I can’t believe that after thousands of years humanity still struggles with “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
When under attack, defend yourselves. When a potential possible attack some time in the future seems likely, or when a benefit provided by society via democratic system is taken away, if you attack preemptively then you’re probably just a POS.
We might be happy this time, but the next person might kill somebody we like. They might feel emboldened to target trans folk and democratic socialists. If violence escalates to riots then one side might start gunning the other down in the street. The only people who want the poor and ignorant to kill each other are enemies of our society as a whole.
You do not get to decide who lives or dies. No one does.
that’s funny because suddenly after the enucleation insurance companies seemed to feel generous and denials dropped dramatically, and a famous decision on limiting the time frame in which anesthesia is covered got overturned. so some things were neutralized.
Another truth: there can be no real, actual equality until all possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been totally destroyed.
The exploiters can be defeated at one stroke in the event of a successful uprising at the centre, or of a revolt in the army. But except in very rare and special cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at one stroke. It is impossible to expropriate all the landowners and capitalists of any big country at one stroke. Furthermore, expropriation alone, as a legal or political act, does not settle the matter by a long chalk, because it is necessary to depose the landowners and capitalists in actual fact, to replace their management of the factories and estates by a different management, workers’ management, in actual fact.
(Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin)
Revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritarian thing in the world. Revolution is an act in which one section of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles, bayonets and guns, all of which are exceedingly authoritarian implements. The victorious party is necessarily compelled to maintain its rule by means of that fear which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. If the Paris Commune had not employed the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie, would it have maintained itself more than twenty-four hours? And are we not, on the contrary, justified in reproaching the Commune for having employed this authority too little?
Let’s step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR’s trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.
But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.
From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.
Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called “land of the free” still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women’s suffrage and workers’ rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.
Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.
And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.
In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR “worked out” but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.
If an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, one person denying over 80% of insurance claims is a whole lot of eyes, which is a crazy ratio. I don’t think your analogy works.
Nation wide, 305 million Americans have health insurance. Over 80% were being denied because of a faulty system these companies refused to fix. That is 244,000,000 people. Two hundred and forty four million people being rejected.
United has 51 million people it “”““covers””“”, being generous and saying it was only 80% who were getting denied from this system means that’s still 40 million 800 thousand people.
All your what ifs already happened because of 2016 btw.
If I had my way him and his ilk would be facing life in prison.
BTW, United had a denial rate of 32%, double the national average. Idk where tf you got 80%.
The man didn’t gun people down in the street, he refused to pay for their treatment and his victims didn’t know how to fight it. Less than a fifth of a single percent of denied claims are appealed by the people whose claims are denied, they literally don’t even realize a system exists to fight against the injustice.
But now we’re moving on to violence in the streets? Well for your sake, I hope your side wins despite the massive sacrifices.
His systemic violence is far more dangerous than street justice. Stop being a libcuck. If someone wants to hurt you, or your community, or your entire planet, there is nothing unjust about stopping him in anyway necessary and this was certainly necessary.
“His systemic violence” is going to keep happening because nobody is doing a fucking thing about it, the killing in the street included. The only real solution is to change laws and pass sweeping reforms of the system, which demonstrably people are reluctant to do.
The only real solution is to change laws and pass sweeping reforms of the system,
Right. So what’s your plan for doing this then?
…
Oh, right, you can’t do it because $200 Billion are leveraged against you being able to do this.
Violence is the authority from which all other authority is derived. We respect laws and governments because we have ceded them the right of violence to maintain and enforce those laws. Governments and corporations do not respect us because governments (and by America’s extension, corporations) hold the monopoly on violence.
Therefore, the credible threat of violence is required for a fair and equal negotiation. We don’t need to go in and gun down every C-level executive in the country, the same way the cops don’t need to arrest every single person in the country to impress upon the rest of us what they are capable of. The opponent merely needs to think that you might do it in order to fear and respect the prospect appropriately.
This assassination hasn’t solved any problems directly, not in the least, but what it has done is hand us a bargaining chip that is now ours to squander. We have proven that we, citizens as a block, are capable and perhaps willing to exercise the authority of violence, and the corpostate no longer holds the monopoly. This has the corpostate immediately scared, and puts us in a position to negotiate to prevent more of these, or even for someone else to wield us in their own negotiations (think some politician in a back rooms talk with insurance reps, “look do you want the citizens to keep taking pot shots at you forever or do you want to actually do something about it?”)
We, the people, don’t want violence. It isn’t ours to wield. We gave it up intentionally when we wrote the laws of our lands. But it is the last tool left to us when all others are taken away. The lesson that should be learned here and the real solution we should be looking for is to return to us the other tools we had for negotiation, so that violence isn’t the only remaining way for us to voice ourselves. When corporations were busy union busting and warping tax code and shrinkflating and lobbying down the minimum wage, they forgot that the reason all those things existed was to keep the people happy so they don’t rise up. We already had a corpo hellstate in America once before, and by the end of it, companies gladly instated all these worker benefits after mass general strikes and the third or so time all their corporate offices were firebombed. Skip a few generations and they’ve either forgotten why those policies existed, or they’ve ignored it completely in some show of demented grandeur.
