[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.
If any other avenue existed: it would long have been tried and replicated. They have the judiciary, they have the legislative bodies, they have the senates, they have the presidencies/head of states whatever. There is no influence left except appealing to their literal and undeniable physical humanity
This situation is the result of them facing literally no consequences ever for tons of exceedingly evil shit. It appears to be the only form of justice available
Thats what the comment above yours said.
For now… Eventually the bastards will basically be like D&D liches and can only be destroyed if you find their phylactery: Their consciousness uploaded to a computer kept in a fortified bunker, miles underground.
See: the recent fallout show
👁️👄👁️
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This is fine. Then it would only become necessary to sever their lines of communication. This would take for form of an appeal to the closest human element to not listen to their masters and to not repair any damage that prevents them from doing so.
As to what form that appeal takes, well, people can make up their own minds as the situation demands.
Without knowing why he did what he did, we can speculate, I can not judge him for his actions.
I can make assumptions, as many have done, as to why he felt it justified to take the life of another.
If we are to assume the shooter to be sound of mind and logic, we can only assume his actions to have been taken in a just morality.
He must have known that killing one man could never right or prevent the wrongs he experienced. He didn’t kill someone irrefutably innocent. He didn’t kill a random person. He didn’t kill the messenger. He killed the person at the top to send a message. Points off for his message not being excruciatingly clear in motive. Points for his execution, thus far.
He scared people of a similar position to try and wipe their names from the internet, lol they don’t know how the internet works. They are scared, but they will need to be more scared into correcting the wrong that the shooter experienced. They have operated with the feeling of impunity from the consequences of their actions. If one death can correct the course of things, that death is justified. Unfortunately, we do not live in a just world.
If his, or other’s ambitions are greater, there can be a horrible justice done in this world if those in power are unwilling to do what is right.
I don’t want another person to die when they can be saved, but I don’t cry for a life lost to save many more.
Profit < people. If you feel otherwise, you deserve a one gun salute.
Don’t kill people and don’t be a dick, but I wouldn’t see or say a damn thing if you do the right thing in the wrong way.
Do you feel that the words he etched into the shell casings that he left behind still leave questions as to what his motive was? It seems pretty clear to most of us.
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The words written on the casings is a message. It is not a statement and backstory. The vagueness is doing what it is meant to, cause speculation and inspire fear for people who identify with the victim.
We can easily assume, but we don’t know.
“And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
Both quotes from Thomas Jefferson, which isn’t to say that that it’s true - only that our founders expected us to defend our liberties with violence if necessary.
I’m not down with vigilante murder or anything because it seems like the slipperiest of slopes
Study history of Ireland then
I don’t think vigilante violence is a good idea but if some of the murders in the US are targeted at billionaires instead that’s fine by me. If the system wasn’t fucked this wouldn’t have been news.
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.
The whole point of politics is compromise. Finding solutions that the most people can accept.
Compromise is the… point, of politics? Are you sure? At best it’s a mean to an end, and only in democracy. We’re not taking moral judgement here, just what is what.
John: “I think we should install storm drains so Main street doesn’t flood when it rains.”
Jim: “But that will block access to my store for weeks!”
Bob: “And I think it’s a waste of time and money!”
Politics is the process of finding a solution that most of the affected people can agree on. As I see it. The rest is just scale.
There’s few countries where the effectiveness of electoral campaigns are measured in the amount of money raised.
It is possible to regulate the amount of money in politics, there’s plenty of examples.
Party funding and salaries are not “the money” that is in politics, those are peanuts. Do you think Elon musk is interested in a government job because he wants the paycheck?
I wasn’t taking about that at all.
I’m most countries there time of money in politics is way healthier than in the us.
So it’s possible to regulate that better.
Yes but you are talking about party funding. Politicians are not into it for the funding, that’s peanuts.
The relationship between politics and money is already regulated, that’s what embezzlement laws are about. They can be improved, but you’ll find it’s harder than you would think.
Surely decoupling money from politics is not possible, which is what I was answering about.
No I was talking about electoral funding, through super PACs and the like. How individuals and companies can buy their way into politicians favor.
I was talking about that the dollar amount raised during elections is a measure of success. That’s not the case in almost all developed countries. And it’s wrong.
