- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
Summary
Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot in a premeditated attack outside the New York Hilton Midtown before speaking at an investor conference.
The gunman, still at large, fired multiple times, leaving shell casings marked with the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.”
Authorities suggest Thompson was targeted but remain unclear on the motive. His wife confirmed prior threats against him.
Analysts speculate a possible vendetta tied to his company. The case raises questions about executive security, as Thompson lacked personal protection despite known risks.
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As of about a month ago there had been ~320 murders in NYC this year.
Yet this single one has captured the media’s attention nationwide and cops seem to be heavily focused on this one.
Because modern society at pretty much every institutional level sees the wealthy and powerful as not just more important than us, but they dont even see us. Hell, compare this to school shootings that only make local news now.
Historically, societies like this end in an incredibly brutal fashion. And until the wealthy and powerful really can build terminator style robot armies…
The masses are always going to win.
It’s kind of the natural consequences of hyper concentration of a finite and essential resource. People rarely sit around and starve voluntarily, and once the majority are starving, people start acting like a mob.
We see it day to day over minor stuff where people just refuse to follow societial norms. Everyday we’re shown that rules don’t really matter, and none of the people who matter are held accountable. If someone isn’t physically stopped from doing something, they take that as permission. Hell, that was the defense of most 1/6ers.
The social contract was invalidated a long time ago, people are just now realizing it. And that’s the only thing that really seperates us from animals.
Crashing out is gonna be the norm pretty fucking soon, I don’t think we have 4 years or that trump will be able to hold society together.
There’s a very high chance we’re gonna live in some interesting times.
People are interested in it (see Lemmy as an example), and news outlets publish stuff that gets clicks. What’s so hard to believe about that?
The media is treating it like a national tragedy, Walz was giving his condolences for some reason, and so are lots of other politicians.
It’s like when those billionaires all died in that submarine and the powerful people that run the media and politics treated it as some huge event and spent crazy money investigating.
They acted like it’s was 9/11, because to them $'s are what matters, so when one person with the same amount of $ as 100,000 people, they act like 100,000 average people die.
Do you not see that? The difference between how a wealthy person and a poor person are treated?
America used to have wealth worship, people still to some extent go to the Biltmore mansion to marvel at how nice robber barons lived centuries ago, or binge watch Downtown Abbey. But nowadays the vast amount of people upon hearing something bad happened to a billionaire, will at best say they dont give a fuck.
The contrast between what people are saying, and what they’re told by their leaders and the media isn’t jivving. And it’s obvious.
Look at history…
When societies are at the stage we are now, very very few bare any resemblance to that in just a decade or two. For better or worse, shit is likely to substantially change soon.
Edit:
To put it as simple as possible, the masses are told implicitly every day they don’t matter and only the wealthy do. Eventually people will start acting like their lives really don’t matter.
Which is bad for everyone, and has been happening for a while now. We’re just approaching the tipping point where “crashing out” is the majority opinion
This post really rings true. This is the small rumbling before the big quake.
The reason everyone is offering condolences and claiming this is bad is because the government is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, and that offers protection to the elite in society. Even on radical left lemmy, you can be banned for implying this is a good thing.
This person was at the top of a pyramid that lied to and deceived millions of people and made life absolute hell for people undergoing medical problems. He was responsible for that misery. He created hell on earth for those people. He was not that different than a mass-murderer, knowing full well what his policies would do, only his actions were legal.
His company delayed, denied, and defended, and the assailant had an answer to deny and an answer to defend but there was no delay, just a quick deposing of this guy. It was obviously symbolic.
It’s funny because the founding fathers of the US had enough of the bullshit from England and so they decided to rebel and used violence to create a New Republic… but their violence made them patriots and heroes. It’s just interesting… I haven’t seen 1 person call the assailant a hero yet. It’s not like the Founding Fathers of the US used rhetoric and voting to persuade England to stop its brutality.
I bet a lot of people are secretly thinking that assailant is a hero. (In accordance with lemmy’s policies, I am not saying he is a hero and instead am saying the assailant is very bad and violence is always bad.)
But we’re in such gilded-age end-times right now that the corporate media always parrot the idea that violence is always bad… (with the implied part being the government, backing the elite oligarchy, is the exception) and the populace has internalized that thinking out of fear.
We have democracy in this country and should vote in leaders that actually make legislation that is sensible, but it’s impossible because the bottom 40 percent of society are brain-washed by religious delusions that the elite thrust upon them in order to make them easier to control. The problems in society are caused by religion and it’s just impossible to make the stupidest bottom 40 percent of people stop believing in bullshit.