But if I’m being honest I fully expect this opportunity to be thoroughly wasted and for us as a whole to generally learn nothing. It is possible that I will be pleasantly surprised. But I’m not really holding my breath for anything these days.
capitalism can not be reformed. the core value system of it and it’s prevalent iteration of neoliberalism is based solely on exploitation, individualism, differential advantage and monetary profit and is antithetical to life and thriving of life. you can’t fix this system with minor tweaks and reforms
the structural violence the plutocrats participate in and reinforce through myriad means like advertising and economic coercion is exponentially more devastating and deadly than someone venting like with this ceo shooting
edit2: the “real solution” is mutual aid, community building and dual power movements with an emphasis on anarchist ideas. to partially quote Buckminster fuller To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. but unfortunately sometimes the only language these monsters understand is violence, which is ironically what their colonial projects always claim about the oppressed
There is no reality in which tearing down the US system of government via violence and forceful action results in a better system than what currently exists. There is no precedent for such a situation. There is no way foreign adversaries wouldn’t leap at the chance to take control during the conflict. There is no way native adversaries wouldn’t leap at the chance to take control during the conflict.
If that’s your plan, a civil war that creates anarchy, then you might as well just hand the keys to the kingdom over to the richest americans because they absolutely would come out on top in that hypothetical.
What you’re really asking for is just for Americans to kill each other off only to make things worse, to make the entire world worse.
Buddy, we are just animals trying to survive. The wealthy lack every transcendental value that makes humans special. They’re more like orcs. You want me to say please and thank you as they destroy my world and poison my family?
Rejecting reason and giving into animosity, into self-serving instincts, precisely describes the people poisoning the earth. Have fun being just like them. No good outcomes will come from your violent revolution, I can tell you that right now.
I explicitly did like when it was done to the rich, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the perpetrator. The enemy of my enemy is just some dude with a gun.
That dude with a gun left an unmistakable political message on his casings that resonates with literally every single American that has never been massively wealthy. Disliking him for pretty much any public thing we know about him paints you as the type of person that honestly has a few casings waiting for you someday unless you give up your wealth and work towards helping your new found class.
I can’t believe that after thousands of years humanity still struggles with “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
When under attack, defend yourselves. When a potential possible attack some time in the future seems likely, or when a benefit provided by society via democratic system is taken away, if you attack preemptively then you’re probably just a POS.
We might be happy this time, but the next person might kill somebody we like. They might feel emboldened to target trans folk and democratic socialists. If violence escalates to riots then one side might start gunning the other down in the street. The only people who want the poor and ignorant to kill each other are enemies of our society as a whole.
You do not get to decide who lives or dies. No one does.
This isn’t “an eye for an eye” this is about the neutralization of a serial eye remover. An eye for a thousand eyes seems a very easy choice to make.
Nobody neutralized shit. They just took an eye.
that’s funny because suddenly after the enucleation insurance companies seemed to feel generous and denials dropped dramatically, and a famous decision on limiting the time frame in which anesthesia is covered got overturned. so some things were neutralized.
(Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin)
(On authority by Frederich Engels)
Oh yeah the USSR worked out super fucking well for everybody. /s
Let’s step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR’s trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.
But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.
From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.
Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called “land of the free” still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women’s suffrage and workers’ rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.
Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.
And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.
In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR “worked out” but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.
Jfc these Tankie bastards
If an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, one person denying over 80% of insurance claims is a whole lot of eyes, which is a crazy ratio. I don’t think your analogy works.
Nation wide, 305 million Americans have health insurance. Over 80% were being denied because of a faulty system these companies refused to fix. That is 244,000,000 people. Two hundred and forty four million people being rejected.
United has 51 million people it “”““covers””“”, being generous and saying it was only 80% who were getting denied from this system means that’s still 40 million 800 thousand people.
All your what ifs already happened because of 2016 btw.
If I had my way him and his ilk would be facing life in prison.
BTW, United had a denial rate of 32%, double the national average. Idk where tf you got 80%.
The man didn’t gun people down in the street, he refused to pay for their treatment and his victims didn’t know how to fight it. Less than a fifth of a single percent of denied claims are appealed by the people whose claims are denied, they literally don’t even realize a system exists to fight against the injustice.
But now we’re moving on to violence in the streets? Well for your sake, I hope your side wins despite the massive sacrifices.
His systemic violence is far more dangerous than street justice. Stop being a libcuck. If someone wants to hurt you, or your community, or your entire planet, there is nothing unjust about stopping him in anyway necessary and this was certainly necessary.
“His systemic violence” is going to keep happening because nobody is doing a fucking thing about it, the killing in the street included. The only real solution is to change laws and pass sweeping reforms of the system, which demonstrably people are reluctant to do.
Right. So what’s your plan for doing this then?
…
Oh, right, you can’t do it because $200 Billion are leveraged against you being able to do this.
Violence is the authority from which all other authority is derived. We respect laws and governments because we have ceded them the right of violence to maintain and enforce those laws. Governments and corporations do not respect us because governments (and by America’s extension, corporations) hold the monopoly on violence.
