It seems people will do absolutely anything except take their anger out on people who might deserve it.
Beat your wife and kids? OK
Run over brown people with your truck? Terrific idea
Shoot your boss? What, never
Well, I know why, it’s because the media rallies themselves to get you all riled up about the gays and the browns, so your rage won’t have any consequence
They do the same with Islamic extremists in eg Pakistan, funnel people into stupid fundamentalist orgs so they won’t look into Marxism, and bonus points, the extremist orgs you’re propping up will even hunt communists themselves, the same way conservatives in the US despise anything socialist (in the UK we don’t know what communists are, we just hate scroungers, trans and immigrints 😡)
Kind of following up from my post the other day about CEO salaries, still thinking about it, I honestly don’t get how senior management are able to kid themselves when they only earn £200k themselves, real serf behaviour
‘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.
Plus, higher ups aren’t usually at ground branches. They’re usually in a regional office or at the headquarters.
Going Postal specifically refers to the streak of post office shootings after the postal service was semi-privatized in the 1980s. All of a sudden, letter sorters were under HUGE pressure to fill quotas. Turns out a bunch of these letter sorters were also traumatized veterans. And boy do ya know it, WACKINESS ENSUED!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Oak_post_office_shootings
This guy in 1991 got 4 members of management, who were universally reviled. After this, management positions were eliminated at that post office. So, critical support I guess?
If it’s stupid and it works, it isn’t stupid
Holy fuck, that’s the post office I grew up going to in the 80s. We moved away before the shooting, but I remember the going postal scare in the news, I was 12 then. Somehow I missed that it happened in Royal oak (about 3 blocks from my grandmothers house).
We were still going back there 1-2 times a year then too. In guess I was roughed oblivious or sheltered from it back then.
Mass shootings are a largely right-wing phenomenon. Why would they target the people they worship?
I think about this a lot, too! Like, there are a ton of people who have suffered or died because their insurance company denied them treatment. And yet none of them nor their loved ones ever just walked into their insurance’s corporate office and took out the board members? Never even heard of someone trying.
Many of the “popular” mass shootings are done by the right, and they still believe that capitalism is based so shooting up a corporate meeting would make them look like a communist. Even the Neo Nazis who do this fall back into supporting capitalism because they often support politicians and policies that are pushed by capitalists. They’ll shoot up a bunch of white kids because they think Biden is a communist, but then support Trump in their manifestos lol.
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.
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.
RETVRN
It’s very amusing when conservatives will invoke shit like “the tree of liberty must be periodically watered with the blood of tyrants,” but the idea of killing your boss or even just intimidating him or even just fucking unionizing is seen as a big no no. These people just have violent fantasies of getting into a shootout with the ATF and gloriously dying because they can only seize his guns from his cold, dead hands.
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.
