While it’s very unlikely that someone has a definitive answer, this question popped into my head after the assassination of the UHC CEO and it’s been bothering me that I can’t shake off this feeling that more is likely to happen (maybe not in higher frequency but potential).
Usually I could provide counter-arguments to myself in a realism/(should I buy apples or oranges comparison) kind-of sense but this one I feel more unsure about.
I wish I had more diverse exp in systems analysis as these kinds of questions that linger in my head really irritates my OCD brain as I just want to know what’s the most likely answer.
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…
two is just a mere coincidence; but three would be the start a pattern or trend.
And if there were FIVE evil CEO’s suddenly victimized, why we could have a movement!
Are there even five evil ceos out there? Come on, be real.
spoiler
/insert_meme_about_making_question_too_easy
Well, there was that guy who took a pot shot at Trump, so if you count that, we’re already at two…
You make it sound like he didn’t successfully shoot him. Honestly if trump wasn’t so goddamn fidgety on stage I think he would be dead right now.
successful
Even your second sentence implies that he wasn’t. Not in his goal anyway.
It happened in Europe during the “years of lead”, mostly in Italia, France and Germany.
Skimming through Wikipedia, most of the attacks seemed to focus on politicians, police, and (disproportionately) members of the public.
A lot of the glee about the CEO murder is that his company’s actions are indefensible, and, as CEO he is responsible for them. It’s very difficult to say the same of the victims of the Years of Lead - many seem to be police, random members of the public, or other members of the same group. With the possible exception of some politicians, it’s hard to see how the victims were responsible for much.
Absolutely right. The aim at large was to free the masses from the grip of modern capitalism. The actual targets were mostly unlucky blokes.
I feel like victimized is the wrong word for someone reaching the find out part of fucking around.
It was tongue-in-cheek, along with “unfortunately”
Honestly, even if 100 CEOs or similar were mowed down I don’t know that I would think that meant we were headed any particular direction as a society, if they’re all done by a single person or group. Now, if many different unaffiliated people start making billionaire swiss cheese, even if it’s only 3 or 4, then I think we start to see a pattern at a societal level.
Of course, if that were to happen, they’ll take all the guns and start throwing people in reeducation camps and probably publicly executing sympathizers. Remember, the police exist with the main purpose of protecting that class. Any kind of class war is going to be met with overwhelming force that would rival any military conflict, and that’s before they start bringing in actual military if it got to that point.
Y’know, this comment started off trying to be playfully optimistic, and now I’m sad :(
You also have to keep in mind that both the police and military are “outsiders” to capitalists. They are often poor, and can side with the public. Capitalists rely on total obedience of the military and police, if that breaks, they’re done.
The whole “seizing guns” thing is a red herring. One general strike and no amount of guns will matter, capitalists need constant, increasing wealth. To not just lower their money but stop incoming money is death to them. Imagine every port, airport, train station, service industry business, etc, all with no workers.
They can call all the cops and infantry they want, those same people will constantly be asked to kill friends and family. The ones willing to do so will decrease in number until the inevitable toppling of the governing body.
A (former) leader of Japan was killed with a makeshift weapon. Imagine CEOs trying to dine out when any person in the kitchen staff could poison them.
But is it? This same year a kid was an inch or two away from making a bullet enter Trumps brain.
He’s not the CEO of a healthcare company, but he’s certainly at the helm of many companies, and will soon be president of the states.
“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
And that’s how you get fascism!
Edit: from the backlash, I guess my contribution was misunderstood :-/. I meant that the top trying to hold on to its power against an increasly conscious base is how you get fascism. I’ll try to make myself clearer next time
From my point of view; death at the top of the pyramid is more of a symptom/resultant of fascism rather than it being the source.
I could be wrong though
I wouldn’t even say it’s a symptom of fascism, more just a symptom of the same things that give rise to fascism
Robin Hood, famous fascist.
Nuh uh. Oppressing and brutalising the bottom layer of society is how you get fascism. Assasinations of the rich and powerful is how you get freedom.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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/
One can hope.
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.
They voted for Trump, but not because they actually wanted a bunch of asshole CEOs in power. The electorate wanted real transformative change; they’re looking for anyone who can offer even a hope of some bold transformative change. The only party offering real change right now is the Republicans. Democrats just want to offer a few piddly means-tested tax credits like they usually do, while doing absolutely nothing to actually rein in corporate wealth and power. Kamala’s flagship domestic policy was a $25k home tax credit that only a sliver of the populace would be eligible for; and it would only serve to bid up housing prices.
