Seriously though, don’t do violence.
If violence isn’t a solution why does the government use it?
The state is nothing but a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. To a hammer, everything is a nail. To a state, everything is a target for violence.
I figure legitimate in this instance just means they won’t have any reason to expect repercussions for their acts of violence.
The state is nothing but a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Which, ideally, is pretty much how it has to work. The state is, ideally, composed of elected representatives and their appointees. The alternative to violence monopolized by elected representatives is violence distributed to private interests. State monopoly of legitimate violence is not great and I agree with the problems inherent to that, but realistically the alternative seems worse. I’m racking my brain for another system, but I can’t think of anything that doesn’t devolve to oligarch-led private armies oppressing people.
state is, ideally, composed of elected representatives
oligarch-led private armies oppressing people.
They’re the same picture.
Elections are a venue for competiting oligarchs - US elections are largely just a wealth check - with the bonus that afterwards people feel they’ve chosen their oligarchs and are less likely to notice that 90%+ of elected representatives only represent the interest of elites.
I do the same thing at work when I need mentally ill people to do what I say. “You can do what I want version A, or do what I want version B, which one?” always works better than “Do what I want!”
I agree that violence management is a very difficult problem with no easy solution. But I don’t think giving full control of legitimate violence to the rich is the best solution, which is what a state of elected representatives does.
Still, there’s the friction of checks and balances. It’s certainly not perfect, far from it, but the alternative is still worse.
This sounds super motivational until you stop to think about how the only thing worse than legitimate violence is the endless horrors of ILLegitimate violence. Solidarity is nothing but a stance of pure aggressivity towards those neighbors outside of your community
So just because it’s sprinkled with the magic fairy dust of ‘government’ it’s immediately moral and good violence?
Here’s a freebie thought experiment I had to pay a PoliSci professor for; if tomorrow the democratically elected government passed a law that from today forward, all babies with blue eyes will be euthanized at birth, is that legal?
Yes. 100% legal. And 100% morally bankrupt.
Consent of the governed is the bedrock of civil society - the ghouls that run big business seem to have forgotten/don’t care that legality does not equal morality.
You win my most obvious strawman award. I really tried to find how any of this pertains to any part of my comment and gave up. I still like your pretty metaphors despite the absence of logical meaning
You’re trying hard to be obtuse, or super myopic if you don’t see the through line from state violence, to consent of the governed to accept laws (and the violence required to enforce them) - hence my comment that legality is not morality, and the inference that lobbying has broken that trust and consent by legalizing policies like UHC’s that are not unique to that one company.
You brought solidarity into this, which is distinct from tribalist/sectarian violence like you’re alluding to. Soup kitchens, community legal defense funds, or cooperative farms are examples of solidarity. Not vigilante murder.
“Soup kitchens, community legal defense funds, or cooperative farms are examples of solidarity. Not vigilante murder.”
I will do what you consistently avoid here(even after I highlighted it, nonetheless) and engage directly with what you are saying rather than engage with a misrepresentation. I don’t understand where or how or why vigilante murder is even brought up here? Who said or implied anything about murder. I’m merely specifying the easily missed core of solidarity which is that a background of legitimacy is required to have these soup kitchens and co-op farms. The state and it’s “violence” of set rules and consequences must exist as a background before the space can be opened up for these examples you use. Quite hilarious to call me the obtuse and myopic one here, when my whole cornerstone from the start has basically been a suggestion to step back and think about what Solidarity means and how it is effectively sustained before we rush in to believing we can so easily make such harsh distinctions between legality and morality or state vs tribalist violence. We’re discussing abstract concepts that don’t merely exist as some objective science to be easily concluded–it’s all much more complex and arguably too open-ended for such hasty oversimplifications. Please don’t triple strawman me here
I don’t understand where or how or why vigilante murder is even brought up here? Who said or implied anything about murder.
The original post is literally about a vigilante murdering the UHC CEO and another company seemingly changing policy afterwards, with OP attaching a comment about ‘not saying it’s good, but maybe violence does work’. You brought solidarity in out of nowhere, and implied it was parallel to sectarianism/tribalism.
That is why I called you out as being obtuse, a vigilante murder is the only reason this comment thread exists - it was there from the very beginning.
