationalize all depravity.
I don't see Mr. Popehat offering much right/wrong guidance, but I may have missed it.
Why? They're both acts of violence that people gloated over. He's not saying "killing this guy is just as bad as lynching innocent black people". He's saying America likes killing, whether it's someone you think should be killed or not.
There's still a pretty big difference between violence against random innocents and violent "revenge" against a powerful force. I'm sure people would also be thrilled if an insurance bigwig got sent to prison, or tarred and feathered, or humiliated in some other way.
He isn't comparing them. He's using the casual and festive nature of many lynchings as support for his argument that America has long embraced extrajudicial killing.
Lynchings were not always reserved for blacks nor were they solely conducted by whites. It's also not an American thing, it is human nature and exactly why we have a legal system. There were some racially motivated lynchings of course but to reduce it to that is misleading. Approximately 40% of lynching victims were not black.
"Read the room" is my absolute least favourite though terminating cliche. It's just "agree with me because everyone else does". You may as well say that it's "yikes" or "gives you the ick".
He's not wrong about America's sordid obsession with violence, but conflating the public reaction to Brian Thompson's death with public lynchings of black Americans is beyond tone-deaf. People aren't celebrating his death because they're hateful bigots; they're celebrating his death because he was the top dog of a system that has personally hurt them. He hit first.
For a piece about violence, you think he'd at least mention the corporations who turn a profit by deciding who lives and who dies.
> But the truth is that celebrating the death of other human beings because we hate them or what we think they stand for is absolutely American.
Remember that lynchings were always justified as a form of revenge, too, whether “protecting” white womanhood or deterring criminals. If we say that a health insurance CEO “hit first” and therefore his shooting is somewhat justified, it’s not easy to draw a line where you can say it’s invalid to apply the exact same logic to someone people are certain raped a white woman, committed a violent robbery, is conspiring to groom a child, or stole an election – once people get a sense of vengeance going, they’ll work backwards as needed to justify an emotionally satisfying outcome.
Even in the most sympathetic cases we should be thinking about how make the rule of law better, not bypassing it.
It's shameful how the media soft-launders the system rather than confronting it, but that's what enough people tell themselves they'd rather see. We didn't end up with the electoral result that we got because people are happy.
