Submitted 8 months ago by yokonzo@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Obviously violence isn’t ever the answer but I’m just curious, when people go nuts and decide to take life and cause terror, what makes their decision to attack something like say a school or a church/mosque, a sporting event. As far as I see it in this day and age the biggest stressors in our society are corporations yet you never see someone say. “Yeah im gonna attack Amazon or HG wells”
Why is this? Why seemingly random places
Read somewhere they target places that are easy/defenseless/won’t give resistance. They target schools, churches, shopping centers, all places with little to no ability to fight back against someone with a gun. Life/society has been cruel to them so they want to return that cruelty to society.
But as someone else said it’s not always rational stuff going thru these people’s minds.
Those people tend not to be the brightest sparks. They’re more susceptible to believing conspiracy theories that provide simple answers than doing any rational analysis of the root causes of their problems.
Mass shooters aren’t exactly known for their well-rationed thinking. On a side note, what’s up with HG Wells??
I was just trying to think of cooperation names, though I do believe HG wells was at the center of some controversy
😂 HG Wells is and English writer often know for being the “father of science fiction.”
You may be thinking of H.G. Hill or Wells Fargo?
though I do believe HG wells was at the center of some controversy
Are we talking about H.G. Wells the scifi author that was born in 1866?
Availability, and likely the difficulty in reaching the people that are the intended target.
As other people have mentioned, it does happen, but if someone “snaps”, they tend to have a fairly specific hate on, and a company is largely going to be about who runs the company rather than the workers, and those assholes are harder to reach.
With churches and schools, the target is more about a group of people being the obsession for the hate/anger/contempt/whatever. You can be relatively certain of killing or hurting muslims if you attack a mosque, christians at a church, etc.
If your assholery is targeted at specific people, you’re going to go after where you interact with those people, like schools or your own workplace.
Besides, you’re assuming rational thought is in play. That isn’t necessarily the case when someone is willing to kill strangers. It actually can be, or at least it’s in play with planning sometimes. Luckily, most of the jackasses that decide to spree kill or mass kill aren’t good planners, or at least aren’t good planners while they’re obsessed with whatever drives them to act.
I am still surprised that more of the idiots don’t go after businesses. You’d think that there would be more of them with beef against a company and lack any concern over who they hurt so that they target workers they can reach.
Both of those places are also more accessible compared to the nebulous Amazon warehouses and headquarters.
Most people would be able to easily find a religious site, or a public event. A warehouse is neither of those things, and might not need to be that easily accessible, as long as people can get there by road, or they can get deliveries in and out.
Someone did attack the Youtube headquarters several years ago. She was mad they had demonetized her videos.
Because those in power spend a lot of effort distancing themselves from the impact they have and casting blame on everyone else, including on the victims.
A local factory may be poising the locals, paying little in taxes, and exploiting workers on the cheap but they are the biggest employer and its those minorities’ fault for some reason and if not that it’s the locals’ fault for not pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps like their fathers did…
Oh, and look over there, quick! A teacher is trying to groom your kid because he refused to shame that one gay kid in school! Git 'im!
The wealthy assholes who destroy our planet and lives can afford to protect themselves. The other poor schmucks who are getting fucked over too can’t.
How would you get revenge against Amazon? Are you going after Bezos, who is probably on a private island getting sucked off right now? Are you going after the faceless corporate types that work in a well protected office building in a city you can’t afford to live in?
The greatest invention of late stage capitalism is that inaccessibility. On a smaller, less violent scale, you’re ultimately going to cuss out the underpaid customer service rep for the shitty store policy, not the wealthy asshole who made the policy.
Are you going after the faceless corporate types that work in a well protected office building in a city you can’t afford to live in?
Those low level workers also have to deal with exploitation, a job’s a job. That’s why Alphabet recently unionized, and then Alphabet retaliated against their unionized workers by firing them while they spoke to city council.
Places are symbolic, often institutions by which the perpetrator feels betrayed, excluded, or neglected: school, community, religion, government, society, etc.
As to why figureheads, authorities, owners/elites, and similarly logical representatives are less common targets, I suspect it’s the same reason why smaller acts of violence often target the innocent: primal dynamics behind the cycle of abuse. The hurt/abused are made to feel weak and associate abuse with strength. Unless the original abuser is perceived as newly vulnerable, a weaker target is then sought, and the abuse is perpetuated rather than reciprocated.
It’s helpful to bear in mind, because the most common forms of perpetuated abuse are subtle enough to go unnoticed by most, including various microaggressions, exclusive body language, backhanded compliments, contrarian and adversarial mannerisms, etc. More noticeable are things like verbal insults or threats, bullying, theft, vandalism, and the like, but these are often treated as isolated behavioral problems. Acts of physical violence are of course most noticeable, but are usually preceded by other signs. Anyway, if you notice someone is hurting, or you are hurt yourself, don’t ignore it. We must look out for each other.
Corporations usually have security for the c-suite.
“Why don’t the mass shooters simply shoot the corporations?”
It’s very simple: your friends work at an Amazon warehouse, but that mosque is full of muslamatic terrorists.
sniff ideology
Are you expecting corporations to tell you about it when they do?
I mean, kind of hard to cover up a shooting or bombing in a public office building, I can bet that if Google got attacked it would be all over the news
I can bet that if Google got attacked it would be all over the news
Except there was literally a shooting at Google Headquarters a few years ago and the news has done everything they can to memory-hole the event because it didn’t fit the outrage bait narratives they love to perpetuate.
How do those things actually accomplish anything against corporate interests though? One of the issues with corporations is that they have many layers of grunts in public facing places so that the people actually in charge are never even exposed to the public. The fact that people’s minds immediately go to the least effective, most self destructive, methods possible to oppose such systems is a symptom of corporate media controlling the narrative. Occupy represented an actual threat to their control, and that’s exactly why corporations have became intensely interested in divisive social issues ever since.
what is the actual reason then, and how can you tell people are revolting?
The current situation started with Occupy speaking out about banking practices, when large corporations failed due to their own greed, and our governments just handed them money to save them from the consequences of their own decisions. That made it abundantly clear the entire economy is rigged against the average person. You can get a rough idea of what’s happening by paying attention to how the corporate media has been whipping people into a frenzy, working relentlessly to demonize certain demographics. It might be harder to see it these days, but the current state of the media is absolutely nothing like it was prior to 2008.
Education and media exposure. All it takes is the right information for things to go south for corporate types.
Obviously violence isn’t ever the answer
Says who?
what makes their decision to attack something like say a school or a church/mosque
Maybe the right-wing child terrorists perpetrating terrorist attacks against marginalized people are motivated by their politics? Just a guess.
Well… It used to be called “going postal” because of the frequent mass shootings in postal offices by postal workers…
Why that changed I can’t tell you.
On a slightly funny(?) note, postal the game was created where you are in fact going postal. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_(video_game)
Apparently there is a plot line that is not about shooting postal workers, so who knows.
If you don’t like corporations do your best not to give them your money
id not enjoy starvation or being completely alienated from modern life though.
They attack those that let them down the most, that they wanted to the most from. It’s how we all operate really.
en.wikipedia.org/…/YouTube_headquarters_shooting
Does this count?
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 8 months ago
School shooters usually go after the environment in which they they were abused.
Churches and other temples are usually attacked for religious reasons.
Apart from that a public gathering of many people is the easiest to cause widespread destruction in. An office building isn’t as tightly packed and might even have its own security. Plus, if you want to lash out against a corporation you are probably more likely to blame upper management than the general workforce. But targeting specific rich people is even harder and takes more planning.
But also: 9/11 was targeted at a lot of corporations.