I’m merely specifying the easily missed core of solidarity which is that a background of legitimacy is required to have these soup kitchens and co-op farms. The state and it’s “violence” of set rules and consequences must exist as a background before the space can be opened up for these examples you use.
You never mentioned legitimacy - I inferred it. That’s called reading comprehension, not strawmaning. Which is why I posted that legal is not inherently moral. Because enforcing laws, not persuasion or incentives to prompt compliance, ultimately requires a state actor to force that law on another person. And if that person still says “no” then that state actor is empowered to use violence to either make that person submit and follow that law, be arrested, or ultimately killed if they continue to resist. A law prohibiting rape or murder is different than anti-vagrancy laws or occupational licensing - but the enforcement is facsimile if met with resistance.
Quite hilarious to call me the obtuse and myopic one here, when my whole cornerstone from the start has basically been a suggestion to step back and think about what Solidarity means and how it is effectively sustained before we rush in to believing we can so easily make such harsh distinctions between legality and morality or state vs tribalist violence.
This is a good explanation. Your initial comment was half-baked and didn’t expound on what you were trying to say, which is why challenged what I inferred your thrust to be. I’m not foolish enough to believe that we can all live in 100% peaceful coexistence, nightly drum circles, and unlimited cooperation and mutual respect. Because there’s always some asshole who doesn’t want to help or respect autonomy, and becomes the aggressor in order to steal/subjugate/dominate/etc. But my thrust was that the social contract is broken, when a company can essentially renege on a financial contract (heath insurance) arbitrarily and capriciously, and faces no legal repercussions. Because lobbying. Because “business friendly” legal environment where the one with the most money almost wins by default, if there even is a legal challenge.
Please don’t triple strawman me here
I genuinely don’t think you understand what that means, or are confusing presumptive argument for it. It you feel misrepresented and I am straw manning - explain in further detail. Like you just did now, instead of a snarky “u iz strawman winnar”. We never got to that part of the debate initially because you got huffy and left a drive-by comment at the first challenge.
Those look like sentences but it’s weird… I’m not seeing any meaning here.
Precisely what I was trying to highlight–many thanks for the confirmation comrade
Aw man. You’re gonna bring the “I like hospitals and roads but not taxes” crowd out of the wood work, claiming governments are just warlords with good PR.
You’re doing violence to grammar with your “an.”
Better now?
Stupendous!
It’s A solution, just not the preferred one.
Because the US government has more guns than any other entity on the planet. There’s no fight it loses.
Afghanistan and Vietnam come to mind.
afganistan, lol
If the us government where to go to war with its own populous it would destroy the very wealth they sought to control.
The Vietnamese peasants and farmers beg to differ.
yeah except for basically all of them
My experience with human rights acrivists is that they only fight for the assholes. Never saw a human rights activist in a foundraiser for children, but talk about murderers and rapists they are all love.
Yeah, because nobody else speaks up for those who’d be railroaded through court otherwise. You don’t ’see them speak up’ because those same people’s voice get lost in the crowd of everyone else’s outrage/support.
It’s trite but true, failure to defend the fringes leaves a smaller and smaller pool of resistance/solidarity:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Look I’ve heard human rights activists say that over and over again but you know what I think? You can look at a CHILD that was raped and say "sorry he deserves to be treated nicely, your values are crooked.
I’m NOT talking about the legal system that is indeed corrupt, I’m talking about people that confessed to murder and rape and you still go out of your way to defend that “he need nicer food”. He needs to burn in hell
They fight to keep government overreach in check
I get that in a lot of circunstances BUT once you have confessed killers what do you want? Them to have a nice life?!
Are you advocating for government sanctioned torture? Wtf is your point? Government should be as bad as cartels?
When you crush folks into the ground for decades, ensure there’s no legal recourse, and bleed them for every dollar until the money runs red. It’s hardly a surprising outcome.
Here’s the song that’s been playing in my head last couple days, for no related reason: https://youtu.be/o9mJ82x_l-E?si=y7r9kDydchPhNPAp
Not sure if you know the reason for the song, but here is the info behind it… the actual footage was brutal as well.
A Song Inspired by an Infamous Suicide
Patrick found the lyrical inspiration for “Hey Man Nice Shot” from the January 1987 suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer. It occurred on the day Dwyer was to be sentenced for 11 counts of bribery for which he had faced up to 55 years in prison and a $305,000 fine, according to an Associated Press article from the time. No money was said to have exchanged hands. The public official spent 20 minutes on live television proclaiming his innocence, then shot himself to death. The incident shocked family, friends, and political associates, not to mention the viewing audience.
