I mean, she no longer holds the title of House Speaker, but the idea that Jeffries is the leader is a joke. After Harris lost, NYT was interviewing Pelosi, not Jeffries. She didn’t let Jeffries take over because she was abdicating power; she was deflecting criticism.

Oh man, I missed that one. I considered mentioning the time she hugged Lindsey Graham at the Amy Coney Barrett hearing because she apparently thought Barrett was a Democrat, or the time she left the Senate for 3 months because of shingles and, when a reporter questioned her on it, claimed she’d never left. In the end, I just picked the simplest example in the interest of brevity. Also, Jerry Nadler is only just now being forced out of the Judiciary Committee, and he shit himself on live TV a few years ago.

Yes. There were stream powered bikes since the mid-19th century, the earliest motorcycles were basically bikes with combustion engines attached, and there were even battery-powered electric bikes available at the turn of the 20th century. Here’s an electric bike from 1935:

I guess so, but it seems like the bike would have already fit that niche in 1944.

OK, but this appears to carry a maximum of two people and doesn’t look like it has a trunk, so…how would this be better than public transit? Realistically, anyone who bought this would still need a full sized car to support a family of more than two, so this thing would only work for single people or childless couples. It’s cool, and certainly better than everyone owning their own sedan, but not exactly a practical solution to car culture.

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I mean, I’m sure they will, but I doubt it will make a difference. Trump almost got it twice this summer. He’s only alive because he was incredibly lucky the first time, and the second time, the shooter was incompetent. Meanwhile, in the last 25 years, schools have added metal detectors, more police, active shooter drills, and bullet-proof walls, but it’s only amounted to security theater. I’m sure there will never be another assassin who escapes and leads police on a 5-day manhunt, but there are too many guns in America to prevent a guy with a death wish from gunning down a CEO or billionaire.

Fucking good. This attitude of waiting your turn and rewarding loyalty over ability is how we wound up with an incompetent gerontocracy. Imagine if the party hadn’t tried to anoint Hillary Clinton, didn’t coordinate around Biden in 2020, forced Biden to face a real primary in 2024…and that’s just the Presidential races. Remember when Dianne Feinstein was so confused that someone had to tell her how to vote during an Appropriations Committee Meeting? We can’t keep giving Democrats power because it’s, “their turn.”

Well, A) the point isn’t that, “fan service,” created this change. It’s that people’s willingness to side with outlaws over institutions is a good barometer of public anger, and based on the United Healthcare killing, people are fucking pissed. B) FDR passed banking reform and social welfare programs that created decades of economic stability and only lost their efficacy after half a century of conservative attacks chipped away at them. I’m not sure why you think a historical example of the sort of fundamental, radical change in talking about doesn’t count just because the Baby Boomers fucked it all up.

Yes. A decade after it was repealed, we had the largest financial collapse since it was enacted, and now we’re dealing with higher income inequality than we had during the Gilded Age. What part of this is meant to invalidate my point?

I actually don’t expect CEOs and billionaires to make any concessions. Honestly, this is how I imagine the next few years going:

Right now, billionaires are waking up to the fact that the majority of Americans want them dead. CEOs will start beefing up security while politicians and pundits try to spin this, and they’ll all hope this was a one-off. It won’t be. Sure, there probably won’t be another assassin who escapes and leads police on a five day manhunt, but there will surely be a guy with an AR-15 who takes out billionaire or CEO before getting gunned down himself by cops or private security.

Billionaires will start lobbying for protections from Congress, probably through special treatment from federal law enforcement and a push for gun control. This will only further enrage the public, who have faced mass shootings in schools and churches without any response. On top of that, the Trump administration is gearing up for an era of naked corruption, which is going to make the billionaire class even less popular

All in all, I think we’re heading towards a period of political instability and violence. Maybe it will end with public rage being channeled into a series of reforms like FDR managed with the New Deal. Maybe we’ll devolve even further into oligarchy and authoritarianism as American society collapses. Either way, I think there will be radical change.

Anyway, that’s my theory. Maybe I’m wrong, and this will be a blip, but I don’t think so. This feels like a very different, very significant moment.

More like how FDR used the banks’ need for government assistance to force regulation on them through the 1933 Banking Act and the Glass-Steagall Act.

I mean, someone literally drove up to one of their softball games and tried to kill them all, and they still didn’t support gun control. It won’t be until the majority of their billionaire oligarchics tell them it’s OK that they’ll start supporting it.

Sure, Congress will act, but the Supreme Court has spent the last 15 years making sure that even the most moderate, milquetoast gun reforms get struck down. I know the current Justices are hypocrites that make a mockery of precedent, but considering they’re the ones that created the precedent (particularly Alito, Roberts, and Thomas), it’s going to be hard for Congress to write a gun control law that doesn’t force several Justices to either strike it down or invalidated their own opinions.

A constitutional amendment isn’t impossible, but I think the NRA would still have enough juice to prevent Congress from reaching a two-thirds consensus, and definitely enough to stop three-quarters of states from ratifying it. The billionaire class has spent a lot of money making gun control extremely difficult, and I think that’s about to bite them in the ass.

You really think this is over? Columbine was a shocking, once in a lifetime event when I was in middle school. By the time I was in college, school shootings were a fact of life. The only difference is that people weren’t rooting for school shooters. They may have caught this guy, but a new era of gun violence is just getting started.

During the Great Depression, people were so angry at banks that they rooted for bank robbers. Things are so bad now that we’re just straight up rooting for cold-blooded executions. Censoring people’s online activities won’t make this anger go away. The genies out of the bottle now, and if billionaires don’t want any more dead CEOs, there will need to be fundamental, radical changes to our society.

“OK, now do these two pictures-”

“Not guilty!”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh , sorry, too soon? I’ll wait.”

No, I think they match, but if I wound up on his jury, I might start to doubt it.

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 see what you’re getting at, but this isn’t the trolley problem. The trolley problem is predicated on the idea that killing one will save many, but it’s assumed that everyone involved is innocent. It’s a philosophical question about moral choice; is inaction that allows many to die more moral than an action that directly kills one? If the one person being killed is somehow culpable for the deaths of the other people, that changes the entire equation.

Also, that’s not even what happened here. One person was killed, but just as many people are going to die today because United Healthcare. No one was saved. Maybe if dozens of CEOs were gunned down in the streets, that would change something, but one dead CEO isn’t going to do anything.

(And, to any moderators or FBI agents reading this, I’m of course not advocating for that. Can you even imagine? The ruling class that has been crushing the American working class for decades suddenly getting put down like rabid dogs? With the very weapons that the gun manufacturers allowed to flood our streets in order to maximize their profits? Makes me sick just to fantasize think about it.)