I say all that in my comment, but, it’s not just that this guy is a techbro, there are some other factors that make it so he’s probably guy. With those, I just think that it’s probably more likely that this is the guy, than that it isn’t. I don’t really see a need to theorize that this isn’t the guy based on how the guy in the video is some sort of crazy criminal mastermind, when he also hits up a starbucks right before, as well as a bunch of other evidence in the video itself that this is probably a somewhat average, if maybe uncommon, guy. i.e. it easily could just be a techbro.

From what the news has told us, which is really all we have, this guy fits the bill pretty solidly. We’ll see with the dna, ballistics, and fingerprint, but we also know that’s historically not really conclusive evidence either. The best you could do is that this guy fits the specific timeline, which we’ve heard less about relative to everything else, though from what we have heard, he does seem to fit pretty well. This entire issue, the issue of being able to conclusively tell who’s done a crime at what time, that’s part of why the justice system needs reform, because it’s very likely that you could just get this all wrong. I can acknowledge that reality, and also acknowledge that, based on what is publicly available so far, this guy is probably the guy.

I dunno, the idea that this random guy, who’s reading and posting shit about the unabomber’s manifesto on his goodreads, and happened to be passing through new york via hostel and then greyhound at this time, is just some random guy, I dunno. With modern social media, I think we really start to strain credibility that this isn’t the guy. You would have to have a very convenient fall guy for that to be the case. It probably would’ve been easier to just catch any random schizo techbro inside of new york and then throw a gun and prewritten manifesto at that guy, to be honest, if the nypd or fbi just wanted some random dude to bag and throw away to pretend like they’re capable. Like you said, you could find them by the thousands.

The crazy part about jury nullification is that if I was someone who was wanting to engage in it I probably wouldn’t be posting my opinions about the case online in a public fashion because that could easily be used as something to dismiss me from the case. That’s like a step away from bringing it up to the judge in the courtroom. They’re probably already gonna select a bunch of random boomers who have no idea what’s going on to comprise the jury anyways, since they can just do that if they want to, in the same way that the jury can just decide someone’s guilty or not. So that whole conversation is kind of moot.

Yeah, it’s been really crazy. People have been trueanoning on this one just like people did with the trump shooting, even though that one was obviously also a pretty clear cut case. I think partially, it’s because people are wanting to be half-funny, and are basically just iterating on the joke of “oh, I saw him at bible study at the time! that couldn’t have been him!” and then sharing photo edits, right.

I think part of it is that everyone has been trained by true crime and fiction to think of all of these events as though they’re living in a tom clancy book, or something. They’re enraptured by the spectacularization of this event, and of all of the past of history, enraptured by the transformation of this event into a spectacle, so they get the feeling that, oh, oooh, something’s off, but I just can’t tell what. It always has to be some sort of increasingly more dramatic escalation, until there’s some sort of release of tension, because that’s how things work in fiction. In fiction, a guy isn’t allowed to just pull off a hit on a random unprotected CEO, ride his bike to central park, leave a backpack full of monopoly cash because he’s kind of cracked, get on a bus, and then go to a shithole in pennsylvania and then get busted over a mcdonald’s hash brown. That shit doesn’t happen in fiction, so it’s not allowed to happen in real life.

I think part of it is also some sort of idiot idea about, somehow, if they just question the narrative on this enough, it will cause the guy to be innocent, somehow just them being conspiratorial on social media will cause that if they cook on it hard enough.

Most of all, though, I think it’s sort of this desire to have the guy who shot that CEO get away, or be a different guy because, in the mind of your average person, that guy is some agent 47 super CEO hitman, that’s going to liberate us brokies from our shitty healthcare problems, when obviously that’s kind of a delusional escapist fantasy.

Basically, none of this is allowed to be actually real. This isn’t a real event, in the mind of your average person. This is a media event, it’s being treated like one. Much like that, you can cook up fanfictions, but it doesn’t change the base media product, and you have to know that you can’t do anything to affect the thing itself, it’s set in stone and it’s unchangeable and it’s totally ethereal and out of your grasp.

That’s sort of partially why I think this isn’t going to change anything, and, though I think maybe a repeat might happen, I’m not holding my breath. Because while everyone can recognize the problem, everyone, in classic american style, wants some superman to come and save them, and is willing to do nothing, or put anything on the line, in order to really save themselves or others.

I really find it to be quite absurd that people are still thinking this isn’t the guy. This is probably the guy. My basis for that is basically just that the shooter had a 200 dollar peak design redditor backpack and a uniqlo packable jacket when he shot that guy, and those are both heavily techbro-coded fashion items. That’s on top of all the internet history of this specific guy pretty much indicating that he’s the guy. Back problems, leading to a several month long disappearance, after he turns 26, and is no longer on his parent’s healthcare plan.