I saw that video when I was in middle school and found out later in my teens that song was about that headshot. It’s a good song.
Wasn’t that the guy who was later found to be innocent? He tried to fight the charges, got convicted, killed himself, and THEN they figured out he really didn’t do it?
Here’s the song I’ve been thinking about
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm1nCYOZB-s&t=175s&pp=2AGvAZACAQ%3D%3D
Oh damn, I don’t think I’ve heard that one in since I was in middle school.
I have a soft spot for what my friend calls, “divorced dad rock.”
To me this is, “rock my edgy older sister listened to.” Gave me a nice nostalgia hit too.
This is my jam this week
Seriously though, don’t do violence.
Why not? It’s a perfectly fair response to the violence perpetuated upon millions of “customers” annually, made “legitimate” by paid off lawmakers. Why should we not be allowed to respond in kind when they’re allowed to kill us - just because it’s in a more roundabout method? Fuck 'em. I’ve never been a gun type, but right-wingers have really been getting me to rethink that stance.
I’m mostly saying it because I don’t know the mods on this sub or if/when they’re gonna start nuking posts and comments like the News mods did. But also, I don’t want to be responsible (or at least feel responsible) in the unlikely event that an unhinged person sees this and does something stupid.
Like…look, am I weeping because a man who profited by denying people healthcare is dead? No. Am I happy to see billionaires suddenly afraid of the people they’re exploiting? Yes. But does that mean I want people who see this meme to start gunning people down in the street? In all seriousness, no, don’t take this as a call to violence.
I know there’s some hypocrisy in that statement, but that’s kinda the point I was getting at with the post: “I can’t condone this action, but damn, it appears to have been very effective at enacting change.”
I couldn’t have said it better, tho we have yet to see if it’s effective at change. It’s really too early to tell.
- If you are USA citizen, you have the right to bear arms in case goverment turns evil
- While yiur giv turned incompeten/insensitive instead, it also soldd itself out to corporations.
- Thus, corporations = gov
- Thus, you have right to bear arms in case corporations turn evil
The intent of the 2nd amendment was for states to maintain a military force that could be easily called on. George Washington used the national guard to put down rebellion of American citizens. It was never about government oversight.
Yeah, and the Supreme Court was never intended to solve Constitutional conflicts, either. The purpose of things changes over time, and I’m pretty sure the hero who brought this CEO to justice didn’t ask whether doing so was really what the founding fathers meant when they said ‘a right to bear arms’.
you have the right to bear arms in case goverment turns evil
I didn’t say it, man, you did. Just letting you know that’s misinformation.
I did not say that at all, so I don’t know why you’re claiming I did while talking about misinformation.
correlation is not causation.
repeat the experiment.
Without 25 observations at least we cannot draw conclusions
Depends on your dataset, confidence, and margin of error.
Assuming that 95% of billionaires will act similarly and 750-ish total billionaires in the US, if you want to have 99% confidence and 1% margin of error, you’ll need a minimum sample size of around 600.
We really should be thorough. For science.
Usually I would nit pick the hypothesis you want to confirm and the math you used, but for some reason 600 sounds right.
Hmmmm… I wonder what would cause pharmaceutical prices mysteriously drop?
Denying healthcare = violence
“Violence is bad”
-Sincerely, every country that came into existence from the violent overthrow of the country that existed before it.
violence is bad
It is bad if used as the first approach.
It is fine when used in self defense or when all peaceful approaches have been exhausted in response to oppression and other malicious actions. It does matter when and why it is used.
Agreed. This happened because both parties are bought and paid for by big corpo. Our vote is only on how to address some of the social issue symptoms, if at all, of our crony capitalist economy, and only if they don’t meaningfully effect corpo profits.
Example “please leftwing Obama, save us from this for profit healthcare hell!” proceeds to further enshrine for profit insurer leeches in a plan made from the heritage foundation because big corpo demand line go up.
The people don’t get a vote on the crony capitalist economy.
When we wish to protest, we’re now sent to designated protest zones out of the eyelines and profit operations of those we protest, making such “protests” as effective as masturbation in creating change.
