I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally. Obviously one person doesn't represent a movement, but if I only ever see immoral people leading a movement, that will form a basis for my opinion of the movement.
My observation of these activists is usually that they seek attention at any cost. They will hurt people to achieve that attention. Worse, I don't even think it's about the movement. They just want the attention personally. Others in the movement tacitly condone this behaviour.
I think the most frustrating part of this is that they claim it's to raise awareness. Who among us has not heard of global warming? Who has not heard of data privacy? The reality is that they're not getting the public support they desire because people just don't agree with their goals or beliefs, not because the public is "unaware."
You do have a valid point but mildly “hurting” (or rather inconveniencing) the justice minister of Denmark out of all places seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I mean he’s hellbent on using 1984 as a guidebook and forcing it on everyone in the EU.
> I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally.
Most people aren't this particular brand of irrational.
Ghandi once said during a visit to the west, "I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians". It is not irrational to question movements you might nominally agree with but that manifest in immoral or inconsistent ways.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence you stand on. They are basically the same thing, especially these days when you get marked as terrorist for talking bad about the people in power.
> difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence
Oft repeated but untrue. Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work. Non-violent protest, and armed insurrection (aimed at the state, not its population) do. Sometimes freedom fighters can benefit from terrorism. But they are distinct strategies with separate targets.
And freedom fighters are supposed to actually care about "freedom" while terrorists generally do not. I fail to see what great advancements in freedom for anyone involved have come out of the terror attacks performed over the past 25 years.
When did USA bomb a civilian house that wasn't a part of a larger operation? Terrorist attacks only target civilians, I have never seen such an attack by USA. They always try to target military or leaders.
The last time I know USA did a terror attack was japan in ww2, but everyone did terror bombing during that war, and the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then. If USA still ran that doctrine you would have Tehran and the rest of major Iranian cities leveled to the ground now, that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks.
How many retaliatory terror attacks on americans performed by citizen of those countries?
What point are you trying to make? US bad? Anything more thoughtful to offer?
The US are an empire and they have behaved as an empire over the last 70 years (bombing, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators). By historical standard, they have proved less coercive than empires of proportionally comparable reach. Think of the Mongols, the Assyrians, the Japanese...
Not really. The Taliban’s attacks on civilians didn’t help their cause. They found success when they started acting as a more-competent government than our fucks in Kabul. If we want to debate whether the Taliban under occupation had any success with its terrorist tactics, I guess I’d concede that one man’s terrorist is another’s guerrilla fighter. But even then, guerilla tactics rely on a sympathetic local population. So a guerrilla team bombing civilians is undermining its own cause.
I'm not exactly an expert on Afghan politics and the reason for the failure of the western backed government are surely multifaceted, but don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?
Terrorist is often a term used to describe freedom fighters, in order to delegitimize them. Basically this is such a common tactic that it is unsurprising that the two are sometimes conflated.
Basically all of history. Terrorist is a term people use for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change. Freedom fighter is a term used for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change that you are sympathetic to.
Both words have identical meanings, the only difference is if you happen to agree with the people commiting the violent acts or not.
No, not at all. Methods and targets/victims also matter. Using violence to achieve specific military objectives or as a response to violence is not the same as indiscriminate murder and terrorism.
Terrorism very much does work. The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded (in one case formally, in the other almost) because they weren't needed anymore. Taliban also got the US out from Afghanistan pretty handily with mostly terrorism.
> The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded
That’s certainly not how it works.
They just became highly unpopular amongst the populations they were trying to liberate (which generally preferred more peaceful solutions) and lost their support base and had to disband.
When the population was complaining that they had to go to the Taliban for help because the Americans could do nothing to help them when the local military was corrupt and abused the people.
Because it was expensive and the local population did not care for the Kabul government we were protecting. It is hard to prop an unpopular government in a country of 40 million.
The US military was averaging only 12 deaths in the years before withdraw.
