this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
124 points (66.6% liked)
196
16744 readers
2570 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Then why are you celebrating the death of a bad person in the first place? That's the actual "eye for an eye" shit that's making you blind. The death itself isn't worth celebrating, only the effect of it on the world.
We are under attack dumbass. We're being parasitized by the rich! The democratic system in the US is gone with the election of Trump. What the fuck do you actually think that would look like if not this? You're either in denial, or too cowardly to actually stick to your word.
If anyone ever wondered who would sympathize with the British in 1775, posts like OPs should answer that question
There are no "effects on the world" from this and if there will be then those effects will be purely negative such as more copycat killers attacking random targets. A bad person is just dead, its results are purely therapeutic.
No, the question boils down to the effect it has on consciousness. How many people broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule of those who may have seemed untouchable to them less than a week ago is hard to fathom.
Not to mention that it was yet another instance of a large scale masks-off event for the exploiter class, with both Democrats and Trump as well as their media lackeys proving once again that they are really just one single party of capital.
Of course however, this does not mean that it also poses a threat of some people falling into the erroneous conviction that risks resulting in anything more than repression by the authorities, that the problem is personal and not structural.
The number of people who "broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule" don't have any impact on the system that creates and restrains billionaires. Even if more people die in the streets nothing, aside from more death, changes.
Real change has to come from ballots. From pen on paper. Or else, if you utilizr violence to the extent of permanent systemic change, you will absolutely have a worse system at the end of it. A system where the strong kill the weak and take what they want. A system where the faction with the most absolute and unquestioned loyalty wins fights and slaughters their intellectual betters.
Voting is over. I'm not kidding when I say that. Trump is a fascist, and until he dies, there will be no more fair elections. We won't be able to restrain the rich with the state, as there will be no more rule of law. It's only the rule of one man now.
Even if you have total faith in liberal democracy being the best system, you need to understand that we lost it. The liberal experiment came to an end at year 248. The system is toast. The Leviathan of the state will no longer listen to us, and the social contract has been irreparably burned by the fires of fascism.
We'd need a new contract to get that system back. Trump will cause a level of change to our government that we haven't seen since FDR.
The GOP congress are the ones with the real power and they're anything but unified. Trump is one of the worst presidents of all time but there have been monsters before and there inevitably will be again.
But a violent uprising is more beneficial to Trump than it is to us. The chances of a better system replacing the current one is basically zero without the majority of people willing to agree on what a better system looks like and how to organize it quickly without concessions, otherwise the USA will just become a corpse for the looming vultures to land on.
Trump will override whatever the GOP congress decides at the barrel of a gun. SCOTUS gave the president explicit permission to commit violence against his political enemies. Does the "Night of Long Knives" ring any bells? Trump takes direct inspiration from Hitler, including with how he plans to purge dissent.
His base is not on the side of the dissenters, and will only cheer him on. That's what ousting Kevin McCarthy was all about. Removing anyone who will say no. If they try to gain leverage, he can use the power of the state to brutally suppress them. If you know a godamn thing about project 2025, you should know that it doesn't plan to worry about what congress thinks.
That's also probably part of his tariff strategy. He knows both political parties want free trade, as global capitalism was an important part of America's geopolitical strategy. However, free trade also hurts many sectors of our economy, particularly the industry side. This has led to the antisemitic tinged hatred of (((globalists))), allowing anger from capitalism to be redirected towards the Jews. When GOP congress members speak up on behalf of capitalism or Jewish people, Trump will make a hit list of the loudest voices.
Again, I'm not joking about this. This is how Trump will become the dictator he promised to be. Checks and balances are finished, elections are finished, and neither party can do anything about it. NOBODY really has rights anymore. Even the rich are in danger if they seriously challenge Trump.
Lol OK then, if thats what the USA chose for themselves then I have no pity.
However, I do disagree with you on the power rankings, here. Congress is at the top as far as I see it. The pentagon isn't going to do shit for Donald if its funding is at stake because of it, and Trump alone has no system to ratify laws and initiate budgets.
Of course you don't understand! I've lived here my whole life and am well versed in our political system. Ignorant foreigner!
I bet you see us as comparable in size to a European country. We're at the scale of the EU. California has the population of Canada. Texas is more populous than Australia. You can drive 1000 kilometers and not leave your state. Our military dwarfs everyone else's combined, and the entire world couldn't mount a successful invasion if our overseas military got snapped from existence.