This is happening because they have made us this desperate,and taken away/castrated our non-violent options. Some are apparently finally realizing that our votes and our protest have been manipulated by the capitalists that know they’re doing us harm into still technically existing, but no longer mattering.
Gotta hand it to them, it’s far more insidious than overt slavery with chains.
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I was really hoping we would avoid violence by electing people like Bernie Sanders. Instead it looks like the class warfare will come to violence.
We really have no other option left
If it works it works. Humans have been using as an effective way to accomplish things for millennia.
The current capitalism overlords may not be happy when it’s used the other way around to what they are used to.
“Violence is a precipitation of two sides unwilling to compromise.”
- Sun Tzu The Art of War
Humans? You mean every living thing that ever existed?
The legislature and violence monopoly are there to ensure all people have legal recourse instead of needing to turn to violence. If you corrupt that system and use it to oppress the masses, they become violent.
I neither agree with, nor condone violence, but it does not surprise me at all. Just surprised that it took so long.
Violence from the masses requires the masses to feel like they are starving, sick, and dying with no way out except death. We have been slowly accelerating towards that violence for a while now.
Watch for an increase for those CEO’s, (at least insurance and pharmaceutical CEOs), to have much increased budget for private security measures. Both in surveillance and personnel. I think we will start to see more ‘black limo caravans’ like the the POTUS moves around in. And being surrounded by people in black suits with guns openly visible. They will do whatever it takes to stay alive and be evil.
The next question is: how long before politicians start becoming targets?
Violence gave us (the US) freedom from being a colony, freedom from slavery, workers rights, women’s rights…wait a minute.
Why do we get told to not do violence again? Seems like we just need a little bit of organized violence and we can solve problems.
Because violence is a tragedy and in an ideal world there would be no need for it. However, fewer and fewer people these days can pretend we live in an ideal world.
I do think, ideally, we should be able to resolve disputes without violence. We don’t live in that world though. Mainly because people that have a lot power and resources worked to keep it that way. They actively work against progress.
And those people will use violence to continue their oppressive rule.
worked
HAHAHA
Equivocation much? By your logic either idiots set the standards or it’s morally defensible to attack people who kill us slowly.
I do think it’s morally defensible for an oppressed group to direct violence toward their oppressors. It’s also a tragedy that it comes to that but tragedy and justice are not mutually exclusive. I also think only an idiot would accept the standards in which we are expected to live, therefore to demand satisfaction with such standards would be idiotic.
It doesn’t really sound like we disagree about anything. Pardon my earlier tone. I should have been mellower, or at least funnier.
Violence is the one true power from which all other powers are derived.
For legal reason I wish to say that I don’t advocate violence. I also say that, I really think this was the only way this was going to happen.
Billionaires only do the right thing if it’s profitable or if they’re afraid.
I’m going with I don’t advocate for violence, but I also won’t condemn this use of it. If I knew a better way to attempt to cause change, I would advocate for that. But it is hard to argue with the result. (Anthem reversal)
That’s basically where I am right now
I think there are a lot of us there. More than lemmy would make it appear.
The best alternative is that we all vote in a government for the people that looks after the people and makes laws to bind these corporations from taking advantage of people locked into their systems.
Obviously, we’re a long LONG way from that happening…
I want to advocate for violence, I’m not going to participate but violence is the only way for change sometimes
“Your health insurance doesn’t want you to know this one cool trick!”
Maybe if several more CEOs and C Suite suits are murdered in the street, then my insurance rates will only rise by single digits next year.
Violence is neutral.
Human nature is bad.
When someone is violent to someone else and doesn’t need to be violent, they are bad.
When someone unintentionally wrongs someone, you try to settle the situation without violence in a way that is fair to both parties.
When they don’t settle or they keep wronging people, you need to escalate.
When the person wronging the people is in a place of money and power, and you cannot escalate, there should be consequences.
I’m not a big fan of vigilantism, If the world ran that way, we’d have a lot of innocent deaths. But if the government and laws don’t protect the people, stuff like this happens, or at least it logically should. If anything, I’m kind of shocked this isn’t more commonplace.
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Killing a rapist mid-act is not wrong. Killing an innocent person because they have the misfortune of being insured by your company is wrong.
I think what theyre getting at, is that in the assailant’s mind it’s justified, or they wouldn’t have done it.
