If it was an eye for an eye we’d trap them and their descendants into ever worsening debt spirals, make them use a system that actively works against them to get their health issues treated, and we’d sit them in places for eight hours a day, for five days in a row, where they must do as we say to survive. This isn’t an eye for an eye, this is a sucker punch after years of having our eyes systemically removed.
I guarantee you that if the shooter had the power to do that then he would have, but the point of the hyperbole is that violence does not solve all problems and instead can be quite detrimental.
The ideal world would have people vote for politicians which oppose privatized healthcare and would make his profession illegal. An ideal world would see class action lawsuits bankrupt him. An ideal world would consider his company denying ability to get necessary care, despite qualifying for reimbursement, as an illegal act similar to assault, and have him sent before a jury.
The outcome we got is the worst possible outcome: the USA elected a bunch of explicitly pro-privatization officials and somebody felt violence was the only resort.
Lol what youre seeing now is nothing compared to how bad it could be.
Look to war torn countries whose democracies collapsed and see for yourself the possible outcomes. Only 70% of people getting healthcarw is your concern? Oh, baby, that number can go much lower and they can take away their bread, too.
Yeah the ideal world would also want its populace educated to be able to participate in democracy in the first place. This world is not ideal. This is what happens in reality when you’re in the business of crushing souls, as it rightfully should. Monsters should fear their own footfalls.
It has always been this way. The degradation of leadership across generations of a society until the people are forcefully unified through suffering to enact meaningful change. That meaningful change always comes wearing the face of violence. Because it is the only face despots recognize.
We all wish it weren’t so. We wish the struggle of people from power didnt lap like the tide against our societies. But that is not reality. In reality power structures corrupt and degrade over time, again and again no matter their nature or intention. This is the meaning of Jefferson’s statement on the Tree of Liberty. You may not like it, but violence is the foremost effective tool of the people. The secret thats always erased and kept from us is how to correctly use it.
Judge them as correct maybe. Society is and has always been built on violence. Kings, emperors, dictators, CEOs all leverage violence directly and indirectly to maintain power. Every successful social movement has been backed with violence or the threat there of.
Of course, why just yesterday I used violence to solve a fellow’s computer problems and then when my car engine light came on I fought 47 men and the light went away. I shudder at the day I suffer heart failure, I can’t imagine how many I’ll have to fight to magically cure it, on top of the people I have to fight that day to make crops grow dinner.
Wait, was it fighting? No no, I’m pretty sure there might be some other pillars to human society… Mutually beneficial coexistence of specialists with a strong democratic rule of law to settle disputes, or at the very bare minimum some temporary excuse to maintain a social contract of minimization of harm done to each other? No no no, definitely fighting. Fight not hurt brain like think think do.
you’re not even trying to educate yourself on the subject, you just hide behind your idealist, grand-standing spite. just go read Foucault and get some critical thinking done. question your biases ;)
Wow you’re such a master of sophistry and purveyor of strawman arguments! I told myself to not to venture anymore into this thread but I wanted to read other comments and was too taken aback by your ingenious reasoning: dripping with sarcasm, devoid of substance, and utterly unmoored from reality.
You reduce centuries of historical struggle to a juvenile caricature of violence as if proponents of revolutionary change are advocating bar brawls over policy disputes. Congratulations, you’ve managed to completely miss the point and simultaneously belittle the historical sacrifices of countless movements that fought for the very freedoms you enjoy today.
Let’s start with your dismissal of violence as a foundation for human society. “Mutually beneficial coexistence” and “strong democratic rule of law,” you say? Cute. But how exactly do you think those came about? Did kings one day wake up and declare, “Let’s dissolve feudalism in favor of liberal democracy because it’s the right thing to do”? No, those changes were wrested from their cold, greedy hands by uprisings, revolutions, and organized struggles.
The Magna Carta? Signed because the barons threatened King John with rebellion.
The abolition of slavery? Achieved only after countless slave revolts and a bloody Civil War in the United States.
The right to vote? Fought for by suffragettes who faced violent repression.
Labor rights? Achieved after decades of strikes, riots, and blood spilled in clashes with private militias and police forces.
Your idyllic “coexistence” is not a natural state of humanity but a negotiated truce born from the fear of revolutionary upheaval.
Jefferson’s statement about the “tree of liberty” needing the blood of patriots and tyrants was not a call to violence for violence’s sake. It was an acknowledgment of the historical truth: oppressive systems do not voluntarily cede power. Pretending that systemic change can occur without disrupting the status quo is like believing you can dismantle a factory while it’s still running without turning off the machines.
When despots—be they monarchs or capitalists—cling to power, they do so with violence. You see it in the police repression of labor strikes, the brutal crackdowns on colonial uprisings, and the militarized responses to civil rights protests. The violence of the oppressed is not the instigator but the response to the entrenched violence of the ruling class.
You mockingly equate violence with fixing mundane issues like car troubles and crop failures. How clever! But let’s reframe this nonsense for clarity. Violence in the context of systemic change is not some crude hammer smashing individual problems; it’s the lever that dislodges entrenched structures of oppression. To illustrate with a few examples:
The American Revolution: Would you prefer the colonists had petitioned King George a few more times instead of taking up arms? Maybe they could have voted him out? Oh, wait—no ballots for them.
