It was not widely commended; that it looks that way is an artifact of how our media is structured. We tend now to look at the world through a band-stop filter that amplifies the most activating ideas.
@tptacek I think people mean assassinations on tape are usually universally condemned.
Luigi has tens of thousands of women lining up to marry him, multiple academics doing long pieces about how to achieve jury nullification, and saying he’s the bad guy is not a popular move basically anywhere with a lot of people in it.
If it’s amplified then the amplifier is the public.
You are describing a very small number of highly-activated people responding to a media environment. I think it's especially telling that you cite women "lining up to marry him"; his support, as you're depicting it, is characterized by deeply irrational behavior. I agree.
I think I’m still openly condemning the violence without dismissing the fucking broad based anger around it. There are a large number of us who are very pissed off but still seeking compromise.
There are a very fucking small number of people who own any significant equities, or have their interests actually materialize politically.
That’s the group I’m lobbying to get your shit correct before Luigi is fucking everywhere.
Maybe the smartest people could get the best but we’ll keep plenty for everyone. No, it’s not that we’ve done.
Maybe we could do the same but with the hardest working? It’s not that either. You ever seen guys making a highway in Arizona? Nah, not the hardest working.
Maybe we could backdate pure fucking blind luck in parents and mentors and shit and call it merit and just push that on the previous two groups like the greasy pimps we are for so long we forgot it was a scam and we actually start believing it. And then use it to justify atrocities at the scale of millions (Brian Thompson) but condemn violence at the retail level (shooting him).
"Widely" could mean a lot of things - it doesn't appear to have anywhere close to majority support, but more than 15% of Americans (and almost half of young people) think it was at least acceptable:
That's an extrapolation from a poll, not literally 50 million people, and you can get 15% of a poll sample to say almost anything, including (first thing that popped up in my Google search) that Hitler was good actually.
I'm not doing a "Godwin's law". I literally have on my screen a poll, which generated a whole news cycle, in which more people supported Hitler, in the United States, than are claimed to be supporting the CEO murderer here.
My point --- I think obviously --- is that 15% support in an opinion poll is a meaningless metric. Tens of millions of Americans do not in fact support Hitler. There's a whole literature on why these kinds of crazy results pop out of opinion polls (read up for instance on acquiescence bias).
You know, I don't agree with you, but if you equate the mainstream-ness of people who approve of what the CEO killer did with those of Hitler supports, the dot product of our takes here will be strongly positive, and there's no need for us to hash this out.
