Ask Lemmy

As John F Kennedy said "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable"

Either we fix this peacefully through the democratic process, or people are gonna riot.

Feels too good to be true. It's only one shooting.

Now if some second evil CEO were unfortunately victimized, I might be tempted to call it a trend...

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

It's certainly part of the catabolic stage in the system's decay. Due to many reasons, both at the input side and the "drowning in waste" side (example: GHGs waste causing climate destabilization), growth is going to falter which means that the "sharing" strategy of the rich, of the oligarchs, is going to stop working. You may know it as "grow the pie" (instead of "share the pie"). The rich get richer, the rest get poorer, and there are going to be a lot of poor people. That means a lot of desperate people and a lot of people with nothing left to lose.

What you have to watch out for is perhaps two strategies that can stop this:

1. Scapegoating: vulnerable minorities and more. The rich of a certain ethnicity may become the scapegoats, instead of .... you know, ALL of that class. This would be a misdirection of attention.
2. Jingoism, chauvinism and various forms of ultra-nationalism. This would be a misdirection of violence... instead of "punching up", it becomes "punching the foreign threat", which means war.
3. Combined 1 & 2. It's usually called fascism.

Something to print:

On a related note, I really liked the recent season of "Arcane" (both seasons are great). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11126994/

The rich have exceptional resources to protect themselves. Money is just another form of power.

For instance, even in a doomsday scenario (for them) of the French Revolution, the rich will have personal security guards. These people will be paid very well (relative to the general population), which will keep them loyal enough. They will eat at secure restaurants (similar deal), and enjoy activities in secure locations.

Beyond that, you already see the rich buying private islands (Larry Ellison) and preparing for an uprising (Peter Thiel).

But if you let your imagination run wild, they can even distort the blame, and set up patsies. Owning the media and controlling the narrative (propaganda) is highly effective and already happening in earnest. Plenty of blame is being shifted to immigrants and (because it works, somehow) LGBT+ groups.

I would even say the UHC CEO is himself a fall guy. The buck doesn't stop at the CEO. There is a step above him. The board of directors is responsible, and they will replace him with another just like him. They are the ones that ultimately choose the direction.

One can hope.

I am surprised people have been tolerating the fuckening so well so far.

We live in a richest country and majority life is shit.

Fake news endlessly tells us to just accept it.

A dead CEO is a good message, it is provocative and it got people going.

School shooting copy cats were many... One can only pray that mentally unstable people can find a better targets going forward since shootings ain't stopping.

Might as well be these parasites.

Just curious but are we heading towards an "eat the rich" society?

I guess we should be, but that's just my personal opinion.

Realistically, no. The people have clearly expressed how dumb they are and what they desire in the November election. They want dumb Republicans, they get asshole CEOs. I don't see it any other way.

Honestly, I believe voting is the best way to bring change about a society that wants to change. It's just that I have given up the thought that the US wants to change in the direction that I would go. So no, it's not gonna happen.

I really fucking hope so, the world has too many rich morons in charge and we genuinely need to do something about it right now if we want to have a planet anymore.

Look to history for some answers.

The Denver Post had a opinion piece that talked about how America has seen something like this before.

The Gilded Age, the tumultuous period between roughly 1870 and 1900, was also a time of rapid technological change, of mass immigration, of spectacular wealth and enormous inequality. The era got its name from a Mark Twain novel: gilded, rather than golden, to signify a thin, shiny surface layer. Below it lay the corruption and greed that engulfed the country after the Civil War.

The era survives in the public imagination through still resonant names, including J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt; through their mansions, which now greet awestruck tourists; and through TV shows with extravagant interiors and lavish gowns. Less well remembered is the brutality that underlay that wealth — the tens of thousands of workers, by some calculations, who lost their lives to industrial accidents, or the bloody repercussions they met when they tried to organize for better working conditions.

Also less well remembered is the intensity of political violence that erupted. The vast inequities of the era fueled political movements that targeted corporate titans, politicians, judges and others for violence. In 1892, an anarchist tried to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick after a drawn-out conflict between Pinkerton security guards and workers. In 1901, an anarchist sympathizer assassinated President William McKinley. And so on.

As historian Jon Grinspan wrote about the years between 1865 and 1915, “the nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections ‘won’ by the loser of the popular vote and three presidential assassinations.” And neither political party, he added, seemed “capable of tackling the systemic issues disrupting Americans’ lives.” No, not an identical situation, but the description does resonate with how a great many people feel about the direction of the country today.

It’s not hard to see how, during the Gilded Age, armed political resistance could find many eager recruits and even more numerous sympathetic observers. And it’s not hard to imagine how the United States could enter another such cycle.

It always does. The lords get too greedy, and the peasants revolt.

The US has done an exceptionally good job of propaganizing that instinct out of people. But the material conditions of American Life have brought the sentiment roaring back.

Basically there are 2 paths. Either way is going to be a revolutionary upturning of the status quo. Either there will be another FDR who reins in the worst impulses of Capital. Or the citizenry will do it for them.

That or GovCo goes full authoritarian to control the population. But that has the potential to spark a civil war. After all, we have more guns than people to use them. A few massacres around the country would spark a real resistance.

You know the saying, "death and taxes"? Well, they stopped paying taxes.

No... Lemmy is, but Lemmy is not indicative of society at large, hell, the Internet is not indicative of society at large.

Look at the last US election, if we were going to Eat the Rich would we have elected a putative billionaire candidate backed by Elon Musk?

Hopefully

as an outsider I would think no. you don't have much political force to cultivate this sentiment. democrats are already acting shocked and devastated for their buddies. they're on the side of ceos, don't forget. insider trading party can hardly pretend to give a shit about the average person. they will wait for the flame to burn out. return to business as usual: protecting the rich, losing elections and all that.

If people can protest for higher taxes on the wealthy, and ensure that money is spent on social services that would be a great start. I don’t know about other countries, but why the fuck can’t America do a Nordic model of socialism?

No one is even trying to assassinate space karen

I don't think we're headed towards that society. This was one incident. We've lived with the billionaire boot on our necks for decades and decades, I think people have become complacent if anything and the vast majority of us go to tictok or places like Lemmy to vent and then never actually do anything about it. We vote, the billionaire class candidate wins, and nothing ever changes. We sigh, vent, and go back to work.

I wouldn't take this one incident to mean anything larger.

In my opinion, just like humanity is taking more from nature than is sustainable and in turn we create climate change, modern capitalism takes more from workers than thei can sustain. And just like climate change is not something that happens suddenly, but is more like a slow slide towards doom, the tone in society is steadily getting rougher, until something breaks.

I’m honestly just glad it brought the left and the right together! 🥰Give more CEOs bunnies, get more unity? Working class solidarity, ya’ll. 🥳

I hope so. We need more organization though. The biggest hurdle to "us" as the majority is that we suck at working together and looking past differences for the greater good. And they will use every tool like media, social media, TV, film, and more to keep us that way.

Never underestimate the laziness of a disaffected but mostly not quite yet starving population.

tl;dr: Patience, grasshopper.

Aren't we primarily ok with this guy being assassinated because he was the face of a terrible company not because he was CEO in general? If someone from middle management or even low level worker who personally denied this guy′s insurance claim would have been assasinated, would we suddenly feel sorry?

Also remember that people like surgeons or dentists also can be considered ″filthy rich″ by your average Joe standards.