We can also look at it through the lens of just the assassination attempt itself. The news is saying they found either a 3d printed gun, or more commonly, a ghost gun (which I have not been able to find a consistent account of). In either case, that involves buying a mostly unregulated firearm upper, and then either finishing an “80%” pre-assembled lower with a drill press, or probably even a regular cordless drill, or just wholesale printing the entire lower of the gun yourself. Both of those, are also techbro-coded methods of obtaining a firearm. Compared to just buying a somewhat common firearm in a state where it’s pretty easy to get a gun a couple months before, and then shaving the serial numbers off the gun, or just getting a gun off the black market, or stealing one from someone, which all seem maybe easier than going the ghost gun route.

In the video itself, we see him struggle to cycle the gun manually, due what is probably a combination of using subsonic ammunition, and his suppressor, which I’m assuming did not have a nielsen device, or, a booster. Those are devices that are meant to help browning-style tilting barrel designs cycle much more reliably. They also tend to cycle less reliably with heavier baffled suppressors compared to much lighter, quieter, disposable, and easier to produce wipe-based suppressors.

His research and meticulously planned operation also consisted of shooting this guy in the back, in front of a camera, while this guy walked to his hotel. That’s a plan that has a high percentage chance of success, it’s the same way that you’d see many mob hits happen, but does it strike me as something which is particularly complicated or out of character for this guy, if he had a couple months to cook something up?

Based on the entire description of that chain of events, that would probably indicate that this is a somebody that’s had some amount of preparation but wasn’t some kind of professional or overwhelming genius. It could be the case that they dug around online for thirty minutes, happened to find a guy that had both disappeared for a couple months, had medical problems, was a little bit more conspiratorial, or rather, had incoherent politics, and would be the kind of guy who would dress in a peak design backpack and in a uniqlo jacket, and was ALSO a guy which was exiting new york at that time via bus. They would then have to plant evidence on him, which cops are known to do, but that’s all, legitimately, entirely possible. Is it more likely than this being the guy, based on everything we’ve seen from the video?

I would say no, probably not, this is probably the guy.

Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.

I mean I fucking live here and that’s pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we’re working on like, who’s right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that’s not really an invalid perception.

I think it’s kind of stupid that we’re defaulting to the idea that a billion dollars as sort of the default “well, that’s too much money, nobody could ever possibly deserve THAT much money!” metric we’re using. Not particularly because there are really any good billionaires, I mostly think that’s not really the case and agree that any claim to the contrary would probably strain credibility.

About the most you could point to is somebody like taylor swift, or any musical performer, or athlete, someone who specifically gains money based almost exclusively on their command of cultural capital and ability as a performer rather than necessarily on extracting the surplus labor value of others, though to a certain extent, you have to have some sort of corporate backing or management company to reach that level, and even if those performers don’t control it, there’s probably some level of loaded complicity going on there. These types would maybe be just above the sorts of people who just run good or more ethical companies, as far as companies can be, on the billionaire morality totem poll.

No, my criticism isn’t so much that billionaires aren’t necessarily evil, because I think it’s mostly true enough that billionaires are all evil for it to be as true a heuristic as a heuristic can be true. I think my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn’t really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We’ve put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where’s the cutoff, here? I’m sure plenty of people know someone with a million bucks, you could probably just point at anyone who owns a home in LA.

My point is that instead of some arbitrary cutoff we should probably just be looking at what’s actually going on here in terms of the relationships at work and the constructed hierarchies. If that’s the case then we can probably draw the line less at a billion dollars and more at anyone propping up this stupid bullshit type hierarchy, and specifically those more critical lynchpins which hold it together. Perhaps, like a “not necessarily a billionaire” healthcare CEO. Now that, that would be a good start.

kind of racist

kind of?

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little removed? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.

Eastern propaganda

lol

I’m not defending the insurance industry or capitalism for-profit healthcare, but I worry more generally about society normalizing or celebrating violence.l and where that’s moght take us.

society already normalizes and celebrates violence plenty. it just doesn’t tend to normalize it or celebrate it against the people who actually deserve it, pretty much apparently until a couple days ago when everyone sort of collectively seems to have realized that they all agree.

yeah except for basically all of them

it could be the combination of the two. suppressors commonly induce failures to eject in tilting barrel designs without the use of a nielson device, and if he had used subsonics, that would also be a contributing factor to a failure to eject.

