I know someone is gonna pipe up about the mean girl from their highschool that’s a nurse now. It cones up constantly in these conversations. But what I wanna put here is this comment by u/nursemattycakes (it’s also the highlighted comment in the link):
"Probably the first major wake up call I had as a new grad in 2006 was taking care of a guy just a couple of years older than me. He was a frequent flyer in our hospital… a super nice kid with cystic fibrosis. His mother was the sweetest person I have probably ever met, and was diligently by his side at every admission. She was honestly the best caregiver I have personally ever met and was always very kind to the staff. I had gotten to take care of him several times over the years, even prior to graduating nursing school when I was a tech. I had never personally met the dad, although a few of my coworkers had, but I knew he worked a shit ton of OT to pay for all the care for his son that he could.
One night I came to work and he was my patient, and the dad was in the room. The mood in the room was absolutely tense, and the vibe at the nurses station was especially tense. During report the day shift nurse told me that the patient had hit his lifetime maximum benefit. Worse yet, his pulmonologist who had been his doctor since birth told the patient “You can’t just come to the ER every time you’re short of breath. You’re going to have to learn to be short of breath at home” and essentially fired him. Fortunately, the hospital’s other pulmonologist was more than happy to assume care. Unfortunately, about six months later the patient died. His demographics sheet listed him as self pay.
I will never ever forgive his doctor for abandoning him once that sweet, sweet insurance money ran out, and the experience made me realize how unnecessary and evil for-profit health insurance providers are.
So no, I do not care one bit about some multi-multi-multi millionaire getting gunned down because the luxurious and worry-free lifestyle he led was made possible by the suffering and preventable deaths of thousands upon thousands of people every year. His family can dry their tears with their stock options. Because fuck ‘em.
I, on the other hand, will enjoy my Christmas season as per usual, with the understanding that with just a little bit of bad luck I could lose everything I own at any point because in this country healthcare is not a right, but a privilege extended to me as long as I work hard to make the unimaginably rich, richer."
I hope the rich greedy fucks see this and are afraid of copycats. I hope they reconsider their being so greedy in the future. Never know when they might push someone too far.
There will be no fear until there are actually a few copycats taking out a few top-tier execs.
They simply won’t care.
And even if they do, they’re not going to change what they do for profits. They’ll beef up security, make implied threats in the media like “Attacking CEO’s is bad for your portfolio” or something.
It would have to be a pretty concerted attack to change anything, revolution-strength attack.
They’ll beef up security, make implied threats in the media like “Attacking CEO’s is bad for your portfolio” or something.
Beefing up security has it’s limit.
Exactly my take. Private security is chicken-change to these guys. They’ll spend more money demonizing the shooter(s) in the headlines and social media.
Three other thoughts:
- The shooter was apparently very motivated.
- He’ll likely never get caught, unless he was really stupid or talks.
- I thought you couldn’t have a BB gun in NYC? LOL, literally the strictest gun laws in America. Huh.
He’ll likely never get caught, unless he was really stupid or talks.
A couple alleged pictures of his face has been released. If they’re actually him, I wouldn’t bet on that.
All three of your points are related - and let’s not kid ourselves, if anyone wants to bring a gun into a no-gun area it’s gonna happen including a DIY gun. So pointing out strict gun laws as fallible is a fallacy of perfection being the enemy of good.
Frankly, to me this is what 2A is for…stopping tyranny. Governmental, or in this case the tyranny of oligarchs trading your longevity for profits. Not threatening to overthrow the government because people want you to mask up to save lives or be nice to LGBTQ people.
You would have to literally topple society as we know it to change it with violence.
And even then, there’s a very good chance those same selfish people who’ve always pulled strings at the top will come out of it back at the top, only stronger than before because they have less competition.
One of the reasons the Soviet Union failed is because running an entire nation is actually very difficult. The “Deep State” is actually the thousands of mid-level bureaucratic functionaries which keep the nation chugging along with any level of consistency. So even after a revolution, you end up using a bunch of the same people who previously comprised the civil service to keep everything going and that invites corruption into the organization on day 1. The same thing happened when the USSR collapsed. The corrupt career politicians failed upward and became oligarchs. The machinery of state largely continued unabated.
The alternative isn’t better, either. When the US toppled the government in Iraq, they refused to allow former ruling party members to get government jobs. Which had two effects. The first is that the new government was horrifically ineffective, because no one knew what they were doing, and running a sprawling bureaucracy is again, difficult. The second was that there was now a large population of disaffected, unemployable upper middle class men who had their careers effectively ended. Which gave rise to ISIS.
Yes. Hence “revolution-strength”.
And agreed on the second point. It would have to be as thorough as possible to force the wealthy to keep their heads down….and attached. Like France’s work.
You mean the France that just had a far-right no-confidence vote that toppled their government?
People like to tout France as some revolution utopia… but they’re hardly a good example of success.
