chat

'Going postal' was coined based on people shooting up their places of work back in the 90s, and the trend still continues. They don't tend to target people farther up the chain because the anger tends to be personal against the people they interacted with and high level positions don't tend to interact with the lower level staff that use violence to retaliate.

The simplest answer is that people who resort to extreme undirected violence are inherently not in a rational state of mind. Even the ideological fascists tend not to target the people that their ideology says are the real perpetrators. If the Christchurch shooter "logically" thought through his own Great Replacement theory, he wouldn't have targeted random Muslims.

Rational people would accurately target their oppressors. Mass shooters are not able to accurately identify their oppressors because, in order to commit a mass shooting, you must be in an irrational mental state. So they target people close to them or symbolic extreme targets, like schoolchildren. They're lashing out with no coherence.

there's an episode of Who Makes Cents which is, sheesh, over 5 years old now that i remember listening to. it's been a while, but the guest was this labor historian academic who wrote a book about the history of workplace violence in the US auto industry in the 60s-80s.

i'm paraphrasing.... one of the things i remember him saying was that the rates of workplace violence in the US haven't really changed that much, maybe they've even decreased slightly, but that decades ago the violence (and its threat) was directed at management. like, people brought guns to work (usually left in their car, but easily accessed) and did so for reasons of "self defense". it's noteworthy they considered managers fucking with their livelihood/organization to be an attack on their person to defend against. they felt the need to periodically remind management in little ways that if workers are pushed to hard, they are capable of bringing immediate violence.

whereas now, workplace violence tends to be unfocused/omnidirectional.

it certainly drove home the relevance of "false consciousness/cultural hegemony" today.

There have been few incidents of left wing terror in the US. Half of it was failed bombings, the other half was FBI infiltration and manipulation. Unfortunately this was during the hippie era so everyone was bro dude groovy. Though there are good hippies in that era too, but they didn’t commit “terrorism” as we describe today.

In modern times, there was the 60 year old Bernie Bro who attempted to shoot up a congressional baseball game attended by republicans (and I think some democrats). But the thing is he was not very rational, as others have pointed out with most mass shooters, so he bought a… fucking SKS. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a semi auto rifle used by the Soviets by the end of WWII. Now, a stupid person with a gun is still lethal, but surely one could make a better purchase in a country where they hand out guns like candy.

It's hierarchy or something.

Wife and kids are lesser. So are school children, pedestrians, etc. But the boss is the superior, so attacking him is unthinkable.

Americans 😒

I think there must be or have been. Corporate policies always have strict measures to make sure fired employees don't take out their anger before they leave

Other thing I can think of is that not many people would be willing to throw away their lives or their loved ones' by doing something that can hurt them even more than losing their job (the brutal reprisal of capital). I can really only think of very desperate or disturbed people like the Unabomber

or people joining hands through unionization and striking where they can have more confidence and hope. Sometimes that erupts into real violence, like the Battle of Blair Mountain

That’s exactly the reason for media sensationalism about fentanyl and violent mentally ill homeless people. We literally just got through a fucking pandemic but no dude, it’s all because of these drug zombies downtown.

Sadly, it’s working. People really are that fucking dumb.

They do, its a nonviolent form, the standard malicious compliance or working really slow etc. Despite Burgerland propaganda people aren't inherently violent, its more on condition and shooters are very much in reactionary mode. Then to add big bourgeois are really paranoid and have all sorts of security etc, so lower classes or those deemed dangerous aren't usually in contact with them in any shape or form, so they're all very nebulous, easier to be afraid of a closer more accessible scapegoat than a group of people you only hear of being really, really rich at most and nothing else. If they ever have beefs with each other they tend to take it out with legalities which are so violent it can hit all sectors of society economically, or typically start the cycle back at beating their spouses and children.

Adventurism... its bad folks.

well there was that guy a year or two ago that walked into his bank job and started blasting. but it's pretty rare yeah.

i mean assuming the story was true, there is a story of unpaid disgruntled north korean workers in china who killed their factory manager over unpaid wages. that would fit the bill right?

Violence framed in the context of oppressed vs oppressor is almost a fantastical concept in the modern day

Makes it all the more absurd that the most powerful military in the world can just kill impoverished middle eastern civilians with impunity

It's easy for cats to kill other cats, it's just the dogs they got trouble with