You make so many excellent points here, I'm not even sure where to start.
1. I agree with you regarding the certainty of Mangione's capture, and the vast resources expended on disincentivizing violence against the elite. We are all equal in the eyes of the law, but some animals are more equal than others...
2. You discussed dystopian films a while ago, and I think it's worth pointing out that many of them - particularly "Elysium" - envision a world in which the haves take extreme measures to protect themselves from the have-nots. This dynamic is not only predictable, it is inevitable. You rightly point out South Africa and Latin America as places where fortified compounds are already the norm. Many places in America already have gated communities, and I think we can expect that the gates will be getting higher and stronger.
3. The response from both the mainstream and alternative media is exactly what I would expect.
The mainstream media is struggling to craft an appropriate narrative, because they have been promoting class warfare for the last decade (at least), but they are simultaneously in the thrall of the upper class. Thus, when an act of class warfare extends beyond the merely symbolic - e.g., the BLM riots that left wealthy enclaves untouched - they aren't quite sure what tone to take. They seem to be settling on an angle that focuses on how Mangione was the product of privilege while his victim bootstrapped himself to the pinnacle of success through hard work and talent. The message, in other words, is that this was not a legitimate act of class warfare, but rather a violent tantrum by a spoiled rich kid. This allows the mainstream media to maintain their ideological commitment to Communism, without biting the hand that feeds them.
The alternative press has predictably bifurcated into two trains of thought: Mangione is a hero for killing one of our corporate overlords, or Mangione is a plant/patsy/actor who may not even be the real killer.
4. I also agree with your assessment that this was genuinely an unsanctioned assassination. Given that such events are very rare, I can see why there's a great deal of skepticism about that. It would not surprise me if there was some string pulling behind the event, but based on what we know right now, I don't think that's the most likely explanation. It seems like the elite were genuinely surprised that this happened. Obviously, they're going to co-opt it to support their agenda - as you say, justifying further repression of the unwashed masses - but, it does look like Mangione had a bad experience with the medical system and was radicalized. Unlike most people in that situation, who have no choice but to suffer in silence, he happened to have the resources to exact some revenge. We can be certain that we'll never know the whole truth, regardless.
Great review. I am not sure what to make of it myself. Does it represent a shift, an educated lone gunman making a genuine strike against the lower echelons of international elites? Is this something they need to fear? Mangione wasn't a moron clearly, although I fully expect some psychiatric report to confirm he is crazy or deluded in due course. I can't imagine the Amazon reviews will last either; too articulate.
I have often felt the combination of elites being relatively low in number and the modern ease with which information can be stored and shared means their days are numbered. All the technology they are ushering in can be turned on them too. How hard would it be to track Central Bank owners in real time and publicize it?
As our world collapses we each have less and less to protect as its value is eroded. Property, money, savings, investments. Elites have wrecked it all and I suspect this will hasten their demise as more Mangiones emerge. What do they have to lose?
Thanks Spaceman. The proliferation of information on the internet, even with the elite counter-strategies of divide and conquer and muddy the waters of what is true or false and even with mass censorship and AI/bot astroturfing, is deeply uncomfortable for our upper elites. They love the internet because it gives them much greater control over people, allowing them access to unlimited amounts of information on people that they would otherwise not have, but they hate that the masses are chatting with each other to learn and grow. The next step of their solution is what they just instituted in Australia: to destroy internet anonymity and to tie one’s real identity to their online presence, all under the false guise of child safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment
That or something else like that will eventually come to America.
I agree with you that the UHC CEO was merely an elite cog; not important at all in the grand scheme of things. Now if the masses turn their sights onto higher levels, that could be a scary thing for them. The upper elites both fear and hate the masses even as they parasite off them…
This is true of anything useful to elites; firearms, for instance. Anything useful to them is equally useful to their enemies. Even the establishment of internet IDs can be weaponized. "Approved" IDs will have access to more, and once that is cracked open it becomes a vulnerability.
Their real weakness is their need to remain few in number, and their recent descent into a declining aristocracy unable to adapt fast enough. A lethal combination.
The clampdown of the internet is just one example of weakness that is becoming more and more apparent no matter how many central banks they control. My belief is they are nobody's future.