We have a lot of checks in place. That's why Trump fell in the first place. Congress won on January 6th in 2021 because Trump didn't have the military. This time, he'll purge the military and every other federal office for the next four years. By then, he'll have corrupted everything too much for elections to matter.
This great nation will probably break apart in the next few decades, despite how well our military is set up to not fracture. It'll take a while for the military to disentangle enough for that to happen. Until then, there will be no civil war, only anarchy and fascism. Maybe everyone will get tired of fighting and we'll hold a constitutional congress, but I doubt it'll hold together after that.
Just remember for where you live: It can happen anywhere. Never let the rich get too strong. Social Democracy is as far right as liberalism can sustainably go.
Jfc that narrow-minded idealist obsession with Trump. Trumpism cannot be defeated with lesser evilism when the lesser evil is basically also far right, only slightly more to the left and that is also dubious with all the war mongering, which Trump's promise to put it to an end indisputably helped him secure a victory, alongside a slew of economic shortcomings affecting the working class (even though his solutions are no solutions at all)
He literally was beaten by a lesser evil and it did a lot of good for a lot of people, so yeh.
You don't like to see blood so you voted for the river?
the fuck are you talking about
(2/2)
This reeks of a bourgeois fear of the masses rising up to demand what’s rightfully theirs, of thinly veiled elitism and misunderstanding of the basics of class relations. No, it's not blue vs white collars but people living off others' toil and the toilers.
Who are these “intellectual betters”? Capitalist apologists? Corporate technocrats? The same people whose “brilliance” built a world teetering on ecological collapse? Spare us the melodrama. Revolutions don’t thrive on blind loyalty; they’re built on solidarity and the shared understanding that the status quo is unsustainable.
Your argument boils down to a defense of complacency: ballots over barricades, submission over struggle. You seem more afraid of the risks of change than the certainty of suffering under capitalism. But history teaches us that systemic change demands courage—not the cowardice of hoping billionaires and their henchmen will play nice. Keep clutching those ballots; the rest of us will be busy building a world where they aren’t needed to decide who gets to live with dignity.
Lmao, I fear the masses indeed because I am among them and they have a grand proclivity for self harm and violence while your pathetic masters look down in glee at you for doing their bidding: conscious or otherwise.
Once again, your idea that violence leads to a “system where the strong kill the weak” is ironic because it perfectly describes capitalism. Under capitalism, the strong (the wealthy) already exploit and oppress the weak (workers and marginalized groups). Capitalism is a system of structural violence: people die of preventable diseases, starvation, imperialist wars and workplace accidents because profit is prioritized over human life. The strong kill the weak daily, but they often do it quietly, through markets and laws, not just the rifles and bayonets. And bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends.
I'll reiterate with hope that you cease your baseless fearmongering: revolutionary forms of social organization, when properly rooted in democratic proletarian control, aim to abolish the conditions under which “the strong” exploit “the weak.” The dictatorship of the proletariat, as articulated by Marx and Engels, is not a tyranny of individuals but a transitional state where the working class wields power collectively to dismantle class hierarchies.
It is capitalism, not socialism, where the strong exploit the weak. In the present system, billionaires exploit the workers, devastate the planet, and use their power to crush resistance. What you fear is the inversion of this state of affairs: a society where the oppressed assert their collective strength to abolish oppression altogether.
Your apparent appeals to moralistic platitudes ignore the material realities of class society. Under capitalism, it is the ruling class that pits the poor against one another through systemic inequality, wage suppression, and imperialist wars. Revolutionary movements aim to unite the working class against their true enemies: the capitalist class.
To denounce revolutionary struggle while ignoring the daily violence of capitalism—poverty, police brutality, environmental destruction—is to tacitly side with the oppressors. Revolutionary action is not about chaos or "killing each other" but about dismantling the systems that perpetuate such violence.
jfc these tankies
ok dear agent, you cannot admit losing the discussion so you'll just resort to namecalling, so vice versa 💅
(1/2)
Your comment reads like a manifesto for maintaining the status quo dressed up as pragmatic wisdom. It’s almost charming, in the same way, an infomercial about a "miracle" weight-loss pill is charming, assuming the audience hasn’t read the fine print. But let’s get to the real business of dismantling this labyrinth of myths you’ve built.