Like it or not, the Republicans did actually have answers for people. They aren’t good or noble answers, but they were answers. Democrats were too chickenshit to run on a platform of “CEOS are ruining your life, we need to come down like the hammer of God on the greedy oligarchs.” The Republicans in turn ran on a platform of, “the reason your life sucks is a bunch of DEI programs are putting unqualified people ahead of you. We’ll end that. Illegal immigrants are taking your job opportunities, and we’ll deport them all. House prices are too high, so we’ll deport 20 million immigrants and lower them!”
Those are abominable answers to the problems we face, but they actually had an answer, however evil and ultimately unproductive. Yes, obviously deporting millions of immigrants won’t actually help people, but it doesn’t matter. The Republicans actually had an answer to the question, “what transformative change will you do to improve the lives of Americans?”
Democrats had no answer. And for that, they lost.
People are hungry for dramatic change. They feel the system is rigged, and they are right. Democrats were too cowardly to take up that message and push for change against the corporate class, and that left Republicans as the only party offering any real change.
You don’t need to radically transform society to want change; the country already clearly wants change. The fundamental problem is the only ones offering change are the Republicans.
Thank you for taking the patience to put this into words so nicely! I really appreciate your perspective. Maybe I was being too rude calling Republicans “dumb”, I apologize. I guess I’m just as angry as many other people at seeing the proposed Republican plans (especially “slashing public spending” a.k.a. reducing social welfare) and seeing people actually vote for that.
Yeah, people in the US want change. I’m not sure what would be a productive and viable proposal that doesn’t completely fuck up the country. I’m European and have a non-interference policy for myself when it comes to the internals of the US. In other words, I don’t want to meddle too much with what’s going on in the US.
This is the only correct answer. Billionaires already control the masses.
Excuse me while I have a good laugh.
The problem is that it hasn’t been happening enough. Don’t get too ahead of yourself.
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.
They love preaching social Darwinism but are they ready for some natural selection 🐸
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.
%100 gonna see more copycats on this. Those who want their name in history are watching this and seeing how the Internet is treating this guy like a hero.
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.
We know one thing for sure is that these parasites and their owners will never stop the grift on their own.
Also Trump ain’t FDR…
What does ‘NOM’ stand for?
“NOM” is an onomatopoeic term for eating (an eating sound).
This is correct, it is not meant to be an initialism.
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?
Swede here, first of all, we don’t have socialism here, we have a social democratic system here.
Secondly, the words socialism/communism have been tarnished over decades in the US, people have been taught to immediately reject those words regardless of their context.
So if the US can ever get a social democratic system, it needs a rebrand.
It needs something like “The Great America Deal”
“Make America normal again”?
MANA from heaven. But without the god bullshit.
Couldn’t agree more. Socialists with their hammers and sickles and Che Guevara t-shirts are accomplishing nothing. People need to let go of their fantasy of having people they disagree with them someday saying “I was completely wrong about socialism, you were right, I will never doubt you again!”
Though at this point Americans don’t even like the term “New Deal” because they’ve been told the economic policies of FDR (which pulled the country out of the Great Depression) were bad. So “Great America Deal” may not work. Biden tried “Build Back Better” but that was too lame. But yeah, gotta find a phrase people like and put it on a hat.
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?
I mean, kind of. Conservatives don’t view Donald Trump and Elon Musk as the wealthy elite that they are. They view them as “political outsiders”. So yeah, people want change from the status quo, because the status quo is broken for so many.
That’s what fake news is trying to say…
Also, many people on here stated from the start kamala and her DNC komissars are incompetent imbiciles for which they promptly banned from politics and news subs.
So just because mods silence comments sense reasoning, doesn’t mean that it ain’t out there.
Plenty of comments in Politics about how dumb the Democratic campaign was, the bans were for calling them perpetrators of a genocide, which is false.
Love your continued moderation of your communities into an echo chamber by removing opinions that $ ~> murder could ever be considered perpetration of murder.
Don’t get me wrong you are free to disagree, but censorship of the opposing position is so toothlessly lame. Glad people are noticing how ineffectual and cringe your moderation practices are.
Fringe elements are gonna fringe, I get way more thanks for dealing with nonsense than hate.
“fringe elements gonna fringe” says the mod who gets pummeled with downvotes every time this happens
tell me more about that “fringe” in light of that fat ratio 💪💪😎🦅
You know the saying, “death and taxes”? Well, they stopped paying taxes.
deleted by creator