Therefore, the credible threat of violence is required for a fair and equal negotiation. We don’t need to go in and gun down every C-level executive in the country, the same way the cops don’t need to arrest every single person in the country to impress upon the rest of us what they are capable of. The opponent merely needs to think that you might do it in order to fear and respect the prospect appropriately.
This assassination hasn’t solved any problems directly, not in the least, but what it has done is hand us a bargaining chip that is now ours to squander. We have proven that we, citizens as a block, are capable and perhaps willing to exercise the authority of violence, and the corpostate no longer holds the monopoly. This has the corpostate immediately scared, and puts us in a position to negotiate to prevent more of these, or even for someone else to wield us in their own negotiations (think some politician in a back rooms talk with insurance reps, “look do you want the citizens to keep taking pot shots at you forever or do you want to actually do something about it?”)
We, the people, don’t want violence. It isn’t ours to wield. We gave it up intentionally when we wrote the laws of our lands. But it is the last tool left to us when all others are taken away. The lesson that should be learned here and the real solution we should be looking for is to return to us the other tools we had for negotiation, so that violence isn’t the only remaining way for us to voice ourselves. When corporations were busy union busting and warping tax code and shrinkflating and lobbying down the minimum wage, they forgot that the reason all those things existed was to keep the people happy so they don’t rise up. We already had a corpo hellstate in America once before, and by the end of it, companies gladly instated all these worker benefits after mass general strikes and the third or so time all their corporate offices were firebombed. Skip a few generations and they’ve either forgotten why those policies existed, or they’ve ignored it completely in some show of demented grandeur.
But if I’m being honest I fully expect this opportunity to be thoroughly wasted and for us as a whole to generally learn nothing. It is possible that I will be pleasantly surprised. But I’m not really holding my breath for anything these days.
Vote against privatized healthcare, you stupid assholes. Vote against the GOP. Vote Dem.
and how’s that working for you? and everybody else?
Everybody else voted for the asshole, so now they get to deal with the asshole and I’m continuing to try to educate people on asshole anatomy.
capitalism can not be reformed. the core value system of it and it’s prevalent iteration of neoliberalism is based solely on exploitation, individualism, differential advantage and monetary profit and is antithetical to life and thriving of life. you can’t fix this system with minor tweaks and reforms
the structural violence the plutocrats participate in and reinforce through myriad means like advertising and economic coercion is exponentially more devastating and deadly than someone venting like with this ceo shooting
edit2: the “real solution” is mutual aid, community building and dual power movements with an emphasis on anarchist ideas. to partially quote Buckminster fuller To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. but unfortunately sometimes the only language these monsters understand is violence, which is ironically what their colonial projects always claim about the oppressed
There is no reality in which tearing down the US system of government via violence and forceful action results in a better system than what currently exists. There is no precedent for such a situation. There is no way foreign adversaries wouldn’t leap at the chance to take control during the conflict. There is no way native adversaries wouldn’t leap at the chance to take control during the conflict.
If that’s your plan, a civil war that creates anarchy, then you might as well just hand the keys to the kingdom over to the richest americans because they absolutely would come out on top in that hypothetical.
What you’re really asking for is just for Americans to kill each other off only to make things worse, to make the entire world worse.
You’re the epitome of the cautionary adage that all it takes for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing.
As for your claim that an eye-for-an-eye is somehow bad? Tit-for-tat is an excellent strategy for maintaining successful cooperation.
Lastly, there’s no coherent normative theory according to which killing is bad categorically. That’s simply ridiculous.
I’d rather die a good man than start killing unarmed civilians. Evil can have this worthless hell if more of them truly exist than the rest of us.
I am unafraid, of them or you.
Killing the rich is self-defense. This planet is dying. Every oil executive, private jet owner, and wealthy polluter is guilty as fuck.
Also they’re not civilians. They’re not even human, as far as I can tell.
Dehumanize the enemy and give them no quarter, but you’re so certain that you’re the good guys. Tale as old as time.
Buddy, we are just animals trying to survive. The wealthy lack every transcendental value that makes humans special. They’re more like orcs. You want me to say please and thank you as they destroy my world and poison my family?
Rejecting reason and giving into animosity, into self-serving instincts, precisely describes the people poisoning the earth. Have fun being just like them. No good outcomes will come from your violent revolution, I can tell you that right now.
The violence has been escalating longer than you’ve been alive. This instance is smaller than the day before it.
You don’t have a problem with violence, you just dislike it when it’s done to the rich.
I explicitly did like when it was done to the rich, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the perpetrator. The enemy of my enemy is just some dude with a gun.
That dude with a gun left an unmistakable political message on his casings that resonates with literally every single American that has never been massively wealthy. Disliking him for pretty much any public thing we know about him paints you as the type of person that honestly has a few casings waiting for you someday unless you give up your wealth and work towards helping your new found class.
Please respond without telling someone else that they may be murdered
The only way, shape, or form that this “message” is “political” is that it is apparent less people believe in politics than ever.