How are you defining elite here? What qualifies as one to you? Yes, he is a ivy league graduate, attended an expensive private high school and his grandfather was apparently very wealthy, but the grandfather apparently had ten children, enormously diluting his wealth.
For clarity, my use of "elite" here refers to the notion of global or international elites, not local elites like the unfortunate CEO or politicians. The serious people who control nations.
Clearly Mangione and others like him would not qualify. What he would represent is the much discussed oversupply of local elites that tends to trigger the internecine warfare mentioned in passing in the article. He could have went far perhaps had he cultivated the right contacts. Not any more of course. I strongly suspect he won't make it far.
I'm open to the possibility that the whole thing is fake. Between the perfectly framed "surveillance" video of the shooting and the shooter carrying not just the murder weapon but "anti health industry literature" on his person at a McDonald's 5 days later. Does he not leave home without such literature? Looking to share it with passersby like an airport Hari Krishna? Aside from the fact that a CEO of a half trillion dollar corporation was almost always going to have some kind of personal security well prior to this episode, since he was at the very least a kidnapping target even in the best of times. I find the possibility of him walking the street in NYC without it to be nearly as unlikely as Bill Gates doing so. I could keep going but you get the idea. OTOH, since caught, our perpetrator does appear sincere, or at least a very good actor.
But why? As you note, the media has hyped it up all they can, they obviously want us looking at this and talking about it. They could have minimized as they have done with other shootings. If the CEO had just wanted to disappear for some reason, the media hype seems counterproductive.
Elizabeth Warren's comments suggest there is elite openness to another overhaul of the health care system. Certainly Trump is open to ending Obamacare. The "left" can obviously no longer claim to love Obamacare, their reaction to this incident is (finally) their tacit admission that they hate it. Kind of like how they needed 9/11 (or something like it) to pass the already drawn up Patriot Act, perhaps this incident (or something like it) was needed to instigate the next phase of health care "reform." This doesn't strike me as very plausible TBH, but it's where the "facts" (as much as they can be believed) have led me.
Given all of the fakery about one cannot rule it out altogether. There are several problematic things about this event.
1. How did Mangione find out which door Thompson would be exiting - in NYC (a place with near total coverage from the Panopticon) from a large hotel with multiple exits? Hotels are not in the habit of giving out such info to random 'tech-bros' off the street.
2. As others have pointed out, how was he able to escape so easily to a neighboring state?
3. Also noted here and elsewhere, the gaslight media is not having the kind of reaction they would if someone had liquidated a Soros or Gates. They're not really condemning the whole 'folk-hero' hoopla, even though Thompson was just a small cog in a very large machine. UHC will continue in its rape and looting and there are more than enough clowns lined up to take Thompson's 10-million a year job to supervise the operation.
I suspect there is more to this story than the bogus David v. Goliath narrative.
My initial reaction was one of a useful idiot being used to clean shop, similar to when a number of CEOs in Russia had falls/commited suicide. The free flow of information via social media is normally indicative of elite approval. The fact we can read about it, see comments re the publics approval is interesting. Compare and contrast during the pandemic when disadent voices were squashed. It might be as you say, but either way it is a distraction and probably not worth spending time on.
Somebody went out of their way to kill someone else. This happens all the time. Usually it's called 'premeditated murder' but if a rich or famous person is involved class politics demands that it be called 'assassination'. Does a manifesto really turn everything more important? How many killings have we seen with manifestos where nothing actually changes. In fact, Mangione's favorite manifesto - Industrial Society and Its Future - changed nothing. And Uncle Ted killed and injured a bunch of people over time. Low-level violence seems unable to change anything in a beneficial direction or, really, change anything at all.
Politically influenced murders are very rare. With that said, Ernst Junger would agree with you - he was deeply enmeshed in the circle of those plotting against Hitler in the July 20 plot, but he refused to participate himself because he thought it would change nothing even if successful; that the Machine was greater than any individual, and that if Hitler had been killed then Goring or someone else would have been put in to assume the same role. Junger analyzed other major assassinations and concluded that they never had the effect that the perpetrator intended.