Most of what the taliban was doing is closer to asymmetric warfare than terrorism.
yet you fail to account for the fact that said people wouldn't wouldn't be in power did terrorism not have occurred in the first place. How many bad leaders in the west resulting directly or indirectly from terror attacks?
About as many as bad terrorist groups that began due to catastrophically bad decisions of leaders in the West. I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics. Imperialism and neocollonialism are real, actual policies, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that. If such policies hit locales where it's not culturally wrong to die for a cause, it's obvious you'll get terrorists after a while. I suspect this was calculated risk until it stopped being that: the locals got their own exploding sticks and decided to use them.
It's so incredibly sad to watch: for decades, tons of people made mostly rational (from their point of view) decisions, yet each step inevitably brought us closer and closer to the current situation. Add a few cultural, social, and personal pathological cases into the mix, and what you have is basically a speedrun to 9/11.
Note that I'm not justifying terror attacks, just saying they are a very predictable consequence of decades of policy-making.
> I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics.
Then why doesn't south America perform a lot of terrorist attacks? If that was the reason then you would see sub saharan africa perform way more terrorist attacks than the middle east.
No, the elephant in the room is religious zealots, they perform terrorist attacks, most other groups do not perform a lot of terrorism. A history of oppression just makes you happy the oppressors left, it doesn't make you a terrorist that go and try to make the oppressors come back like the middle east does.
no, it's nothing specific to "The West" or the decisions it has taken. The typical "They hate us because our bad policies" does not explain why every empire (western or not) has had to contend with dissenters keen on overthrowing its "yoke".
How would the Mongols, the Russians, the Egyptian empires have solved the israeli/palestine conflict? Do you know where the terms zealots and sicario come from? Did the Romans solve these terror attacks by reconsidering their "catastrophically bad policies"?
Two towrers falling, man of the weat warring man of the east, all seeing stones in every mans hand for the kings to see and understand through and a fiery behavioural ring, burning in the dark ready to consume all civilzation in endless war.
There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
This is also why twitter drove journalism (and perhaps even the country) off a cliff.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.
Did it achieve the effect that everyone is getting cheaper healthcare now?
OR, on the contrary, it only achieved that CEOs are now getting more anonymity and private security, while the plebs are getting more invasive law enforcement tracking like Palantir and Flock shoved up their ass to prevent them from doing something like that again?
> The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has prompted healthcare executives to say they will address growing frustrations among Americans struggling with access to and costs of medical care.
> Months after the killing of a top health insurance executive unleashed Americans’ pent-up anger over denials of medical care, the industry announced Monday that it will take action to “streamline, simplify and reduce” the preapproval process.
I don’t think it is. Healthcare prices are widely tracked. They’ve been rising faster than inflation for years. I have seen zero evidence that trend even temporarily abated after Luigi.
You don't understand how it works, imagine a world where 9/11 never happened.
Do you think that this alternative universe would not have the equivalent of TSA and Five Eyes?
It would. These things do not exist because $event happened, they exist because they are useful to those in power.
Look at the city of Trinidad, TX for example: Lady is arrested because of Facebook about how she heard that brown colored water coming from pipes has hospitalized people. Another guy because he is protesting the arrest. Her crime is "Felony false alarm". His crime "Disorderly conduct".
Both laws created, I am sure, to combat issues the community or state has had to deal with. But also able to be used to suppress people those in power dislike.
More or less the same except a family of kids would not be missing their father and grow up with the idea of wanting to get revenge on their father's murderer. An eye-for-an-eye never makes good societies which is why all civilized countries outlawed their practice.
>Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
The more elites you murders, the more of your tax dollars the elites will send to the military and law enforcement to better protect them from you and the more of your tax dollars they'll send to Palantir and Flock to spy on you. You can't win this by killing elites, they have more money, more guns than you and their guns are bigger and more powerful than yours. You win by enacting change through popular votes.
Also because most people presumably aren’t really into indiscriminate irrational murder. The victim was a merely an entirely replaceable cog in an unfair system (also a human being who had a family and there is no real evidence he personally was anymore nefarious than other men in similar positions).