The elite have given people a choice: gun rights and policies for the rich… or no guns and policies for the poor. There is no middle class pro-gun party and it’s by design. We need to have liberals start embracing the NRA because any gun regulation seems toxic to middle America, and for good reason. To anyone who say the Democrats are not an anti-gun party, you’re lying and everyone can see through it. Any gun regulation is a slow decent to zero guns for regular people, and working class middle America knows it, which is part of why we keep ending up with these horrible leaders allowing health care in the US to descend into an abyss.
I haven’t seen 1 person call the assailant a hero
I’ve seen it in a few threads, and they’re right.
I finally understand what certain people mean when they talk about “good guys with guns”.
This was always the dream, the picture everyone tried to paint. Grabbing your powderhorn, Putting on your tricorne hat, and defending liberty against tyranny, and all that. It just never really actually happened.
Lol tricorn hat reminds me of
Tally ho lads.
I sure hope nobody copies this behavior of retribution against the billionaire class which is responsible for almost all of the worlds suffering.
Thoughts and Prayering so hard right now.
I sure hope the internet isn’t a reasonable indicator of how the general public feel about CEOs and billionaires. There are in fact many fantastic CEOs and billionaires who donate and focus their time and money and corporations to benefit communities. There’s more than a reasonable argument that without billionaires, the planet would be suffering more.
This movement of hating on the mega wealthy is misguided. It’s not like billionaires are actually hoarding wealth - they don’t have billions stuffed under their bed. They own companies and stock in companies that are worth money. The money is used to create or buy other companies, to invest in other companies, to create new opportunities, to create jobs.
The Board of Directors are decreasing overhead and increasing profit margins to satisfy Wall Street’s hunger. This is due to changing government regulations, mostly lead by Republicans. The Republicans want limited government, the dismantling of federal programs, an increase in private corporations, and greater opportunities for the wealthy to generate income off Wall Street speculation.
This act should be condemned and the murderer should be sent to prison.
Murdering one person isn’t going to accomplish anything. Murdering all the CEOs isn’t going to accomplish anything. It may feel good to you that this person’s family has lost someone they love in retribution for all the families who have lost the people they love. But it’s not going to prevent anyone else from dying.
Hopefully, after the crowd chills out from seething at the teeth, we can get back to discussing how fucked our health care system is. Oh, sorry - we just elected someone who explicitly says he’s going to make health care worse and more expensive.
Maybe we should give a shit about our government and who we’re voting for.
Maybe we should be shooting each other instead of these CEOs who present more as a symptom of the illness.Edit: I’m going to take that back. It’s clear that people are just angry about anything and everything. It doesn’t matter how or why or its relevance. It’s not just the internet, clearly. This is how we ended up with another Trump administration. Irrationality and fear are all that matter. Science, facts, context, intelligence, education; all passé. We are the mob standing by with pitchforks.
average lemmy.ml take. the billionaires aren’t gonna let you hit, go back to your algebra homework
This is quite ironic because a typical ml user’s take would be joyous over this news
I don’t believe there is a single billionaire who is a good person.
What gives them the rights to amass such obscene wealth off of the backs of their workforce just to choose what charitable causes they want to spend their ill gotten gains on.
Furthermore, I take issue with the whole stock market and its need for perpetual growth at any cost.
Then you should acknowledge that you are ignorant about who the billionaires are and what good they may be doing.
Most aren’t amassing wealth on the backs of a workforce. Most are making investments for the company they own to make money. As I said, they don’t have the money in their pockets. The company or the stock for the company is worth money.
Look at any sports team owning CEO. They’re not all great but many are decent people who contribute to their communities. And the people working for them are making decent money. The money the team they own makes is from fans spending money on tickets, buying merchandise, and selling broadcast rights.
This is surprising coming from an ml user, but otherwise i support your stance
Shootings must be rare in NYC given how much attention this one is getting.
Um ackshually, NYC is doing better than many other places, at least as far as per-capita homicide statistics go, according to this list I pulled out of Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
Sort by “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter” and you find NYC way down on the list. St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit is on the top. NYC is not even the worst in the state anymore, Buffalo is worse.
There aren’t often assassinations in NYC, unless you’re talking mob hits through the years.
What even is an assassination? It is entirely likely that this is based in a personal grievance. The guy did wrong by a lot of people. Might even have been a tyrannicide.
An assassination is when the victim is wealthy enough for the police to care.
An assassination is a targeted murder, no matter the cause. It’s not getting in a fight with someone, or trying to rob someone. You mean to kill that exact person.
