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.

Thanks to everyone that spent time writing in response to this. This added context from so many perspectives really clears a lot of things up for me. 🙏

When the justice system no longer provides justice, justice will be sought elsewhere.

All I know is that jury nullification is legal and is there for a reason.

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.

I feel like people are finally starting to see why Batman has so many interesting villains.

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.

Over the last several years, I have had opportunities or at least contemplated opportunities to make lots of money while exploiting others or being a completely useless finance bro.

The thing that keeps me from moving in those directions is moral character. If you can’t bring yourself to bullshit your fellow human and take from them to enrich yourself without providing any real value, you won’t get as rich as a CEO. Think of all those get rich quick YouTubers who do nothing but sell digital bullshit or ebooks about how to sell ebooks or some other digital bullshit to get rich quick.

There are, of course, exceptions, but what did Brian Thompson really do for society? Moreover, what harm did he cause to society?

These people know they are doing the wrong thing and are cashing in on their ability to take from society while enriching themselves. In the context of health care, they’re literally hurting and killing people.

Remember when the arguments against nationalized health care were mostly about how we would have death panels? How fucking ironic.

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 Johnson was shot. Are the police putting the same effort into tracking the killers of those people as they are into the Brian Johnson’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.

The incident still appears to be a professional hit (as of this comment).

That means its much less likely to be about the wrath of countless UHC victims, and more likely a business associate or rival.

That said, we lowly proletariat are already dying, and will do so a lot more as Trump and the Heritage Foundation advance their agenda. The sooner we all get on board with resistance, the better.

That said, there are effective nonviolent means of revolution, but I suspect sooner or later some pretty woman will get killed horribly on camera, and the whole country will start exploding.

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.

“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.

Cook em mash em put em in a soup

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.