>One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
What kind of broken logic is this? What good did this do for you if the end result for you is the same or worse now? Other than feel good for vigilante vengeance than then backfires on you in the end. It's not like there's a shortage of CEOs to take his place and keep doing the same thing.
You're not in a comic book movie where if you kill the main "bad guy" then society magically fixes itself at the end, because there is no main villain here, society is broken not because of the decisions of one CEO, but because of a combination of decisions of thousands of people, factors and incentives accumulated over decades that lead to healthcare and other things sucking, and you don't fix it overnight by killing one guy, you instead just make it worse for everyone else who isn't a murderer.
You fix it by talking, campaigning, gathering people and voting, knowing that it will also take decades to undo, the same way as it took decades to get to this stage. That's the only way you enact change that will will guarantee bi-partisan buy-in and actually stick around for the long term. Policy changes implemented by populist movements under threat of violence rarely produce good outcomes that last.
>There are a million reasons why we don't want to live in a society where each person tries to solve their political grievances with a gun
You and me are preaching to the quire here and wasting our time. Some on HN they just wanna see rich people get killed, as if that fixes anything that's wrong with society. By rich people, they mean everyone richer than them of course.
>It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping... instead abusing them for personal gain.
That's what the justice system is for. If you don't like the way it works, then vote to change it. Look how Luis Rossman is doing it for a good example.
But shooting people you don't like as vengeance for what you perceive is wrong, is some third world banana republic shit, and no such country where this is normalized is remotely safe or functional, look at Africa and parts of Latam.
You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
My biggest wish in life would be that every champagne socialist that unironically says "America is a third world country", we just send them to an actual thirld world country like Zimbabwe, Congo, Sudan, Cuba, North Korea and import a genuine refugee from there in their place.
This way we can make two people happy at the same time(three if you include me), and the lottery of birth advantage evens out, so the world becomes more fair and less unequal.
Sorry the justice system is setup to protect them, not you. By putting fear in the leaders of these companies, and showing people that yes, you CAN actually stand up to their corrupt ways and beat them because in the end they are just people, even if they don't see you that way.
Historically indiscriminate extra judicial murder has never worked as a tool for addressing societal injustice, it has been tried countless times, usually it just made things worse.
>By putting fear in the leaders of these companies
I'm sure people who control the economy, pahrma, law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies are shivering because of fear from people with glocks.
> You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
Nobody wants this. This is the result of the breakdown of trust in the judicial and democratic processes. GP is just acting the zeitgeist.
If the system is rigged heavily against you, relying on it to affect change does feel like a losing strategy.
The fact that such a large part of the population supports literal murder could also be considered a political statement. One that would not have been expressed so strongly without what happened.
So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap. Musk’s wealth grew by $1 million per minute over the past year. Who can seriously argue that this is fair and balanced?
Your income may remain constant while your wealth rises significantly (say... because your investments are doing well, because you inherited... etc). The two are often confused when talking about (tech) billionaires.
There's many anecdotes of people who managed to get lifesaving or lifechanging treatments in the panic after the CEO got murdered. Obviously, anecdotes aren't data - but it is highly likely that even though one life was lost, many were saved.
I don't know about this case, so I can only speak in general.
A lot of times people that say this don't make a strong case that some theoretical more moderate protest would be effective. There is just a feeling that if they personally feel offended by the actions of the protester then it's probably a bad thing.
In reality it's often more complicated. I know some people that are involved with controversial protests, and the effectiveness of their actions is definitely something they think about. It can't be too extreme, that will put people off like you say. But often there is conversations like in this thread, "this protester goes too far, but they do have a point". This moves the Overton window in the desired direction.
The goal isn't too make you like the protester, it's to make you think about the issues.