Aha, gotchu now
Justice Thomas? Is that you on Lemmy?
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OP, can you please edit your question to make it clearer. Remember, open-ended and thought provoking.
I tried. Not sure how much clearer I can make it if this doesn’t do the trick.
Not to toot my own horn, but I’m a rather intelligent person. I have done a lot of thinking and reading about these problems. I have tried to consider ways that might change their minds without violence and come up with little.
The rich NEED to be afraid of the poor. Or there needs to be no rich. Those are the options for a prospering society.
The rich throughout history have always been afraid of the working class it just usually just shows up in less obvious ways.
The way the wealthy talk about the working class
The way the wealthy always look to divide the working class into camps to fight amongst themselves
The way the wealthy demonize labor unions
The way the wealthy keep education limited and expensive
The way the wealthy use religion and media to drive their idea of goodness and justice
The way the wealthy try to make the working class envious of their wealth so the working class spends their money and time trying to replicate it.
Are all examples of an underlying fear of the significantly larger working class population getting control.
And it is such a winning strategy that it works on them in reverse. The wealthy will do whatever they can to keep their wealth and always try to pile more on because of the fear of being one of them (the working class) that they have demonized for generations.
EDIT: added more examples
thing about people being afraid of something is that it tends to lead them trying to kill it
The poor have been afraid of the system for decades…
We subject to largest psyop in human history tho
Things are changing due to deteriorating socio economic conditions
Things are changing due to deteriorating socio economic conditions
Agreed. When you fear the actions of the system as much as the consequences of inaction, the needle definitely shifts.
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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.
The fact that he’s doing it slightly more slowly, but on a massively larger scale should not change anything.
This is something that I hope society learns to comprehend and act on more effectively in the future.
A lot of today’s huge problems we’ve known about since I was a kid 30 years ago - climate change, corporate greed, housing crisis, immigration, etc. I spent most of my times growing up arguing with adults, having my lived experience questioned. I thought there would be a tipping point when I started working, or paying my own way through life, where the condescension would stop but it never did.
The current older generation has lived longer than any other in history, and they’ve clung to control for as long as possible. Even when younger leaders come in, they’re still trapped in these outdated values—Victorian at best—that keep pulling us backwards. Somehow, they’ve convinced themselves that investors deserve their returns more than people deserve to live. It’s soul crushing.
The current older generation has lived longer than any other in history, and they’ve clung to control for as long as possible
And they’ve used that time to change laws and tax codes to ensure their power and money will pass to their children, forming lasting dynasties who will continue their extortive behavior.
$1000 says Baron Trump will be president someday, no laws required (just idiots)
What a terrible premonition.
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.
How do you feel about the French Revolution? Storming the Bastille to kill the governor was an act of vigilante murder, and there’s an entire holiday celebrating it.
Violence should only ever be a last resort when all else has failed. But there have been numerous times in history where we consider violence to have been a just last resort.
The hard part is recognizing when it’s truly time for that last resort. I can’t say for sure where the line is drawn. Maybe it can never be clearly drawn in the moment and will just have to be something for future historians to judge.
Before you prick your finger and commit to the contract, lemme remind you it took about a century for France to settle down into a republic and then still didn’t establish some basic rights until the 20th century.
And that century included an attempt to take over the world (by Emperor Napoleon), a bunch of ambitious dictators, the invention of the Piano, and consequently, romanticism and multiple instances in which the guillotines had to be pulled out and heads piled high because the ownership class refused to play nice.
Okay, you’re slightly better informed. Do do some research.
Sign away.
the invention of the Piano
So the French Revolution led to the career of Billy Joel?
Bo Burnham
The French Revolution and the English post-war (WWII) Cultural Revolution. Yes. Though there were two very important musical technologies. In Paris mid 19th century, the Pianoforte ( soft / loud ) allowed for a keyboardist to express velocity changes, allowing for more impassioned expression (hence the Romantic age), and then a similar thing happened in the mid-20th century, with the electric guitar, the output of which could be run through filters, essentially turning them into early synths.
Mix that with musicians learning and expanding on the blues and we have the Rock-&-Roll revolution of the 60s and 70s.