Getting rid of Lenin led to Stalin - less interested in Global Communism. ( an evil villain sure, but at least he got rid of the more dangerous Trotsky.)
'But it will also be interesting to see if UHC quietly lowers their claim rejection rates moving forward'
I think I've seen some hint of this in my reading. At the very least, now that denial rate is high on the public radar, I'll be surprised if this doesn't trigger some sort of attempt by insurance companies to get lower on the denial-rate chart.
However, just simply mentioning this has gotten me flamed elsewhere for *condoning murder!*.
I posted about this too today, riffing off Walter Kirn and Taibbi. The official narrative is trending toward support, as another means to distract America from the will of Trump's mandate to dismantle the deep state and the Health cartel. And to reempower the demoralized left.
Sure, it's possible the media is hyping him up as a distraction. They take their orders from their oligarch owners and follow it through; they buried without even a peep the New Zealand Brenton Tarrant attack, for example, as it didn't further any running elite narrative. Each of these attacks should be looked at and parsed within it's context, I think; there isn't a one-rule-fits-all. For example, if one applied a hard and fast rule, would it mean *every* time someone commits a high profile attack and the media covers it that the attacker was part of a conspiracy or in furtherance of an elite over-arching agenda? Here Mangione was an Ivy league grad, good looking, valedictorian of his high school class, planned the attack well, and isn't easily categorized politically. Perhaps the elites are trying to figure him out and what he means, too.
One particular statement from this story disturbed me- "You can see all the charts here how the wealth disparity really skyrocketed after getting off the gold standard in 1971, and it accelerated further after the decline of the Soviet Union - without fear of communism holding financial predators in check they were free to dramatically jack up executive compensation while ruthlessly decreasing worker pay."
Since when has communism held financial predators in check? Are you not aware of the financial oligarchy that operated before the 'fall' of the Soviet Union and that still exists today? What rate of wages did the average factory employee earn in the U.S.S.R.? Are you not aware of the wealth disparity in Russia and in China? Wealth disparity isn't the result of capitalism, it's the result of corporate fascism and the suppression of entrepreneurs due to fascist / communist government policies that reward large corporations while destroying small businesses. The free enterprise system gave the common man a brief era of opportunity in which to advance economically. My father was born poor but worked his ass off before the era of excessive government regulations had evolved into what we have today. He achieved success without the help of a labor union or communism. There are no success stories in communist countries unless you are a member of the ruling elite or you are a boot licking peasant that brown noses his way up through the party ranks. Economist Ludwig von Mises had a name for people who believed communist propaganda: "useful idiots." The fear of communism doesn't hold predators in check, it punishes hard working people and rewards criminal dictators.
Hi Jim, to clarify, the point made with that statement isn’t to argue in favor of communism. I’m not a communist and it’s an ideological system not in line with human nature. Rather, the statement is meant to argue that capitalist executives in the West were fearful of workers organizing together under the ideology of communism and overthrowing the capitalist system, therefore they made it a point to keep wealth disparities from growing too extreme. It’s not an argument in favor or disfavor of any ideology, just perception of incentives and psychology.
Thank you for the clarification. I'm surprised the media would want to cover this CEO's murder since it exposes the vulnerabilities of the 1%ers. If the perp hadn't been arrested they probably would've buried the story.
So is your thinking influenced by all the 4Chan stuff? Or are you the creator of all of the 4Chan posts that seem to track your writings?
Fascinating person whoever you are. I agree with many of your takes on political-economy and history, despite being squarely in what you label the pro-"Globohomo" camp.
I'm sure you would never do anything to dox yourself but I am absolutely fascinated by what your educational and professional background might be.
I'm guessing alienated conservative graduate student. Someone well-read and thoughtful, iin any case.
Thanks Verwirrt. I don’t post or lurk on 4chan, although I occasionally come across memes from there - I’ve just never liked the format, plus it’s full of feds. While I’d prefer not to dox myself, most of what I’ve learned has been through a painful decades-long trial-and-error process, not learned via formal education. It’s interesting that you consider yourself squarely in the pro-globohomo camp — most of the people who self-identify in this camp (without using this label, of course) I’ve found to be rigidly narrow-minded, ideological, arrogant, and unwilling to listen to alternative viewpoints. I’d be interested in your perspective and approach if you ever decide to write about it.
