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I think this is a very bad trade. With spree killers, we at least had massive social opprobrium against them, such that the tactic was a resort only for the most nihilistic, dysfunctional and despairing among society. This new evolution is something different: killing for a cause, for an ideology, killing tribal enemies. The old sort of spree killing was a problem that was vexing but survivable, like wildfires or famine or organized crime; we could collectively band together to oppose it and to mitigate its effects. This version is corrosive to the very concept of society in the way that the old form was not, because the violence is fundamentally popular, and at the same time polarizing.
What this is leading to is more killing, not less. The killing will not constrain itself to such broadly unpopular targets as health insurance CEOs, nor to CEOs or senior politicians generally. It will most visibly start there, certainly, but some of the victims will be popular with one tribe or the other, and that tribe will then be motivated toward partisan revenge. Escalation will continue along this new axis, and people will realize that CEOs and senior politicians are increasingly hard targets, whereas it's much easier to just go for their supporters directly.
This is how peace and plenty goes away and never comes back within your (very possibly abbreviated) lifetime.
Not really. Murdering 10+ children is always going to be easy unless we make the cure worse than the disease. We've already increased security at schools to a pretty high degree; any more and they'll start to look too much like jails. Not to mention Gun Control which we have proved over and over again we can't agree on.
I hate to say it, but if we're assuming that we have to have either the mass shooting of children or assassinations of well-paid executives, I'll take the latter every time.
You point to the reality of the situation. The reality is that this sort of killing is going to have its own supply and demand curve, so I'd rather have less of it.
My argument is that the latter will inevitably lead to much, much more of the former.
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Like peace and plenty went away in my father's lifetime when he lived through the political murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Sharon Tate, etc.
Oh wait, no, the boomers who saw that in their youth lived through an unprecedented era of peace and plenty in human history.
I dunno, the 21st Century so far has me suspecting that the Cold War ending how it did may have just been a lucky fluke we didn't appreciate. The 80's was filled with economic hardships paired with plenty of fears of the end of the world vis-a-vis WWIII. Imagine if the Soviet Union didn't collapse when it did.
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No, not like your father's time, because your father's time was fundamentally unlike our current situation in a number of crucial ways, foremost among them the steep decline in trust and social cohesion, and the steep increase in polarization and tribalism. Our present system almost certainly cannot survive the kinds of hits society took through the 60s and 70s. We are at much, much higher risk of self-sustaining fratricide than they were.
Literal antifa gets frightened off from potential targets all the time- who do you think is going to be carrying out this tit-for-tat violence?
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