Forget Charlie Kirk, What about Luigi Mangione?

[KaraBulut]

Mangione was in court today. The weak terrorism charges against him were dropped by the judge.

New York judge tosses terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione, lets murder count stand

A judge has dismissed terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione in New York state’s case over the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

apnews.com

Fox News was all lusty about how hot he looked and repeated the video of him walking in a tight fitting tan uniform on a loop.

The Luigi fan club was there, too.

 

[KaraBulut]

More Mangione news-porn....

 

[rareboy]

The man we didn't know we needed.

Glad that the bogus terrorirism charges got turfed.

He will definitely face the consequences for the shooting but he sure made a lot of people nervous in the insurance industry and underscored for many people in the US, maybe for the first time, how fucking predatory and evil the private insurance grift scheme is.

 

[KaraBulut]

It's interesting how different media outlets have portrayed the judge's decision.

Several conservative outlets have used headlines along the lines of "DA faces humiliation as judge drops terrorism charge".

The terrorism charge was a stretch, just as some of the charges against Kirk's shooter seem like they're a little over-the-top.

It's an interesting time in America. We have cults that are springing up around both hate-mongers and around assassins. Notably, there's no cults in favor of healthcare CEOs.

 

[rareboy]

Well as I just noted in the Kirk thread...there may have been a little more Luigi in Tyler Robinson than I thought.

 

[KaraBulut]

The professional criminal profilers (i.e. the ones who aren't on Twitter) are pulling their hair out. Robinson is another shooter like Thomas Matthew Crook or Mangione, who didn't fit into a tidy box.

The evidence is accruing that Robinson is another nihilistic lost soul who rationalized something that his upbringing told him was a sin. There may some evidence that comes out that Robinson was radicalized by online interactions but more and more, it doesn't seem like this guy fits into a particular ideology and he seems to be another in a series of lost men in American society.

I don't know that I have a clear picture of Mangione's motives. Sometimes, when I'm dealing with some low-level useless call center worker in the Philippines or trying to actually talk to a human being at Amazon, I think I might understand Mangione's frustration. But I'm at a loss for specifics because it doesn't seem like he was personally affected by UHCG... so what was the motive?

 

[NotHardUp1]

Although I wouldn't argue with nihilism being a description. I suspect there is a new syndrome in the making in sociology and psychology.

The disaffection is the principal trait, combined with a sense of betrayal and abandonment, or true victimization.

There is likely some literary character who fits the profile, but I can't name him. It's not Iago.

 

[KaraBulut]

Although I wouldn't argue with nihilism being a description. I suspect there is a new syndrome in the making in sociology and psychology.

The disaffection is the principal trait, combined with a sense of betrayal and abandonment, or true victimization.

There is likely some literary character who fits the profile, but I can't name him. It's not Iago.

I agree. And hopefully, there will come a point where both parties stop exploiting the phenomenon and do something to figure out why we're having this problem.

It's not going to be a simple answer or a simple fix. It seems to have started with incidents like the Branch Davidian incident. It was escalated with the fallout from the 10 year Iraq-Afghanistan conflict, as a lot of lost, damaged people seem to have returned from the war with lasting psychological wounds. It's likely being fueled by social media and the internet. It's likely being fueled by bots from hostile countries. It seems to have connections to the gaming community and the large amount of idle time that young men seem to have.

Congress makes an effort to do something about it but then those efforts threaten some of the billionaires who are benefiting from internet addiction and radicalization. Those investigations seem to have radicalized some of those billionaires.

It's a problem that we have so many men under 30 who are seemingly so pessimistic about their future that they are willing to take actions on a single day of their life that will set them on the road to ruin for the remainder of their life.

 

[rareboy]

Honestly, I think that these men have always been out there, but isolated from a network of fellow travellers and a proliferation of guns and celebation of gun culture...they just didn't have the impetus or the ability to act on the impulses.

I think it was likely the Kennedy and King assassinations, followed by a spate of other politically motivated shootings and assassinations that made the notion actually glamorous to men who, feeling powerless to control things, realized that bullets let them control everything if only for a brief moment or two.

The odd bit about Luigi is that it was as much about a personal grievance as a desire to fight back against the insurance industry.

And I think that this kind of personalized sense of injury may be a core driver of actions.

 

[KaraBulut]

Honestly, I think that these men have always been out there, but isolated from a network of fellow travellers and a proliferation of guns and celebation of gun culture...they just didn't have the impetus or the ability to act on the impulses.

I think it was likely the Kennedy and King assassinations, followed by a spate of other politically motivated shootings and assassinations that made the notion actually glamorous to men who, feeling powerless to control things, realized that bullets let them control everything if only for a brief moment or two.

I do think that the assassinations that we saw in the late 1960s and early 1970s had a lot to do with a rapidly changing society that left some people feeling lost and confused and angry. That is something which that period in our history has in common with today.

There's an interesting book that I read a few years back that is becoming increasingly relevant to what we're seeing today. Author Clara Bingham, had the idea to interview some of the people involved in the social protest movements from the 60s and 70s. Hearing their reasoning, rationale and sometimes delusions was an interesting read. The book is Witness to the Revolution: Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul.

The motivations were different but something that the protestors (and in some cases, terrorists) all had in common: they thought that their actions were justified by their belief that they were doing something good. Killing a hate monger? Killing a CEO of a ruthless insurance company? Sound familiar?

 

[NotHardUp1]

As more and more citizens are relegated to constraints of labor and privation, if not poverty, then the number who act out, going out in a blaze, inevitably increases.

The solution is more socialism, made possible by taxation. Taxation should follow the money. That's not hard to do if the people ever wake up.

But as long as baby-killing and trans threats drive the know-nothings to the voting booth, it will not change.

 

[fabulouslyghetto]

3.3M views · 28K reactions | who’s STILL defending?…DAFURQ? wild that a year ago this random BTS @itsmelmitch and I did went so insane…the birth of DAFURQ | Jake Jonez

who’s STILL defending?…DAFURQ? wild that a year ago this random BTS @itsmelmitch and I did went so insane…the birth of DAFURQ

www.facebook.com

"Your honor stop" is so me. this is propaganda, this is fake

 

[NotHardUp1]

I read a commen yesterday that the mainstream media started eclipsing coverage of Luigi after they saw that the population was strongly behind him. Free press, my ass.