Sources tell me that the shooter had recently undergone this operation, which apparently Chris Brunet has undergone as well, leading to erratic behavior in recent months: https://youtu.be/7_RgXuIgBss
Excellent article! Do you think the Two-Tier aspect will affect people (eg the speed and effiency of this 'justice' compared to the slow or absent justice for normal people)?
It's clear they can pull their finger out when they want - the fast track courts after the Southport events - and then go back to sleep.
One thing I did find rather demoralising was the immediate reaction vids from people who decided that they must be against what this man did because the loony left support him. It's as if every issue has a side and we must all follow our team.
That's by design. I consider myself a leftist, but I have more in common with a working class right-winger than I do with an elite liberal.
Half the time I find they believe in many of the same principles as me, just expressed differently.
Edited to add: while I consider myself a leftist, I am confident many other leftists would say I am not one because there seem to be as many competing left-isms as there are leftists.
The question remains, how does a lone person know the whereabouts of a heavily-guarded person, and the one rare moment when he is not? Too much effort has gone into making the YALG (yet another lone gunman) story popular. I’m in agreement with Styxhexenhammer666, this has a Sirhan Sirhan vibe to me.
You make so many excellent points here, I'm not even sure where to start.
1. I agree with you regarding the certainty of Mangione's capture, and the vast resources expended on disincentivizing violence against the elite. We are all equal in the eyes of the law, but some animals are more equal than others...
2. You discussed dystopian films a while ago, and I think it's worth pointing out that many of them - particularly "Elysium" - envision a world in which the haves take extreme measures to protect themselves from the have-nots. This dynamic is not only predictable, it is inevitable. You rightly point out South Africa and Latin America as places where fortified compounds are already the norm. Many places in America already have gated communities, and I think we can expect that the gates will be getting higher and stronger.
3. The response from both the mainstream and alternative media is exactly what I would expect.
The mainstream media is struggling to craft an appropriate narrative, because they have been promoting class warfare for the last decade (at least), but they are simultaneously in the thrall of the upper class. Thus, when an act of class warfare extends beyond the merely symbolic - e.g., the BLM riots that left wealthy enclaves untouched - they aren't quite sure what tone to take. They seem to be settling on an angle that focuses on how Mangione was the product of privilege while his victim bootstrapped himself to the pinnacle of success through hard work and talent. The message, in other words, is that this was not a legitimate act of class warfare, but rather a violent tantrum by a spoiled rich kid. This allows the mainstream media to maintain their ideological commitment to Communism, without biting the hand that feeds them.
The alternative press has predictably bifurcated into two trains of thought: Mangione is a hero for killing one of our corporate overlords, or Mangione is a plant/patsy/actor who may not even be the real killer.
4. I also agree with your assessment that this was genuinely an unsanctioned assassination. Given that such events are very rare, I can see why there's a great deal of skepticism about that. It would not surprise me if there was some string pulling behind the event, but based on what we know right now, I don't think that's the most likely explanation. It seems like the elite were genuinely surprised that this happened. Obviously, they're going to co-opt it to support their agenda - as you say, justifying further repression of the unwashed masses - but, it does look like Mangione had a bad experience with the medical system and was radicalized. Unlike most people in that situation, who have no choice but to suffer in silence, he happened to have the resources to exact some revenge. We can be certain that we'll never know the whole truth, regardless.
Thanks Alex - great and insightful comment.
Great review. I am not sure what to make of it myself. Does it represent a shift, an educated lone gunman making a genuine strike against the lower echelons of international elites? Is this something they need to fear? Mangione wasn't a moron clearly, although I fully expect some psychiatric report to confirm he is crazy or deluded in due course. I can't imagine the Amazon reviews will last either; too articulate.
I have often felt the combination of elites being relatively low in number and the modern ease with which information can be stored and shared means their days are numbered. All the technology they are ushering in can be turned on them too. How hard would it be to track Central Bank owners in real time and publicize it?
As our world collapses we each have less and less to protect as its value is eroded. Property, money, savings, investments. Elites have wrecked it all and I suspect this will hasten their demise as more Mangiones emerge. What do they have to lose?
