/sThere was certainly no discussion about the cost and unfairness of health care prior to Thompson’s public execution./s
Stranger
Political violence is more common than you might think, but it’s usually committed by the powerful against the powerless. The people of Gaza right now are experiencing “political violence” with U.S weapons paid for by our tax dollars. The immigrants being rounded up by ICE are also experiencing political violence.
Yes, but the shooting really brought it to the forefront. The sheer volume of celebratory posts really made the issue hit home and made many people realize how widespread the antipathy towards greedy insurance companies was.
It’s sad that the powers that be don’t start paying attention until the underclasses start oiling the grooves on the guillotine.
Society cannot operate without violence. Any society or government on earth requires violence to operate either in the form of law enforcement or military.
Even nations that have abandoned the concept of a military like costa rica still have law enforcement and they still have military alliances, so they know other nations will commit violence on their behalf when needed.
The term ‘violence’ is limited in our vocabulary. If I kick down your door, pull out a gun and take you to a random building, then lock you in there against your will for 20 years, I’m a violent criminal. When the police do it, it is justice. When I kill someone, its murder, when a soldier kills someone its patriotism. Violence is necessary for society. When people think of violence they think of illegal violence. They never think of all the legal violence that is necessary for society to function.
The issue is that because violence is necessary, we’ve all collectively agreed to give the government a monopoly on violence so the government can use violence in a transparent, highly regulated and restricted way that benefits everyone. Thats why the military have endless rules of engagement and why the police have (but don’t have nearly enough) some transparency and accountability for their actions, because the violence police and military commit are designed to benefit society as a whole.
The issue is that as a society, targeted violence does work. Thats why Ukraine targets generals in their war, that is targeted assassinations.
Illegal violence against the government should be a last resort, but it is necessary. The phrase ‘the ballot box, the jury box, the ammo box’ has a lot of validity. Voting is paramount in importance. If that fails, then you use jury nullification. You refuse to convict either on a grand jury or a trial jury for someone convicted of a crime against the government. If that doesn’t work then sadly armed resistance becomes an option. But it should be the last resort.
The killing of the health care CEO was a good example. We can’t vote our way out of oligarchy. But people can choose to vote not guilty on a grand jury or a trial jury when someone resists oligarchy and breaks the law in the process.
Which brings up something; an assassination now and then seldom has a useful political effect not because violence is politically useless, but because there aren’t enough of them to accomplish anything. Plenty of violent political movements have achieved their goals, but not with just a single assassination every decade or two.
Kill hundreds or thousands or even millions of people and you’ll have a much greater effect. Usually a bad one of course, but that’s because of the sort of people who typically resort to such tactics; not because political violence doesn’t work.
Indeed. If there had been ten Brian Thompson-type incidents last year rather than just one, there would have been major changes in healthcare.
Yes, I think this is the real question. The violence has to be part of a plan of some sort. You have to have a clearly stated goal, and an idea as to how violence will possibly advance that goal.
One guy deciding to shoot someone all by himself doesn’t accomplish much. There’s a reason revolutions recruit as many members as possible. That gives you the resources to plan an operation, and makes you much more likely to succeed.
a Government which uses force to maintain its rule teaches the oppressed to use force to oppose it.
Nelson Mandela, 1964
I don’t agree that violence is necessary but I can’t argue that it doesn’t yield results.
True; corporate health care executives would be traveling in armored SUVs with security details, and passing the costs onto their customers.
Oh, you think they are going to change business models allowing them to rake in record profits because a few of them got caught out in public not watching their ‘six’?
Stranger
Quite possibly, yes. They behave the way they do because they are immune to any consequences from their actions; not because they are brave or fanatical.
Disagree. If the assassins who had targeted Trump has succeeded, his cult of personality would’ve fallen apart and I don’t think anyone else would be able to have such a cult like hold on the republican party or republican voters the way Trump does.
The (supposed) assassination of Stalin was highly effective, and it only killed one person. But it probably saved millions of lives.
What happens if grand juries start refusing to indict or trial juries start refusing to convict. This could change how society functions.
The Soviet Union (and yes, the persecution of political opponents and the GULAG system of forced labor prisons) continued onward for nearly four decades, and even with the public ‘destalinization’ under Khrushchev there was brutal repression of any form of political dissent, minimal freedom of expression or travel, state-sanctioned violence and murder. Other than some of the more self-destructive policies under Stalin (which hypothetically could have brought the Soviet Union to dissolution even faster) not a lot actually changed in Soviet society.
Although you are framing this thesis in more administrative terms this is really no different than the doomthusiasts saying, how great it would be if society collapsed and we could all live in private little fiefdoms where armed warlords control everything. If “grand juries start refusing to indict or trial juries start refusing to convict,” then law is meaningless, and the people who will suffer the most are the ones who can’t afford physical security and to live behind bulletproof glass and thick walls.