How is force working for Hamas? The shift in general sentiment towards Israel came from Israel's blatant disregard for civilian life and from their apartheid politics being put in spotlight. Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane and their Oct 7 attack served as an excuse for Israel to set them back and hunt them regardless of collateral casualties, terrorizing their compatriots
On examination of the evidence, Hamas appears to be an organization dedicated to harming Israel, not helping the Palestinian people (or improving public opinion of Hamas). In this regard, I would say that Hamas has been very effective at provoking heinous overreach by the zionists, causing severe damage to Israeli credibility. To Hamas, it seems that Palestinian deaths are the price they are willing to pay, being integral to their strategic mission and personnel supply chain.
Why would you think so? The conflict will most likely be decided by Israel (and by extension USA) having the biggest influence both globally and locally, and the biggest guns, but there is no misconception about it, so I decided not to add it.
Both sides always assume that people must fall on one side or the other instead of disliking both and wishing they would stop trying to make their hundreds of years religious regional conflict the world's problem
How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.
What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.
Even if every single Hamas was killed - you have a whole population totally traumatized. That's extremely fertile ground for something like Hamas to pop up again. So, a lot of sufferring but Bibi and "Hamas" (or whatever) prospers.
Hamas has been killed. Again and again and again. But people keep joining this "Hamas" resistance group against Israel so the group never seems to go away. And do you know why they join? They join because Israel killed their whole families.
> but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
And who do you see on track to displace Hamas? After years and years of conflict and being "bombed to shit", they're as entrenched as ever while their enemy declines much faster.
Israel is getting to a point where it has no friends left in the world, where the average European youth thinks nuking Israel and turning into a glass parking lot would probably be a net positive. Jews are starting to be broadly despised again thanks to Israeli policy, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Hamas operatives lead shitty lives in the Gaza strip as they have for decades, but they certainly aren't losing control.
Over the course of a few years, Hamas managed to turn wearing a star of David in big EU cities into a dangerous political statement. And we're supposed to believe that they're not winning?
Your arguments are self-contradictory. You say force is great, but only for Hamas - not for Israel.
A youth who thinks Israel should be genocided doesn’t care about genocide, so why hate Israel?
The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway, and who naively think that the hatred won’t backfire on them. Once you start promoting racism it comes for everyone.
>The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway
You are mistaken, the sentiments are shifting across the board.
This is probably driven to a significant degree by the Israeli national policy of tying any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the broad acceptance of that policy by Jewish communities globally. Because of this implicit endorsement, it is not surprising that many would struggle to separate between the actions by taken by the state of Israel and those who call themselves Jews.
You can’t blame the victims for racism. The whole point of racism is that it lumps people together based on the actions of some.
It’s the same way Islamophobia doesn’t become justified based on the actions of some Muslims.
Anyone who does do that is already a bigot, and would do the same to any other group, regardless of what they do.
A culture that normalizes hatred of Jews (or Israelis) as a group, will very quickly devolve into one where other minorities are hated as well. Because the youth, as gullible as they are, can still detect when a system of values is inconsistent.
The final victory of Islamic Republic was after they did NOT used force against west, but when America and Israel started idiotic war, bragged about using force and then promptly lost.
This was quite literally the case of "actions backfire" situation.
Attacking families is firmly across the line and looks like crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
No wonder he gets raided, at one point it becomes a topic about protecting one's family, left or right, moral or crook doesn't matter anymore.
Its not activist anymore in any meaningful sense, just a fanatic.
> crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
You just committed exactly the kind of escalation that you condemn when it's about him.
So what if someone can vouch for him? What's that worth? "Vouching" is worthless in any circumstance I can think of, and nobody can give you guarantees about anything. I can't vouch that you won't do exactly the same, or that you weren't the masked police who raced to the breakers so he's not filmed while breaking the law (innocent people have nothing to hide, right?), or that you're not one of the politicians pushing for oppressive laws for your personal benefit.
Jeez, you grabbed a single word from an expression that even non-native speakers like me know very well how to interpret and went a bit too deep into your self-made projections and on-purpose incorrect interpretations.
Just to be clear - there is no actual vouching, there never was, nor any plans for that. Fanatics are unpredictable, it doesn't matter in which area, their decisions are primarily emotional. He certainly behaved as one. Rest are details.
