[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.

  • Bluetreefrog@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    OP, can you please edit your question to make it clearer. Remember, open-ended and thought provoking.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • AstralPath@lemmy.caOP
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    7 months ago

    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. 🙏

  • RangerJosie@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

      • RangerJosie@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • steeznson@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          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.

          • RangerJosie@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            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”)

            • steeznson@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              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.

              • RangerJosie@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                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.

      • eran_morad@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • steeznson@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          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.

          • eran_morad@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago
            • 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.
  • missingno@fedia.io
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    7 months ago

    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, romanticismm 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.

      • NABDad@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        the invention of the Piano

        So the French Revolution led to the career of Billy Joel?

        • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          7 months ago

          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 ( loud / soft ) 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.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        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.

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    7 months ago

    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.

  • elbucho@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • zaphodb2002@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      The American Declaration of Independence makes the bold claim that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

      The guy who wrote those words was also raping his slaves. It’s always been this way.

  • 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.

    • okwhateverdude@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

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

      A professional hit would have had some plausible confusion if it was suicide, such as defenestration that the ruski’s like to do. Or he simply would have disappeared. The US has no shortage of gun enthusiasts and youtube is a great teacher. It doesn’t make sense for a business associate or rival to inflame the masses and increase the likelihood of copycats since it directly affects their class. All of these fucks are in it together and they protect their own.

  • Caveman@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • Tyrangle@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    “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.

  • HasturInYellow@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      thing about people being afraid of something is that it tends to lead them trying to kill it

        • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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          7 months ago

          We subject to largest psyop in human history tho

          Things are changing due to deteriorating socio economic conditions

          • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            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.

    • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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

      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.