No, there were two votes of no-confidence, one by the left and one by the far-right. The left refused to vote the mention deposed by the far-right, but the far-right did vote for the motion deposed by the left, which succeeded.
And the government was your typical neoliberal government that was just there to gut all benefits for the poor to give it to the rich, like what Macron has been doing for years, despite previous elections giving a (albeit small) majority to the left.
So yeah, not gonna lie, that government won’t be missed.
(Although I tend to agree with your last sentence, the current structure of the country basically gives a lot of power to the president)
Who said it was utopia? Nobody said it was utopia. Even the French say it had some serious problems. Nonetheless, it was effective. What’s your example of success? Seeing as you so confidently know what isn’t success, surely you have the perfect system for to show where they went wrong?
Was it effective? I mean, they had a moment to breath… before they were taken over by the Napoleonic dynasty. I’d say not succumbing to a dictatorship within a generation is a good measure of success.
I don’t know of a perfect system, and I’m almost certain one doesn’t exist… but I do know that violent revolution does as much harm as good. Often more, you often see authoritarians seize the reins after, or during, a violent revolution… and they rarely give them up.
It can be helpful… but only in the short term. Like most things people tout these days, it’s little more than a reactionary stop-gap. Not a solution. No solution is going to be that easy.
The best thing people can do is work to support each other, not focus on undermining each other. That’s what revolution boils down to, undermining a system. It doesn’t fix anything, it just breaks what’s there.
It was effective for like 10 minutes until Napoleon declared himself emporer
No way, they’ll just triple their security detail and bill it to the company where we’ll pick up the tab.
They can do that until the mob shows up at their door with a rope.
“hey boss, we’re gonna need more rope. a lot more.”
I admire your optimism in the activism of the average American.
I feel like we’re approaching the level at which violent revolution becomes more probably than not, especially when the system isn’t working to correct it.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
—John F. Kennedy, 1962
The fear won’t make them better, it’ll make them more bitter and resentful. They’d do more to take it out on the small people they’re responsible for than to give back to them. Probably in spending more money on private security firms to keep them safe.
USA: “Each of us needs at least one gun to fight tyrants!”
Also USA: “You’re not allowed to cheer the death of a tyrant. You need to pretend like they were a good person and never say anything bad about them.”
There has been an intentional amplification of “only peaceful protest is effective” when teaching about civil rights, ignoring Malcolm X in favor of MLK. When the reality is that society was presented a choice - taking the proffered open hand and building something better together, or the closed fist of armed paramilitants reciprocating the violence shown to them. We did the former (but also assassinated MLK to prevent it from going further).
Since then, our government has taken every opportunity to chill any discussion of violence in the open, and to intentionally publicize the infiltration of private organizations or gatherings in which individuals might discuss or plan violence and/or direct action. They make corporations hosting modern public forums (like reddit, twitter) liable for pro-violence content to encourage them to ban participants who express notions in favor of or encouraging violence. Corporate entities band together to refuse to advertise in places which do so, depriving those places the funding needed to operate.
Our national security state captures all digital traffic and automatically processes and filters it, flagging key words and the individuals associated with it. We all know, and have incorporated that fact into our behaviors at an unconscious level.
The state and corporate entities are more well equipped than ever to prevent people from taking action to re-level the playing field. We’re all taught that the “ammo box” is the lsst line of defense against tyranny, but every unspoken message given to us is meant to convey that you’ll be infiltrated before you start, or arrested and painted as a radical for even participating in the conversation.
Everything you said is true.
But the catch is, there is a limit to how much can be extracted from laborers and the earth before the system breaks under it’s own weight. Infinite growth on a finite planet with a finite work force is not possible. It might break next week, it might break a decade from now, it might be a century, there is no way to know for sure.
All of the national security and shut down of pro-violence content can only do so much. The country has been flooded with arms such that anyone can easily and legally get one, and effectively everyone has a motive, and the security these CEOs/shareholders/billionaires have is limited. And so lone wolf attacks like this last one will always be possible.
My wife’s cousin runs the office for a podiatrist and has to deal with insurance companies. When I told her about the shooting, she just flippantly responded that it was probably someone denied coverage and it was bound to happen.
My wife said almost the same exact thing.
I have to say, in what will violate absolutely zero terms of service, I have seen not one single individual who had anything bad to say about what happened.
In the most leftist spaces, in the most pacifist places, in the kindest places, about the person who did this, it seems to be either you have something nice to say, or you say nothing at all.
Allow me to add that it brings me such joy to see there are still some things that every American can agree on.
Almost any loss of life is a tragedy, and there are children who are now without a father. And I have seen other folks express similar thoughts. That said, I’m sure there are also many children missing parents due to lack of proper medical care, so there’s kind of a trolley problem situation going on. And most folks are not surprised that this happened. I’m only surprised that this it hasn’t happened before.
I won’t condone violence, nor will I say that vigilantism is the way to deal with the state of our society. But I also will not be shedding a single tear or losing a lick of sleep over what happened.
Share holder meetings become the next public school? 🤞
