[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.
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.
I think it all boils down to that nebulous concept of “the social contract”. The most naive interpretation of the justice system is that it will provide justice when justice is demanded. It is, after all, called “the justice system”. But what constitutes justice? And who receives it? We have already seen two separate supreme court decisions that state unequivocally that the police are neither obligated to serve nor protect people. We have also seen that young black men are 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of serious crimes than young white men, so we know that the justice system does not work for all of us. We know that rich people get convicted far less often, and for far shorter sentences than poor people, and we know that the legal system saps the opportunity to acquire generational wealth from those who do get convicted.
It is illegal to shoplift $100 of groceries from a corporation, but it is perfectly legal for that same corporation to drive out competition and then raise prices, in essence stealing from the entire community. It is illegal to intentionally harm someone, but it is perfectly legal for a medical insurance company to deny coverage to paying customers for necessary medical intervention.
When justice is completely out of reach by legal means, the flimsy fiction of the social contract is voided. New York City has somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 murders per year, which means that there have probably been 5 or 6 other people who have been murdered in the city since Brian Thompson was shot. Are the police putting the same effort into tracking the killers of those people as they are into Brian Thompson’s murderer? The reality is that the vast majority of us are intentionally excluded from the halls of power. The American Declaration of Independence makes the bold claim that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Does the present situation in this country feel to you like equality? Because to me, it feels like there is an owner class, and a peasant class, and brother… we ain’t the owners.
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.
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.
The fuck you think billionaires are?
… You mean a human?
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
The main point of any government is a mediator between people.
When the government is corrupt and not only lets the powerful break the laws, but rewrites them in their favor, people realize it.
They stop following rules because they know others aren’t. If someone stops them in the act, they feel innocent because they didn’t complete the act. If no one stops them, they legitimate believe it was allowed, because they see people flagrantly break the rules with no consequences on the daily.
That’s what today’s elite don’t get, they’re stopping the peaceful process we all agreed was better than violence, because they have a monopoly on legal violence. But eventually it just means no one follows the rules, and 99% of us don’t have much to lose these days.
A society that starts acting that way quickly becomes uncontrollable.
Like we saw four years ago, it only takes a relatively small amount of people in one spot to really be uncontrollable. A mob of 5,000 people is just as unstoppable as a hoard of 5,000 zombies. At that point pain compliance is the only thing that can get thru to them, and there’s always a chance the mob fights back instead.
That’s why if cops think the mob has a chance of having guns, they immediately back down.
If BLM had marched with ARs, shit might have changed.
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.
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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.
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
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?
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.
All I know is that jury nullification is legal and is there for a reason.
Yeah it’s so weird that more than 30 countries have managed to implement public healthcare without assassinating CEOs. Mind boggling.
There are so many more of us than there are of them that a general strike would bring about swift change without us stooping to their level of harming others to gain and wield power.
Unfortunately, we’d have to stop all the infighting and work together. We couldn’t be bothered to do that for the latest US presidential election, so I’m not sure we’d do it in this case.
I have even less hope that violence and threats of violence will do any good at this point. They have so much money, they can buy invincibility. And that’ll be even easier under the next administration. Vigilantism is a feel-good revenge fantasy rather than it leading to anyone’s life improving. If it was effective it would be much more common. We’ve got the guns in America, but their use has not yet caused a utopia.
Best answer here
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.
I feel like people are finally starting to see why Batman has so many interesting villains.
Nothing has changed OP. We each protect what is important to us individually.
For the assassin, that meant dealing with the threats to him and his family directly. (Or maybe he was just crazy, or maybe both)
You’re not judge, jury, or executioner so don’t even try to be.
Thanks for your perspective on this. I’m certainly not trying to be judge, jury, or executioner here but my concern is that its become pretty clear that many in the society I live in are completely content assigning those roles to themselves and I find that to be concerning.
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.