The guy used a silencer and when his gun jammed he cleared the jam and got off a couple more shots.

that’s something you could do with about five minutes of training. if he was a “professional”, he probably would’ve used a nielson device, or, if he just had some shitty turkish oil filter, a non-tilting barrel design, like a hi-point, so the suppressor doesn’t induce malfunctions. he also probably would’ve waited a little bit further down the guy’s path. he pulled off his hit in broad view of a camera which was directly behind him, and he stopped for starbucks and a couple protein bars down the street, and left his garbage on site. none of these things matter too much since the police are pretty bad at their job, but if the feds get involved, things might take a different turn, and little mistakes like those add up. if his gun had jammed more severely, he might not have been successful at all. no, this speaks to me as a kind of amateur endeavor.

now, it’s still somewhat unlikely, but it is, I suppose, possible, that he was still hired. actual hitmen would probably tend to be so professional that you will basically never see them, like the guy that probably killed the boeing whistleblower, or part of some obviously state sanctioned special forces unit. The can also be unprofessional schmucks that are willing to just eat the sentence for an organized crime syndicate, and in less high profile cases, they can just be random people down on their luck who are willing to kill for a couple thousand dollars and know someone who’s willing to pay that fee, which never really works out too well.

bait used to be much harder to do back in the day

this is potentially true, though if there’s any flexion or breakage in the 3d print material, you’d probably some underpressure in the cartridge, not that such a thing would matter much, or a more troubling lack of accuracy, which may be significant even at this distance, but probably not. both especially if you’re not using hardware store parts. at a certain point, you do just kind of get into shinzo abe doohickey territory, with that sort of a thing, maybe easier just to use a couple pipes. on that note, you could also conceivably use a wipe-based suppression system with a classic hardware store four winds shotgun, OR a contained gas firing system, if you’re going the probably over-complicated 3d printing route, especially if you avoid some larger pressures which are probably unnecessary.

you really don’t need any advanced rifling or superior ballistics or anything, at the distance this guy was at. he could’ve even just used a knife, or a brick, or his hands, to be honest, especially since the CEO was not dressed in ballistic armor or protected in really any way. though I imagine the public would be somewhat less sympathetic to those methods since they’re seen as kind of brutal or psychotic, even if they have the same end result.

you can use alcohol to eliminate those, and there’s really no reason to retain those or even the uhhh. bunny cage? if they’re properly cleaned, because caliber can be determined just by forensics and is totally useless for most LE to know, unless you’re getting really weird with it. yeah. bunny caliber, the caliber of bunnies.

as a hobby, it’s basically just another form of consumerism, and the culture surrounding it is not unlike that of car culture, with the same purported values. freedom, agency, maintaining control over your own life, it’s all just marketing speak to drive customer traffic, and ends up being politicized only really insofar as everything must exist inside of a political context.

there are definitely advantages to having guns for certain populations, certainly, marginalized populations that are already at risk, but those populations already have more prevalent firearms use for obvious reasons, and would probably maintain higher firearms use rates regardless of legality as a result of their marginalization, where more strict gun laws won’t really factor in, or rather, would be just another meaningless slap-on charge to extend sentencing.

most of your other actual pro2a people are gonna by random hobbyists, hunters, and fudds, who can’t really be expected to put up any organized resistance against anything, and the other half are people who would already be a fan of any plan to march around and take away other people’s guns, because they’re ex-military chuds, or cops, or what have you.

you could probably 3d print a booster, and use a spring, I bet. it wouldn’t be reliable since it’d get hot, but I don’t think there would be too big an issue with too high of pressures or anything causing it to break. alternatively, you could just go with something that doesn’t use a tilting or rotating or locking barrel mechanism, like a steyr GB, or even just a hi-point, which I think is just straight blowback.

you’d also probably wanna go with a mainly wipe-based suppressor rather than one with just baffles, since you’re making something that’s basically disposable anyways, and those can fit into smaller packages while being more effective than something with baffles.

they legit just send out the interns to go get coffee, so much that it’s a trope at this point. these people barely raise their own fucking kids, they don’t give a shit about any of those like, minor pleasures. they have cocaine, and other rich people who are constantly willing to kiss each other’s ass in a big circle, human centipede ouroborous style.

they already do that shit. elon already has a pretty big security retinue and his ass almost never goes out in actual public anymore, only ever hosts private events with verified people and pretty good security. most CEOs and billionaires aren’t gonna be that paranoid, but most of them don’t have to be, and they already tend to live in totally different contexts than your average person.

what I’d be more interested in knowing is how this guy figured out that this particular guy was going to be outside this particular hotel at this particular time. this wasn’t a crime of pure opportunity, this was something which seems like it was probably planned in advance. if it was publicly accessible where this guy was going, that’s a much easier and cheaper thing for businesses and CEOs to solve, and is probably the most important part of this kind of security.