The French Revolution: Should the starving masses of France have just “coexisted” with the aristocracy while bread prices skyrocketed and their children died? Perhaps a sternly worded letter to Louis XVI would have sufficed?
The Civil Rights Movement: Even nonviolent actions like sit-ins and marches faced brutal violence from the state. Without the threat of unrest, would the Civil Rights Act have passed? Doubtful.
Your whimsical alternatives ignore the brutal reality of oppression: power concedes nothing without a fight.
You extol the virtues of specialization, rule of law, and coexistence as if these are unassailable constants of human civilization. But under capitalism, these “pillars” are subverted to serve profit, not people.
Specialization? Great, but under capitalism, it’s turned into alienation, where workers are cogs in a machine, disconnected from the fruits of their labor.
Democratic rule of law? Lovely idea, except it’s a veneer covering the reality of class domination. Laws are written by and for the ruling class, and enforcement disproportionately targets the poor and marginalized.
Minimization of harm? Tell that to the victims of imperialist wars, sweatshop labor, and environmental destruction—harm inflicted not by revolutionary movements but by the very system you implicitly defend.
Your appeal to these ideals is as hollow as your argument.
le violence bad, peace good moral tailspinning
You frame violence as inherently immoral, but your selective moral outrage ignores the structural violence baked into capitalism. The daily grind of exploitation, poverty, and systemic inequality kills far more people than any revolution ever could.
8 million people die yearly from poverty-related causes under capitalism.
The imperialist wars waged to secure resources for the capitalist system have claimed tens of millions of lives.
Environmental collapse, driven by the profit motive, threatens the survival of humanity itself.
Revolutionary violence, by contrast, seeks to dismantle these systems of oppression and exploitation. It is not a love of violence but the recognition of necessity.
In conclusion
Your snarky deflections and idealistic appeals to a nonexistent utopia betray your deep misunderstanding of history and the nature of power. The world you describe—a harmonious democracy where disputes are settled through mutual benefit and rule of law—has never existed without the threat or use of force to make it so.
You ridicule the idea of revolution while sitting atop the very achievements that violence has secured: your rights, your freedoms, your comforts. To dismiss the utility of revolutionary struggle is to deny history itself, a luxury only afforded to those insulated from the realities of oppression.
You might enjoy your quips, but history won’t judge you for your wit. It will judge you for your cowardice.
The sheer volume of text you’ve posted in the last 24 hours is… wow. I hate to be rude, but have you ever heard the saying “if I had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter”? A little brevity goes a long way.
Frankly, this is too much for me to read right now so we’re not going to make a judgement regarding the reports against you yet… But I’ll let you know now, fascist state apologia / tankie shit is a permaban on 196.
I guarantee you that if the shooter had the power to do that then he would have
You don’t know that. Killing the rich is ethical; torturing them is not. And since the shooter has better ethics than you do, I doubt he’d violate such a basic principle.
If it was an eye for an eye we’d trap them and their descendants into ever worsening debt spirals, make them use a system that actively works against them to get their health issues treated, and we’d sit them in places for eight hours a day, for five days in a row, where they must do as we say to survive. This isn’t an eye for an eye, this is a sucker punch after years of having our eyes systemically removed.
I guarantee you that if the shooter had the power to do that then he would have, but the point of the hyperbole is that violence does not solve all problems and instead can be quite detrimental.
The ideal world would have people vote for politicians which oppose privatized healthcare and would make his profession illegal. An ideal world would see class action lawsuits bankrupt him. An ideal world would consider his company denying ability to get necessary care, despite qualifying for reimbursement, as an illegal act similar to assault, and have him sent before a jury.
The outcome we got is the worst possible outcome: the USA elected a bunch of explicitly pro-privatization officials and somebody felt violence was the only resort.
Obviously violence doesn’t solve all problems, but it does objectively solve a lot, if not most, of them.
And when we normalize solving problems with violence then the weak and disadvantaged will be slaughtered like lambs.
We’ve mostly not been and yet that is exactly what’s happening now. I’d at least like to try something else.
Lol what youre seeing now is nothing compared to how bad it could be.
Look to war torn countries whose democracies collapsed and see for yourself the possible outcomes. Only 70% of people getting healthcarw is your concern? Oh, baby, that number can go much lower and they can take away their bread, too.
Yeah the ideal world would also want its populace educated to be able to participate in democracy in the first place. This world is not ideal. This is what happens in reality when you’re in the business of crushing souls, as it rightfully should. Monsters should fear their own footfalls.
It has always been this way. The degradation of leadership across generations of a society until the people are forcefully unified through suffering to enact meaningful change. That meaningful change always comes wearing the face of violence. Because it is the only face despots recognize.
We all wish it weren’t so. We wish the struggle of people from power didnt lap like the tide against our societies. But that is not reality. In reality power structures corrupt and degrade over time, again and again no matter their nature or intention. This is the meaning of Jefferson’s statement on the Tree of Liberty. You may not like it, but violence is the foremost effective tool of the people. The secret thats always erased and kept from us is how to correctly use it.