I get the emotional impetus of people wanting to celebrate the execution of Brian Thompson; for-profit corporate unified health providers and insurers have so manipulated the health care system in this company to maximize profits at the expense of providing even adequate health care that it is maddening, and Brian Thompson appears to have been kind of an odious person in both his corporate and private life. But frankly, UHC and Thompson didn’t by themselves bring about this world in which the regulatory environment over health care permits this kind of exploitation. Elected legislators–of both parties–collaborated in allowing providers to treat their ‘customers’ in this fashion, and for the most part have resisted any kind of thorough investigation or reform, and certainly of revolutionizing the system to provide comprehensive care at affordable cost, subsidized across the tax base so individuals aren’t dependent upon having a full time job with a large company or having to pay for health care on an open market without the benefit of class representation. We can have another dozen Luigis shooting Thompsons in the back (on a public street, with completely innocent people put into harms way) and it won’t change that situation one whit except that insurance companies will beef up security around their execs and become even less transparent about their affairs.
Stranger
Didn’t things pretty much go the way Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin hoped?
Thats not accurate. After stalin died, the mass purges stopped. The man made famines ended. Over a million gulag prisoners were released and mass arrests/executions largely stopped.
No it wasn’t a paradise, but it was less oppressive and miserable. During stalin, millions were executed and sent to the gulags. After stalin, it was more in the low tens of thousands.
There was still mass oppression, but not on the same level as under Stalin and it wasn’t directed at the general public like it was under Stalin. The assassination of Stalin was the best thing to happen to the people in the USSR.
And besides Beria bragging that he’d done it, is there any evidence that Stalin was killed?
First of all, Josef Stalin was not assassinated. He had been in ill health since 1950, and was diagnosed as having had a cerebral hemorrhage (stroke) a few days before dying. Despite various allegations there isn’t any evidence that he was poisoned and an autopsy showed that he had severe atherosclerosis.
Second, the planned “man made famines” ended by 1933, while while agricultural mismanagement continued to offer sub-par crop yields, the Soviet Union didn’t experience mass famines again until World War II. Third, while there was a general amnesty for non-political prisoners and those with short sentences as part of the destalinization process following Khrushchev’s election to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that was as much a practical matter as of any kind of liberalization; the GULUG labor system had become engorged with prisoners, many of whom were too ill or old to actually do productive physical labor, and releasing them made it appear that not as many died because of their years of impressment. Political prisoners remained in the GULAG system even after it was formally dismantled in the early 'Sixties, and political opposition (often, just someone who displeased a local party official) was often sent to the labor camp system without trial or at most a show trial without the opportunity for defense. The Soviet system remained oppressive after Stalin albeit not quite so mercurial. Internally, although the forced relocations, ethnic purges, and mass executions of ethnic Germans and other minorities ended even before Stalin’s death, that was because most of those plans had been completed. The Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact became even more extreme after Stalin, with the 1956 invasion of Hungary, repression of the 1968 ‘Prague Spring’ in Czechoslovakia, and the threat of invasion of Poland in 1980 which lead to martial law to suppress the Solidarity Movement.
Regardless of all of this, there is no reason to believe and no evidence for the thesis that the extrajudicial killing of corporate CEOs will somehow force corporations to reform themselves so as to not seek profit at the expense of their ostensible customers. The response to Brian Thompson’s killing was to remove public information, increase security, and in a few cases relocate corporate officers who were perceived to be at threat. Grand and trial juries refusing to indict or convict assassins isn’t going to somehow create more justice; it would just serve to reinforce the notion that there is no justice to be had in any sense, by any legitimate venue. Your imagination of a world where society progresses its way to greater fairness by individuals summarily killing people on the street is just a perverse and infantile fantasy.
Stranger
I’m not going to kiss your ass or fawn over your self proclaimed brilliance the way other people here do. You are wrong and you are too arrogant and sensitive to admit it.
Also a cerebral hemorrhage can be caused by rat poison, as I mentioned. Beria also admitted to killing Stalin to Molotov. Could that be a lie? Possibly. But the autopsy found Stalin also had bleeding in his digestive system, not just his brain.
Several million people were released from Soviet gulags in the years after Stalin died.
The famines you write off happened due to Stalin’s leadership. Stalin died, the famines ended.
Moderating:
You’re in Great Debates, not the Pit. You know better than to engage in personal insults that this. I’m letting you off with a mod note and not a formal warning, against my better judgment.
Don’t do this again.
I’m really not interested in responding to your ad hominem. The credible way of responding to a statement you disagree with is to either present evidence or a rational counterargument. You have done neither.
Stranger