[EDIT] Inb4 more people try to suggest that I’m mourning the loss of this scumbag capitalist fuck: No, I’m not sad he’s dead. No, I don’t think corporate murder is acceptable and no, I would not ever rat to police if I knew the shooter and yes, I believe the punishment fits the crimes he’s committed against untold thousands of people. THAT SAID…
I’m not down with vigilante murder or anything because it seems like the slipperiest of slopes toward chaos, but what other option is there in a situation where someone seeks to make an impact in this way? You can’t just beat up evil CEOs and let them go back to work. It would be naïve to expect them to change their ways when faced with consequences for their actions and then promptly let go. It just seems like the chances that it emboldens their penchant for exploitative behaviour and disdain for people in need are too high.
We’re just born into and strapped to this capitalist ride and expected to sit quiet and make these leeches their billions. How else can this cancerous greed possibly be dealt with? Is vigilante murder the only effective option? Honest questions. I’m terribly conflicted and I’m genuinely curious what more reasonable and intelligent minds than mine think about this because I can’t think of an alternative to murder in this case.
Ideally, we wouldn’t have to resort to vigilante killings to level the playing field but I 100% understand that we don’t live in a society where the rich will ever give a fuck about the rest of us or would ever sacrifice their power over us in the name of goodwill.
Killing in the defense of others is a legal defense to homicide.
If the guy were attacking people with a machete, nobody would dream of prosecuting the person who put him down.
The fact that he’s doing it slightly more slowly, but on a massively larger scale should not change anything.
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immigration
Is it really a big issue or are you just internalizing the language of the oppressing class, putting common people against each other?
The current older generation has lived longer than any other in history, and they’ve clung to control for as long as possible.
And now you’re adding ageism to the mix. It is not old people who are the problem! Keep your eyes fixed on the real enemies and don’t target your exploited fellows.
People vote for greed because schooling indoctrinates hierarchy:
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-public-schools-in-your-country-are-designed-to-make-kids-docile-obedient-workers-for-the-upper-class/answer/Harri-K-HiltunenHow schools should be:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-one-thing-that-should-be-taught-in-school-that-isnt-already/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunendeleted by creator
I am down for it. If more of it happens I’ll laugh just as hard every time.
Because fuck em. They’ve spent the last half century recreating The Gilded Age. If now is when the bill comes due. Good. Happy I’m alive to see it instead of just reading about it.
You’re a savage pretending to have morals
I have morals. I have empathy. For the homeless. For the destitute. The poor. The hungry. Victims of war.
For parasites like Brian Thompson I have nothing but vicious mockery and laughter. Fuck them all. May they die screaming.
Edit - hold up, I’m not done.
I am a savage. The product of my environment. An environment that has told me all my life that 30 dead kids every week or two is the price we pay for freedom. That a million dead civilians on the other side of the planet is good and just because we’re the good guys. That the predatory monsters at the head of all these companies that have made life here worse year over year are the smartest and most qualified and that what they do isn’t only legal, but just. That the poor don’t deserve food water and shelter. It’s fine if they starve. Because they didn’t work hard enough or maybe they’re on drugs. That corporations have no responsibility whatsoever to anyone but their shareholders. They deserve everything they can take from us. Because that’s Capitalism and Capitalism is just the best. That women don’t deserve self determination because of a 1700ish year old book of shitty fairytales.
So yeah. [redacted] all the ceos. All the billionaires too. Why should I care? They’re just meat. Fuck em. A few more bodies on the pile. No big deal.
Edit 2 - Same country that handwaves off a goddamned genocide. Funds it, supports it, and tells me it’s not a big deal. 100,000 dead civilians this year. Tells me that I can’t boycott the country using MY MONEY to ethnically cleanse an entire indigenous population.
Two wrongs don’t make a right I’m afraid.
Edti: Like you don’t exactly need to be Kamt to see that setting a precedent for extra-judicial killings isn’t going to end well.
I don’t care if it ends well. I’m just enjoying the ride.
I’m not afraid. I have nothing to fear. When I die the entire country wont celebrate like Ewoks watching the 2nd death star explode.
I could start today and 🔫 my way through the entire fortune 500 and I’d have less blood on my hands than Brian Thompson had. (giggled at “had”)
Got no love for the dude. Clearly wasn’t a boyscout. Also have to admit it was a slick assassination given that they are still at large.
I just feel celebrating it (encouraging it?) is immoral Nihilism might seem appealing but it’s basically just giving up.
Moral. Immoral.
There’s no quantifying it because the opposing classes are not equal. They have the money, police, political support, media support, the entirety of the power structure of this country.
We have numbers, and little if anything left to lose.
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The fact your country resolves every single problem with violence is astonishing. Lemmy has been a cesspool the past few days. You guys deserve Trump - he’s pretty much a personification of the entire country.
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The closest thing to a real answer that i can come up with is to remove money from politics. That itself seems near impossible a goal, but in order to start making better decisions you have to improve the decision making process that got us to this point.
Taking money from politics is like taking food from cooking. Not compatible.
The whole point of politics is power, influence, assignment of scarce resources. I don’t mean this in a bad way, it’s literally what politics is about: you want your government to make laws that influence your community, to collect taxes and use them in a certain way, to regulate certain things the way you’d like. Without those things politics are meaningless.
Money is just power that you can measure and trade, it will always be part of the equation. Removing money from politics is nonsensical.
Justice Thomas? Is that you on Lemmy?
If violence isn’t a solution then why does the government use it?
This is a very interesting question that would require so much more talk than is proper for a lemmy comment.