Oh, so now we’re pretending that mass shifts in consciousness are irrelevant? History begs to differ. The abolition of feudalism, the rise of unions, civil rights movements—all were powered by collective awakenings. The Paris Commune was ridiculed as a blip, yet it shaped proletarian strategies worldwide. The suffragettes, who were once dismissed as a hysterical sideshow, rewrote the political landscape. Sure, individual enlightenment alone won’t topple billionaires—but dismissing the transformative potential of collective action? That’s some industrial-strength cynicism masquerading as “realism.”
This Hallmark sentiment belongs on a motivational poster, not in a serious discussion about systemic change. Who controls the ballots? Capitalist elites, through gerrymandering, corporate media, voter suppression, and lobbying. Let’s talk specifics: Tsipras in Greece was democratically elected to resist austerity. What did ballots deliver? Betrayal. Ask the Greeks who were prevented by the banksters from withdrawing more than 50€ a day. Bernie Sanders inspired millions, only to capitulate to the Democrat machine with imperialist war criminals at the helm, because Democrats were never a party that served the working people. They had so many chances to e.g. codify abortion when they were in power, before Roe v Wade got struck down. Meanwhile, Corbyn faced a relentless smear campaign and sabotage from within Labour and now virtually all of the Labour left is purged and Sir Starmer happily approves more and more money being wasted on warfare while denying the possibility of renationalizing the water companies which have turned British rivers into one of the most polluted in Europe, because his narrow reformist mindset rejects the possibility of expropriation without compensation, even if it's something so indusputably belonging to all, a common (outside_ the WEF and other ultra-rich psychopath meetings, of course).
The conclusion? Ballots are a tool wielded by the ruling class to manage dissent, not overthrow it.
Ohh the old pearl-clutching “violence begets chaos” trope. Conveniently ignores the systemic violence baked into capitalism: poverty, imperialist wars, environmental destruction, police brutality.
Over 100 million people displaced in the last year.
56 wars raging worldwide, the highest figure since WWII.
Nuclear warfare back in business after three decades.
Approx. 5-20 million people dying annually due to preventable causes
Revolutionary violence isn’t arbitrary carnage; it’s the oppressed defending themselves against the daily brutality of the ruling class. In fact, it is out of the fatigue with the incessant brutality, injustice and deprivation of the existing order that revolutions are born. Look at the revolutionary wave that followed after the Great Slaughter of WWI.
Capitalist states routinely murder and displace millions to maintain power. Revolutionary violence seeks to end that barbarism, not perpetuate it.
Take again the Russian Revolution—initially a relatively bloodless overthrow. More people got trampled over when the storming of Winter Palace was being reenacted 10 years later for a movie than during the actual event. The ensuing violence was primarily defensive, against counter-revolutionaries and imperialist invaders. Without the Red Army, the October Revolution would’ve been a footnote. If you don't believe me, read Ten days that shook the world by John Reed.
Capitalism's birth was hardly a bloodless affair—whether through the American or French Revolutions, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, La Conquista, Opium Wars, colonialism in Africa, India or Indonesia, it was drenched in violence. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and freedom of the press. The civil war resulted in the death of roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population. During the Russian Civil War, about 0.7% of the population died, a large portion of which can be attributed to the White Terror. Yet, the Bolsheviks, despite the brutal conditions, attempted to minimize violence. They first sought to rely on agitation among intervention forces, and even amid famine, Lenin organized the largest international aid operation of its time, importing vast amounts of grain into the USSR between 1918 and 1921—much of it sabotaged by the Whites, Esery or kulaks. The mutinies within the foreign troops and the strikes and blockades organized in solidarity by French or British workers also contributed to the withdrawal of many of the Allied troops. Still, you wouldn’t think of questioning the legitimacy of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions or the U.S. Civil War, would you? And in fact, if not then rightly so. Beacause freedom is the recognition of necessity. They played their progressive role at their time, along with capitalism. But that potential is long gone and now capitalism is holding human potential back.
jfc
these tankies
You are the literal definition of tankie when you side with the tanks against the civilians they were used on. You're a USSR fan. You're precisely what people refer to.
USSR was a degenerate workers state, though the degeneration didn't fully take hold until 1930s. The concept of socialism in one country was a revisionist drivel against which Lenin fought his entire life. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 established soviets (worker and peasant councils) with direct democracy without privilege all over the country. it's a shame that the political upheaval in the USSR didn't go further and the calls to not only criticize Stalin but also Khrushchev didn't materialize, as well as his plan to return at least some democracy to the party for which he got ousted.