certified yakubian imperialist crakkka
coal mining enthusiast
mostly an alt account
Uhhhh, that’ll show them…?
Probably the biggest problem with this is that you need to read an absolute wall of text or watch a YouTube video to actually understand what’s going on, something that the target audiences are unlikely to do, not to mention other issues like how ignorable it all is.
There are a ton of people like that, but they’re mostly found on real life, facebook and other similar social medias and not lemmy or reddit or twitter - those are terminally online echochambers, but I’ve seen one or two people going “thoughts and prayers” or “all violence bad”.
Also, my position is more complex than “violence can’t solve problems” - it can, but it must be organized, with clear goals in mind and people already behind and actively part of the cause.
If you just go in lone wolf style like Luigi or something and gun down a CEO, you expect for the public to see this, get inspired to take up arms of their own and start Years of Lead where rich people are fearing for their lives and suddenly we have a revolution like in some sort of Hollywood movie, but that’s not what happens in reality.
Instead, media tries to demonize the shooter by saying how good the victim was and how their family is grieving (happening right now) to tug on heart strings which will at least turn some people against them, the shooter being made example of in court which essentially throws their life in the bin, the CEO being replaced by someone else in a week’s time and people forgetting about all of this after news cycle moves on. I genuinely only see Luigi mentioned on lemmy here given how he’s the liberal larp darling here, and nowhere else I visit or IRL.
Also, if we’re talking history here, then here’s a fun factoid - some Anarchist burnt down Reichstag in opposition to Hitler and his Nazi party, but this fire was later used by Hitler to expand his powers, suppress civil liberties and was pivotal in establishment of Nazi Germany. Of course, this is only something to think about with more brutal regimes, but nothing like that will probably come out of this shooting.
A good example of organized violence is probably that of the Bolsheviks pre-Russian revolutions - they had bank robberies, political assassinations that were used to fund the revolutionary underground and destabilize the regime, and not merely some bouts of individualized violence.
I love it when some shooting or tragedy happens, if it’s workers then all they get is one line at best and their lives get abbreviated to a statistic, but when some capitalist dies every news site writes about how great and authentic they were for a couple days.
Though given how this shooting was an example of lone wolf adventurism, it’s quite dumb to support it - the CEO will be replaced by an identical cog in the machine like always, a decent part of the public will get alienated thanks to anti-violence culture and media narratives (as seen in articles like there) and the shooter just threw away their life.
Though I won’t lie that it doesn’t make the day a bit better to see capitalist get gunned down
The quality of life is already fucked, and that’s what caused those people to rally behind current regimes who promised to fix everything using whatever opportunistic buzzwords like immigrants or national volk, turning to reaction.
Sorry sir, we’re all out of feudal aristocracy to execute and proletariat is too busy rallying behind their favorite ruling class public figure, so the best you’ll get is ruling class on ruling class violence, with workers being the ones who die the most as a result and status quo not changing
I can assure you, most of them still don’t care.
I’ll be frank and say that this is idealist nonsense - these types of movements/boycotts/protests don’t work even with critical mass reached.
Remember when the internet was boycotting Blizzard and their video games after all the sexual abuse and workplace treatment things came out about them, and just the classic ask-for-more-money-while-decreasing-quality-itis? There was a ton of posts about it, hundreds of thousands joined in and it was the talk for a couple of weeks but then people kinda forgot, Blizzard released a new trailer and a lot of the boycotters bought in.
Slightly less related example but still an useful one is one that’s still ongoing - there’s student protests in Serbia against the current government that’s undemocratic or whatever, and many outside people did say how they support the protests and how they’re 100% behind students, “if they want us to strike we’ll strike!” type of shit, yet nothing came from these pledges because it’s infinitely easier to talk than to act.
Changing your pfp to Clippy is pretty much like that - it’s a 0 effort action, it doesn’t require you to change anything as you continue using platforms that you’re supposedly fighting against. What would “things starting to roll” even look like, assuming people don’t lose interest - will it be just a bunch of 0 effort actions that everyone is going to forget/be confused about or even benefit the sites by generating buzz around? If there even are some useful actions that require a bit of inconvenience or effort, most of them are going to not do it due to the lack of investment into this type of activism.
Currently I feel like the plan of this movement is for CEO’s to “see it, feel bad then fix everything”.