If you want to live in a violent hell then thats just you, society will judge you for your self-justifying actions.
Judge them as correct maybe. Society is and has always been built on violence. Kings, emperors, dictators, CEOs all leverage violence directly and indirectly to maintain power. Every successful social movement has been backed with violence or the threat there of.
Of course, why just yesterday I used violence to solve a fellow’s computer problems and then when my car engine light came on I fought 47 men and the light went away. I shudder at the day I suffer heart failure, I can’t imagine how many I’ll have to fight to magically cure it, on top of the people I have to fight that day to make crops grow dinner.
Wait, was it fighting? No no, I’m pretty sure there might be some other pillars to human society… Mutually beneficial coexistence of specialists with a strong democratic rule of law to settle disputes, or at the very bare minimum some temporary excuse to maintain a social contract of minimization of harm done to each other? No no no, definitely fighting. Fight not hurt brain like think think do.
you’re not even trying to educate yourself on the subject, you just hide behind your idealist, grand-standing spite. just go read Foucault and get some critical thinking done. question your biases ;)
Sir that’s a mirror you’re speaking into, I’m over here.
Wow you’re such a master of sophistry and purveyor of strawman arguments! I told myself to not to venture anymore into this thread but I wanted to read other comments and was too taken aback by your ingenious reasoning: dripping with sarcasm, devoid of substance, and utterly unmoored from reality.
You reduce centuries of historical struggle to a juvenile caricature of violence as if proponents of revolutionary change are advocating bar brawls over policy disputes. Congratulations, you’ve managed to completely miss the point and simultaneously belittle the historical sacrifices of countless movements that fought for the very freedoms you enjoy today.
Let’s start with your dismissal of violence as a foundation for human society. “Mutually beneficial coexistence” and “strong democratic rule of law,” you say? Cute. But how exactly do you think those came about? Did kings one day wake up and declare, “Let’s dissolve feudalism in favor of liberal democracy because it’s the right thing to do”? No, those changes were wrested from their cold, greedy hands by uprisings, revolutions, and organized struggles.
Your idyllic “coexistence” is not a natural state of humanity but a negotiated truce born from the fear of revolutionary upheaval.
Jefferson’s statement about the “tree of liberty” needing the blood of patriots and tyrants was not a call to violence for violence’s sake. It was an acknowledgment of the historical truth: oppressive systems do not voluntarily cede power. Pretending that systemic change can occur without disrupting the status quo is like believing you can dismantle a factory while it’s still running without turning off the machines.
When despots—be they monarchs or capitalists—cling to power, they do so with violence. You see it in the police repression of labor strikes, the brutal crackdowns on colonial uprisings, and the militarized responses to civil rights protests. The violence of the oppressed is not the instigator but the response to the entrenched violence of the ruling class.
You mockingly equate violence with fixing mundane issues like car troubles and crop failures. How clever! But let’s reframe this nonsense for clarity. Violence in the context of systemic change is not some crude hammer smashing individual problems; it’s the lever that dislodges entrenched structures of oppression. To illustrate with a few examples:
Your whimsical alternatives ignore the brutal reality of oppression: power concedes nothing without a fight.
You extol the virtues of specialization, rule of law, and coexistence as if these are unassailable constants of human civilization. But under capitalism, these “pillars” are subverted to serve profit, not people.
Your appeal to these ideals is as hollow as your argument.
You frame violence as inherently immoral, but your selective moral outrage ignores the structural violence baked into capitalism. The daily grind of exploitation, poverty, and systemic inequality kills far more people than any revolution ever could.
Revolutionary violence, by contrast, seeks to dismantle these systems of oppression and exploitation. It is not a love of violence but the recognition of necessity.
In conclusion
Your snarky deflections and idealistic appeals to a nonexistent utopia betray your deep misunderstanding of history and the nature of power. The world you describe—a harmonious democracy where disputes are settled through mutual benefit and rule of law—has never existed without the threat or use of force to make it so.
You ridicule the idea of revolution while sitting atop the very achievements that violence has secured: your rights, your freedoms, your comforts. To dismiss the utility of revolutionary struggle is to deny history itself, a luxury only afforded to those insulated from the realities of oppression.
You might enjoy your quips, but history won’t judge you for your wit. It will judge you for your cowardice.
The sheer volume of text you’ve posted in the last 24 hours is… wow. I hate to be rude, but have you ever heard the saying “if I had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter”? A little brevity goes a long way.
Frankly, this is too much for me to read right now so we’re not going to make a judgement regarding the reports against you yet… But I’ll let you know now, fascist state apologia / tankie shit is a permaban on 196.
Yes as somebody with correct opinions 98% of the time I should write a book
The Allies of WW2 would like a word.
The Allies were on the Defence. They, for the most part, treated nazi soldiers with dignity and even fair trials and rehabilitation.
Ganking any unarmed civillian in any context is not comparable that.
You don’t know that. Killing the rich is ethical; torturing them is not. And since the shooter has better ethics than you do, I doubt he’d violate such a basic principle.