I’m not normally one for conspiracy theories, but there’s a massive motivation for the US government to find anyone who looks about right and is disgruntled and then frame them, or plant evidence on someone they found through an illegal means. The US surveillance state uses parallel construction all the time to hide the actual (often illegal) ways they find someone.

Plus, if you don’t have a suspect, the message to all the proles out there is that you can kill CEOs and get away with it. The internet just showed that the only reason the working class aren’t doing The Purge on CEOs is fear of consequences. That’s a critical threat to the ruling class, and they will 100% frame, pay to take the fall or blackmail someone into it rather than not convict somebody.

It doesn’t line up at all that he brought a handwritten copy of his manifesto plus his fake IDs and his recently used murder weapon to a Macdonalds. Especially after being careful about escaping the city, and the amount of practice he had to smoothly clear the jams when he shot Thompson shows this was premeditated.

Unless he takes the jury stand and uses it to verbally blast the ruling class and try to incite more violence, this ain’t the shooter IMO.

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It’d be fun to watch, it’d be engaging to the crowd, and it’d terrorize capitalists. Especially with real-time updates, imagine a CEO doing a press release and then having their bounty skyrocket as people hear the news.

I’ve got a story idea for a cyberpunk dystopia. Imagine a world almost identical to ours. In that world, some inventive person creates a darknet website that allows anonymous donations to put bounties on corporate executives. Now, this site’s creator wants to make sure their site isn’t misused, so they implement guardrails like “Targets would be required to have over $10M in assets” and “each crypto wallet may contribute a maximum of $5 so it better reflects the will of the people.”

Then, the site admin adds betting options like “who reaches a $1M bounty first”, over/under odds, betting on which target gets whacked first, etc, in order to draw traffic to the site. Maybe there’d also be a percentage of the bounty that’s paid out to organizations working to heal the damage caused by the target, so for example if a fossil-fuel exec gets whacked then that percentage goes to orgs working to stop fossil fuels.

How do you think it’d play out in this story? Would the site properly incentivize people to shoot up boardrooms rather than schools?

Oh lol, that’s weird, I thought it was common knowledge that China censors some types of speech, similarly to every other nation. If I was running a state, I’d want to censor transphobic slurs, arguments for gender inequality, pro-Capitalist propaganda, racism, etc. IMO there’s nothing inherently morally wrong about censorship, and I see a lot of think pieces from US / NATO outlets like Voice of America yelling that China is bad because it censors speech, without giving any context or nuance about what type of speech is being censored and also distracting from the US’s massive censorship.

On the oppression point - I guess it mostly matters who’s getting oppressed. If it’s regular working people being oppressed, fuck that, but if we implemented policies as a society that forced billionaires to give up their wealth I’m sure they’d cry about being “oppressed”. I don’t have any sympathy for the cries of CEOs and mega-landlords about how they’re being oppressed by being forced to give back their stolen wealth.

So I’ve been thinking about this for a bit. Yeah, fuck countries, nation states, etc. Power should be at the level of communities of workers, similar to how the original Soviet system was before it got so fucked up.

Tbh I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree, I think wealth should be redistributed by force because I believe that the rich won’t redistribute it otherwise. But I can respect where you’re coming from - I wish it wasn’t necessary but I just don’t have faith that the rich will do it out of their own free will and kindness of heart. Also, even more than the local rich we need to expropriate the wealth of the billionaires and other shitheads that just suck the money out of areas and people, leaving them destroyed.

Also - what happens when the community is full of bigots? Like let’s take Odessa TX, where they’ve just functionally banned trans people from using their correct bathroom. The community there decided on that, does that make it right? There’s a similar argument with what happens when you’ve got a community of racist white people who decide that all POC are less than their equals.

Actually, the opinion I see most often on .ml is that modern day Russia sucks, and is bad because they’ve turned into a capitalist warmongering empire similar to the US. People are pretty mixed on China, but legit if you just look at the technological advances coming out of China - just verified stuff that’s been scientifically proven and then deployed - it’s pretty impressive, especially surrounding batteries. So, if you’re suspicious of China then any good news about China will come off as a conspiracy, but in reality things are pretty mixed and there’s a lot of good and bad about nations, and no one state is all good or all bad. Anyone reducing the complexity of geopolitics down to one nation = good / other nation = bad is either dumb, trolling, not speaking in good faith, indoctrinated or just repeating propaganda.