I’ll try and make a stupidly short summary:
In political philosophy, it is commonly accepted to define a state as a political community where the government detains the monopoly over legitimate use of physical force.
Basically what allows you to feel safe in such a community - as opposed to a more tribal one - is that you know that you can’t be harmed by your fellow citizen. When you buy your groceries you don’t want to worry that the shopkeeper will beat you up because he doesn’t want to give you change. When you are outside enjoying your sandwich you don’t want to worry about a random guy cracking your head open in order to steal it. You are not worried because you know that their violence would be considered illegitimate, and would be met by legitimate violence.
This only works if everyone agrees to delegate their use of violence to the state, who in turn executes that violence through the appropriate means (police etc) using the appropriate rules. If violence is taken into one’s hands the whole foundation of the political community breaks down, which means that the state has existential interests in prosecuting whoever does it.
States where violence is not really prosecuted are those commonly considered failed states.
Now I know this is rather abstract and the real world is more complex than that, but as I said this would require a lot more space than is available here. But there is your answer: [privately administered] violence is not the answer.
OK I get that, but the social contract has broken down.
“Health care industry” is a horrible, horrible concept. You and I both know that these corporations get in between doctors and patients. Why? Profit. Everyone knows this.
I’m not going to go out and murder a CEO but I’m sure not going to give a shit that this one got murdered. Godspeed, murderer.
I’m with you. I was just addressing the general question, which doesn’t get addressed as much as it should :)
I would rather see the conversation going towards reforming the broken system rather than going in the direction of “fuck the state it’s all broken anyway” which wouldn’t help anybody.
Let’s call this murder an act of political violence. If it’s the first, brutal step towards reform, then it’s one thing and we can “celebrate”. If it’s the first step towards Dodge City (which is the vibes I get from some comments) then there is very little to be happy about.
I’m really not comfortable with all the cheering of this evevtm
The guy might have been a huge POS, he was not personally responsible for a broken and violent system that Americans have created for themselves. Americans continue to democratically elect individuals from the dominant class who promote inequality, they have the system they deserve.
When Obama timidly tried to correct the healthcare system, Americans voted, twice, for someone who promised to destroy what was build and replace it with the “concept of a plan.” They made a democratic choice, they chose a pedophile billionaire to run their country, this is no french revolution.
That CEO guy was just one of millions who WANT the system to be unfair. What is this shooter gonna do, kill every capitalist in the US?
We hung the “just following orders” guys after WWII.
They weren’t personally responsible for the system they perpetrated. But we hung them anyway.
Same thing here.
Or is your gripe that it came from the bottom up instead of the top down? That it was righteous fury instead of cold legality? Because the legal side has utterly failed us. Been corrupted if not outright captured. It serves them not us. Million dollar fines on billion dollar profits aren’t a penalty. They’re a rounding error, an operating expense. Already accounted for in the budget.
Leave people with no recourse. No justice. They’ll make their own way.
They weren’t personally responsible for the system they perpetrated. But we hung them anyway.
A couple of questions for you:
Will you be shooting every capitalist in the US? Is an Amazon worker “perpetuating the system”? Is an Amazon consumer is? Who will draw the line between the victim of the system and the responsible for it, you?
And no, we didn’t just hung every German who followed orders.
Again, I’m deeply anti-capitalist. But Americans choose this system over and over, of course the shit will hit the fan, I just don’t believe shooting CEOs will fix things, unfortunately.
Will you be shooting every capitalist in the US?
Historically socialist states are very pro-rehabilitation, once the former ruling class is not an immediate threat. PuYi for example, the last emperor of China, who’d been a willing puppet of Japan, ended up living his life doing menial jobs such as street sweeper, actor, gardener, and tour guide.
Nicholas II on the other hand, had white armies fighting just a few hundred miles away and potentially the armies of Europe making him an active threat.
So should all capitalist of the US (probably meaning around 96% of the population), get shot or rehabilitated? Which is it?
Capitalist doesn’t mean someone who supports capitalism, those people are called liberals, capitalists are people who own significant amounts of capital.
Typically it’s only used to refer to the big capitalists, your car dealership owners to owner-operator plumbers are small capitalists whose class interests are generally opposed to both workers and big capitalists.
Less than 1% of the population are big capitalists, and of them I’d support all of them getting rehabilitated once they’re no longer a threat, the death penalty only makes sense against active threats IMO.
Though China has had some success using the death penalty in cases of gross social murder, such as when a baby formula maker poisoned a dozen babies, several executives were executed, and they haven’t had any baby formula contamination since.
The guy might have been a huge POS, he was not personally responsible for a broken and violent system that Americans have created for themselves.
No one snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche.
That CEO guy was just one of millions who WANT the system to be unfair. What is this shooter gonna do, kill every capitalist in the US?
Of course not, a single person could never do that. But the millions (probably closer to tens or hundreds of thousands) of people who want the system to be like this are outnumbered by the people who have to suffer in it, so they’ll just encourage more acts like this by pushing people to extremes.
But the millions (probably closer to tens or hundreds of thousands) of people who want the system to be like this are outnumbered by the people who have to suffer in it,
77 millions Americans voted for your president knowing exactly who he is :a liar, pedo, rapist, felon, with absolutely no plan for healthcare. Not only do they want the system to be the way it is, they wanted it to be even more unfair, even the people who suffer for it are brainwashed.
I wish you guys a civil war, if that’s what you want, but I doubt it will ever come.
Don’t count on the fact they want the system to be worse. In reality, the Democrats’ message of ‘nothing will fundamentally change’ is likely a much bigger driver, as were the lies they chose to believe from the pedo/rapist in the face of reality. Especially given the bipartisan approval of this event.