Thanks Spaceman. The proliferation of information on the internet, even with the elite counter-strategies of divide and conquer and muddy the waters of what is true or false and even with mass censorship and AI/bot astroturfing, is deeply uncomfortable for our upper elites. They love the internet because it gives them much greater control over people, allowing them access to unlimited amounts of information on people that they would otherwise not have, but they hate that the masses are chatting with each other to learn and grow. The next step of their solution is what they just instituted in Australia: to destroy internet anonymity and to tie one’s real identity to their online presence, all under the false guise of child safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment
That or something else like that will eventually come to America.
I agree with you that the UHC CEO was merely an elite cog; not important at all in the grand scheme of things. Now if the masses turn their sights onto higher levels, that could be a scary thing for them. The upper elites both fear and hate the masses even as they parasite off them…
This is true of anything useful to elites; firearms, for instance. Anything useful to them is equally useful to their enemies. Even the establishment of internet IDs can be weaponized. "Approved" IDs will have access to more, and once that is cracked open it becomes a vulnerability.
Their real weakness is their need to remain few in number, and their recent descent into a declining aristocracy unable to adapt fast enough. A lethal combination.
The clampdown of the internet is just one example of weakness that is becoming more and more apparent no matter how many central banks they control. My belief is they are nobody's future.
🎯 They lost control of the printing press. Someday they’ll lose control of the internet.
They never had control of the internet. That is what they are trying to create. I believe it will fail.
Mangione was a born member of the elite, the CEO was not.
How are you defining elite here? What qualifies as one to you? Yes, he is a ivy league graduate, attended an expensive private high school and his grandfather was apparently very wealthy, but the grandfather apparently had ten children, enormously diluting his wealth.
For clarity, my use of "elite" here refers to the notion of global or international elites, not local elites like the unfortunate CEO or politicians. The serious people who control nations.
Clearly Mangione and others like him would not qualify. What he would represent is the much discussed oversupply of local elites that tends to trigger the internecine warfare mentioned in passing in the article. He could have went far perhaps had he cultivated the right contacts. Not any more of course. I strongly suspect he won't make it far.
It is not murder to cap a Fat Corporat CEO; it is the path to becoming a Based Legend. Saint Luigi Did Nothing Wrong.
Incorrect. Murder is decidedly illegal, however much you disliked the CEO.
That just makes it sound even more Based. Luigi Did Nothing Wrong. It's not murder, it's just that the Jewish Controlled State called it murder.
It's self-defense. Kill Corpos. Behead Corpos. Roundhouse kick Corpos into the concrete. Slam dunk a Corpo baby into the trashcan.
Hi Will, you’re welcome to comment here but keep the fedposting off. I’ll be deleting comments like this in the future.
I'm open to the possibility that the whole thing is fake. Between the perfectly framed "surveillance" video of the shooting and the shooter carrying not just the murder weapon but "anti health industry literature" on his person at a McDonald's 5 days later. Does he not leave home without such literature? Looking to share it with passersby like an airport Hari Krishna? Aside from the fact that a CEO of a half trillion dollar corporation was almost always going to have some kind of personal security well prior to this episode, since he was at the very least a kidnapping target even in the best of times. I find the possibility of him walking the street in NYC without it to be nearly as unlikely as Bill Gates doing so. I could keep going but you get the idea. OTOH, since caught, our perpetrator does appear sincere, or at least a very good actor.
But why? As you note, the media has hyped it up all they can, they obviously want us looking at this and talking about it. They could have minimized as they have done with other shootings. If the CEO had just wanted to disappear for some reason, the media hype seems counterproductive.
Elizabeth Warren's comments suggest there is elite openness to another overhaul of the health care system. Certainly Trump is open to ending Obamacare. The "left" can obviously no longer claim to love Obamacare, their reaction to this incident is (finally) their tacit admission that they hate it. Kind of like how they needed 9/11 (or something like it) to pass the already drawn up Patriot Act, perhaps this incident (or something like it) was needed to instigate the next phase of health care "reform." This doesn't strike me as very plausible TBH, but it's where the "facts" (as much as they can be believed) have led me.