First of all, yes, we’re living under a shitty authoritarian government in the US. It’s basically a dictatorship of the richest in society. I want to invert that, where the workers have all the power. It’ll flatten out the power hierarchy eventually because everyone will become workers like everyone else. Just, in order to get there, we’ve gotta do some things which will smack of authoritarianism, such as forcibly redistributing wealth and converting businesses to being worker-owned.

I don’t know what’s best for people, other than that we should make society more democratic. But thing is, we can’t let everyone act in their own self interest when doing so harms others. Like, it’s in a landlord’s individual self interest to charge as much money as possible and to refuse to redistribute their property.

Also, if you let everyone act in their own self interest, how do we solve the problem of getting land back to indigenous populations? For example, I’m certain that many white people in the US won’t want to give land back, and there could be a democratic majority that opposes doing the right thing. What do we do then?

Agreed, power should be held by syndicates, ideally with those syndicates/groups/unions/etc working together by sending delegates to a Congress and then abiding by the democratic decisions made by that Congress.

I think deciding who is or isn’t the vanguard is something you can only do when you look back at history - you can point at different groups at different times when they were leading the movement, but if you were living through it things might not be clear. It’s pointless trying to figure out who the vanguard is right now, instead we should be organizing.

So, I think the workers should own the nation and that power should be held at the level of workplace unions and community organizations. I see being “the vanguard” of communism as similar to a 1st place designation in Mario Kart - it’s a floating title that depends on who’s doing the most for the effort and who other people look to. That vanguard shouldn’t get any extra privileges, they’re workers just like anyone else.

I think the whole authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian split is kinda BS - IMO it’s more about who’s dictating terms to who. We really badly need land reform, and landlords aren’t going to willingly give that up, so we have to be a bit “authoritarian” in order to make them do so. Same thing goes with wealth redistribution, and land back. If you give up on using force to get what you want, how do you get land back to indigenous populations, or stop the genocide in Gaza?

I think we’ll be more free if we work together to build socialism than we would be if we keep shitting on each others approaches towards building it. Then we’ll just keep refining it until there’s a minimum amount of hierarchy or control in society that’s used to prevent re-privatisation, exploitation, and the re-establishment of Capitalism.

Signed, a “tankie”

I’m so tired of being the Cassandra of my social life - I call this shit out years ahead of time and nobody believes me or takes my analysis seriously because I said that I’m a communist. Like, holy shit, yes, I am a communist - I want workers to own the entirety of society. That’s the exact opposite of these fascist fucks who essentially want bosses, money and corps to control society. I’m a communist because I saw this fascism coming, I recognized the patterns and incentive structures in society, and realized communism is the best way to defeat fascism - we have to decisively win the class war. And this is a war, don’t confuse it. Mark my words, now that things have gotten to this point, massive violence is inevitable soon.

I’ve seen that reinforcement of workers who toe the line first-hand, people are scared and brainwashed into not acting up or demanding better. It’s why I have a hard time maintaining a job - not because I’m not good at what I do, but because I’m bad at pretending to buy into the capitalist ideology in the workplace.

Agreed, not all managers are bastards but the system they are working within creates horrible results.

I believe I’m one of those knowledge workers. I do cybersecurity and I’m actively working on trying to unionize the sector. I’m not management, and I don’t have hiring or firing power, and I’m reliant on wages to survive.

Actually, I can see the comparison. Many cybersecurity people don’t challenge the power relations in their workplace and instead act as enforcers of corporate policy. That always disappoints me, and I can see the pattern of how even our relative privilege is being actively reduced. I just hope more cybersecurity people will recognize the class struggle we have to wage and organize in solidarity with the rest of the working class.

I get where you’re going with this, and yeah, the PMC helps hold the current system in place. I was thinking about the cybersecurity/engineers/architects/other better paid workers who are still subject to class exploitation even though they’re better off than a line cook.

Also, I like your bit about the professional managerial class being an ideological shield - I see that happening in the workplace all the time where people won’t consider rocking the boat because they want to be management one day.

There is no middle class - there is the working class and the exploiter class. People have misidentified a chunk of the relatively better off working class as somehow not part of the working class. Over time the systems of capitalism and the power imbalances at the heart of the non-unionized workplace will eventually reduce better off workers to the lowest common denominator as the exploiter class demands perpetually growing profit that must come at the cost of the working class.

For those of y’all who say that we don’t have an antisemitism problem on the left - this seems to be another example showing that we do, and we need to deal with it. Similarly to how movements in the past have been sabotaged by excluding groups (like white-only unions excluding nonwhite people), this could similarly fracture us along identity lines.