Ok, but frame some of those same problems in the context of the times and their peer countries. Did France’s rights or republic keep pace, lag, or were they actually ahead despite the turmoil? There were many places with awful monarchs that were effectively dictators. Maybe they were stable dictatorships…and it took global conflict to unseat many of them.
🤓
France was a revolution of a monarchy in a continent of monarchies, who in turn demanded they choose a king, and that was after they were tired of Robespierre’s culty shenanigans.
France refused because they didn’t want to be dictated to by the international community (who again were still feudal lords). Napoleon developed the Napoleonic Code, establishing bunches of civil rights and rule of law, before inventing the Levée en masse (popular conscription) and proceeding to make Europe his personal bitch†
They tried a bit of the constitutional monarchy thing with the Bourbon restoration, but again Charles X went Heritage Foundation on the French and started rolling back rights eventually resulting in the July Revolution of 1830 (more guillotines, more piles of heads).
It wouldn’t be the last.
Note in Russia / USSR, the moment the Red Army won and Lenin started going Communist, Wilson pushed Europe to embargo the union, to never give it a chance. The Red Scare started at the beginning, and was entirely about its threat to King Capitalism. Of course, we’d see the true colors of Capitalism a couple decades later with the Great Depression, and Hoover was glad to let people live in cardboard boxes and piles of paint cans while dying of malnutrition surviving on flour paste. Compared to that, Lenin’s arrangement started looking really good, and FDR’s New Deal, a stopgap to give capitalism one more chance really pissed off the industrialists, who began their plot to propagandize the United States into a fascist pro-capitalism bulwark. That was a pivotal moment in the white Christian nationalism movement that is taking over in 2025.
But I’m pretty sure the far right is going to be happy enough to shoot first.
Going back to France again, it’s much like Nazi-occupied Paris, in which the German Wermacht soldiers were such Karens, and the garrison was so brutal that the French couldn’t help themselves but take action. It started with cutting phone lines, defacing propaganda and slashing tires, but eventually La Résistance organized into a formidable fighting force.
We know ICE is eager to crack heads, typically immigrants and their families, but in Trump’s first term they went after anyone who was Latin enough or simply brown enough. If local law enforcement behaves as the nationwide police unions have been pushing them to, we’re likely to see civil unrest rise up in many states, and then we’ll be one sympathetic dead victim away from riots and Molotov Cocktails.
/🤓
† These days, mostly thanks to WWII, the French are known as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but historians like to keep in mind that everyone gets their turn in the barrel, and everyone gets their turn on top of the hill.
You said do-do lol
Haha. Dodo. They did say it haha.
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.
Bootlickers been so hurt recently haha
The fuck you think billionaires are?
Your myopia is truly astounding. They’re both murderers. One murdered to avenge and spare the lives of the many. The other murdered countless individuals for profit. Murder within a legal framework, with a profit motive, is murder nonetheless.
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.
- disagree that it’s astonishing. it was baked into our system. it’s expected. it’s overdue, frankly.
- agree that we deserve trump. we voted for him, after all. it’ls going to be interesting, to say the least.
- if you think trump personifies this country having won a plurality of a pathetic voter pool, you’re every bit the idiot he is.
… You mean a human?
We’ve become too soft, and we need to get used to harsh realities. What was done was a perfectly acceptable and reasonable response. May this be the beginning of something new.
All I know is that jury nullification is legal and is there for a reason.
but what other option is there in a situation where someone seeks to make an impact in this way?
You can form an organization that gathers evidence and levies lawsuits in an effort to expose and stop their abhorrent practices. You just need to make it your sole purpose in life. It only took Rob Bilott 30 years to get DuPont to stop knowingly poisoning 99.9% of all life on planet earth. DuPont was even fined 3% of their annual profits from a single year. Other than that? Nothing. They have their hooks into the politicians, the legislators, the judges, the regulatory agencies, and the police forces. How do you fight that without making it your entire life’s work?
One would need to forge a dominant unified labor union or labor union network that has the sole purpose of representing the worker. Unions would need the power to cripple a company. It will cost everyone more at first, but it could eventually claw back the salaries of c-level executives.
That is a great question. Thanks for the link. I only know the surface level basics of the DuPont story.
It’s an outstanding movie, yet infuriating, and enlightening simultaneously. Definitely check it out to get a glimpse into the power these companies have, and the destruction they’re willing to wage for profit.