Given all of the fakery about one cannot rule it out altogether. There are several problematic things about this event.
1. How did Mangione find out which door Thompson would be exiting - in NYC (a place with near total coverage from the Panopticon) from a large hotel with multiple exits? Hotels are not in the habit of giving out such info to random 'tech-bros' off the street.
2. As others have pointed out, how was he able to escape so easily to a neighboring state?
3. Also noted here and elsewhere, the gaslight media is not having the kind of reaction they would if someone had liquidated a Soros or Gates. They're not really condemning the whole 'folk-hero' hoopla, even though Thompson was just a small cog in a very large machine. UHC will continue in its rape and looting and there are more than enough clowns lined up to take Thompson's 10-million a year job to supervise the operation.
I suspect there is more to this story than the bogus David v. Goliath narrative.
My initial reaction was one of a useful idiot being used to clean shop, similar to when a number of CEOs in Russia had falls/commited suicide. The free flow of information via social media is normally indicative of elite approval. The fact we can read about it, see comments re the publics approval is interesting. Compare and contrast during the pandemic when disadent voices were squashed. It might be as you say, but either way it is a distraction and probably not worth spending time on.
Somebody went out of their way to kill someone else. This happens all the time. Usually it's called 'premeditated murder' but if a rich or famous person is involved class politics demands that it be called 'assassination'. Does a manifesto really turn everything more important? How many killings have we seen with manifestos where nothing actually changes. In fact, Mangione's favorite manifesto - Industrial Society and Its Future - changed nothing. And Uncle Ted killed and injured a bunch of people over time. Low-level violence seems unable to change anything in a beneficial direction or, really, change anything at all.
Politically influenced murders are very rare. With that said, Ernst Junger would agree with you - he was deeply enmeshed in the circle of those plotting against Hitler in the July 20 plot, but he refused to participate himself because he thought it would change nothing even if successful; that the Machine was greater than any individual, and that if Hitler had been killed then Goring or someone else would have been put in to assume the same role. Junger analyzed other major assassinations and concluded that they never had the effect that the perpetrator intended.
The JFK assassination changed everything.
Ok, Boomer.
Getting rid of Lenin led to Stalin - less interested in Global Communism. ( an evil villain sure, but at least he got rid of the more dangerous Trotsky.)
Gavrilo Princip has entered the chat!
'But it will also be interesting to see if UHC quietly lowers their claim rejection rates moving forward'
I think I've seen some hint of this in my reading. At the very least, now that denial rate is high on the public radar, I'll be surprised if this doesn't trigger some sort of attempt by insurance companies to get lower on the denial-rate chart.
However, just simply mentioning this has gotten me flamed elsewhere for *condoning murder!*.
I posted about this too today, riffing off Walter Kirn and Taibbi. The official narrative is trending toward support, as another means to distract America from the will of Trump's mandate to dismantle the deep state and the Health cartel. And to reempower the demoralized left.
Sure, it's possible the media is hyping him up as a distraction. They take their orders from their oligarch owners and follow it through; they buried without even a peep the New Zealand Brenton Tarrant attack, for example, as it didn't further any running elite narrative. Each of these attacks should be looked at and parsed within it's context, I think; there isn't a one-rule-fits-all. For example, if one applied a hard and fast rule, would it mean *every* time someone commits a high profile attack and the media covers it that the attacker was part of a conspiracy or in furtherance of an elite over-arching agenda? Here Mangione was an Ivy league grad, good looking, valedictorian of his high school class, planned the attack well, and isn't easily categorized politically. Perhaps the elites are trying to figure him out and what he means, too.
Faux-populism to serve the State. Stir up a little stochastic violence to swamp and distract Trump and Americans.
If you’re countersignalling Saint Luigi and the fact that Dead Corporats Are Always A Good Thing, then you’re probably Fucking Jewish.
Agree, I think a lot of the attention is to distract from the Trump transition.
Very well written and researched. Thank you.
Stick this amazing article directly
Into my veins and let me breath it in.
Thank you for your thoughts. I have added your article to my UnitedHealthCare graph:
https://embed.kumu.io/3004f88b5e2a094cbe718c36cb615780
One particular statement from this story disturbed me- "You can see all the charts here how the wealth disparity really skyrocketed after getting off the gold standard in 1971, and it accelerated further after the decline of the Soviet Union - without fear of communism holding financial predators in check they were free to dramatically jack up executive compensation while ruthlessly decreasing worker pay."
Since when has communism held financial predators in check? Are you not aware of the financial oligarchy that operated before the 'fall' of the Soviet Union and that still exists today? What rate of wages did the average factory employee earn in the U.S.S.R.? Are you not aware of the wealth disparity in Russia and in China? Wealth disparity isn't the result of capitalism, it's the result of corporate fascism and the suppression of entrepreneurs due to fascist / communist government policies that reward large corporations while destroying small businesses. The free enterprise system gave the common man a brief era of opportunity in which to advance economically. My father was born poor but worked his ass off before the era of excessive government regulations had evolved into what we have today. He achieved success without the help of a labor union or communism. There are no success stories in communist countries unless you are a member of the ruling elite or you are a boot licking peasant that brown noses his way up through the party ranks. Economist Ludwig von Mises had a name for people who believed communist propaganda: "useful idiots." The fear of communism doesn't hold predators in check, it punishes hard working people and rewards criminal dictators.
Hi Jim, to clarify, the point made with that statement isn’t to argue in favor of communism. I’m not a communist and it’s an ideological system not in line with human nature. Rather, the statement is meant to argue that capitalist executives in the West were fearful of workers organizing together under the ideology of communism and overthrowing the capitalist system, therefore they made it a point to keep wealth disparities from growing too extreme. It’s not an argument in favor or disfavor of any ideology, just perception of incentives and psychology.
Thank you for the clarification. I'm surprised the media would want to cover this CEO's murder since it exposes the vulnerabilities of the 1%ers. If the perp hadn't been arrested they probably would've buried the story.
So is your thinking influenced by all the 4Chan stuff? Or are you the creator of all of the 4Chan posts that seem to track your writings?
Fascinating person whoever you are. I agree with many of your takes on political-economy and history, despite being squarely in what you label the pro-"Globohomo" camp.
I'm sure you would never do anything to dox yourself but I am absolutely fascinated by what your educational and professional background might be.
I'm guessing alienated conservative graduate student. Someone well-read and thoughtful, iin any case.
Thanks Verwirrt. I don’t post or lurk on 4chan, although I occasionally come across memes from there - I’ve just never liked the format, plus it’s full of feds. While I’d prefer not to dox myself, most of what I’ve learned has been through a painful decades-long trial-and-error process, not learned via formal education. It’s interesting that you consider yourself squarely in the pro-globohomo camp — most of the people who self-identify in this camp (without using this label, of course) I’ve found to be rigidly narrow-minded, ideological, arrogant, and unwilling to listen to alternative viewpoints. I’d be interested in your perspective and approach if you ever decide to write about it.
Sources tell me that the shooter had recently undergone this operation, which apparently Chris Brunet has undergone as well, leading to erratic behavior in recent months: https://youtu.be/7_RgXuIgBss
Excellent article! Do you think the Two-Tier aspect will affect people (eg the speed and effiency of this 'justice' compared to the slow or absent justice for normal people)?
It's clear they can pull their finger out when they want - the fast track courts after the Southport events - and then go back to sleep.
One thing I did find rather demoralising was the immediate reaction vids from people who decided that they must be against what this man did because the loony left support him. It's as if every issue has a side and we must all follow our team.
Quite embarassing.
That's by design. I consider myself a leftist, but I have more in common with a working class right-winger than I do with an elite liberal.
Half the time I find they believe in many of the same principles as me, just expressed differently.
Edited to add: while I consider myself a leftist, I am confident many other leftists would say I am not one because there seem to be as many competing left-isms as there are leftists.
Pretty sure that burger place Gate’s was at is Dick’s Drive-In at 111 NE 45th in Seattle.
The question remains, how does a lone person know the whereabouts of a heavily-guarded person, and the one rare moment when he is not? Too much effort has gone into making the YALG (yet another lone gunman) story popular. I’m in agreement with Styxhexenhammer666, this has a Sirhan Sirhan vibe to me.