Or do you consider family stalking as a correct sane approach that actually achieves the goal effectively?
I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally. Obviously one person doesn't represent a movement, but if I only ever see immoral people leading a movement, that will form a basis for my opinion of the movement.
My observation of these activists is usually that they seek attention at any cost. They will hurt people to achieve that attention. Worse, I don't even think it's about the movement. They just want the attention personally. Others in the movement tacitly condone this behaviour.
I think the most frustrating part of this is that they claim it's to raise awareness. Who among us has not heard of global warming? Who has not heard of data privacy? The reality is that they're not getting the public support they desire because people just don't agree with their goals or beliefs, not because the public is "unaware."
You do have a valid point but mildly “hurting” (or rather inconveniencing) the justice minister of Denmark out of all places seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I mean he’s hellbent on using 1984 as a guidebook and forcing it on everyone in the EU.
> I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally.
Most people aren't this particular brand of irrational.
Ghandi once said during a visit to the west, "I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians". It is not irrational to question movements you might nominally agree with but that manifest in immoral or inconsistent ways.
> that's what activist have to do to shake people
That's also the line most terrorist groups use.
Its not exactly wrong i suppose. 9/11 did get Americans to think about the middle east a lot more.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence you stand on. They are basically the same thing, especially these days when you get marked as terrorist for talking bad about the people in power.
> difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence
Oft repeated but untrue. Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work. Non-violent protest, and armed insurrection (aimed at the state, not its population) do. Sometimes freedom fighters can benefit from terrorism. But they are distinct strategies with separate targets.
And freedom fighters are supposed to actually care about "freedom" while terrorists generally do not. I fail to see what great advancements in freedom for anyone involved have come out of the terror attacks performed over the past 25 years.
25 years? Why stop there? How about the US terror attacks on other countries civilians since at least the 1960s?
When did USA bomb a civilian house that wasn't a part of a larger operation? Terrorist attacks only target civilians, I have never seen such an attack by USA. They always try to target military or leaders.
The last time I know USA did a terror attack was japan in ww2, but everyone did terror bombing during that war, and the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then. If USA still ran that doctrine you would have Tehran and the rest of major Iranian cities leveled to the ground now, that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks.
If you ignore our proxies. Or are Israel's attacks destroying the hospitals and apartment buildings in Gaza and Lebanon "part of a larger operation"?
I guess it's okay we napalmed Vietnam and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians because it was "part of a larger operation"?
American Exceptionalism is a disease.
Yeah... what about those?
How many retaliatory terror attacks on americans performed by citizen of those countries?
What point are you trying to make? US bad? Anything more thoughtful to offer?
The US are an empire and they have behaved as an empire over the last 70 years (bombing, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators). By historical standard, they have proved less coercive than empires of proportionally comparable reach. Think of the Mongols, the Assyrians, the Japanese...
Islamists fight to be the oppressors, not to help the oppressed.
> Islamists fight to be the oppressors
Eh, the history of Islamism comes out of rebelling against secular dictators who had a habit of imprisoning their thought leaders.
or put simply, just rebelling against any attempt at modernising muslim societies. Anwar Sadat comes to mind.
The Taliban's terrorism very much did work.
Not really. The Taliban’s attacks on civilians didn’t help their cause. They found success when they started acting as a more-competent government than our fucks in Kabul. If we want to debate whether the Taliban under occupation had any success with its terrorist tactics, I guess I’d concede that one man’s terrorist is another’s guerrilla fighter. But even then, guerilla tactics rely on a sympathetic local population. So a guerrilla team bombing civilians is undermining its own cause.
I'm not exactly an expert on Afghan politics and the reason for the failure of the western backed government are surely multifaceted, but don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?
Terrorist is often a term used to describe freedom fighters, in order to delegitimize them. Basically this is such a common tactic that it is unsurprising that the two are sometimes conflated.
> Terrorist is often a term used to describe freedom fighters
Do you have an historical example?
Basically all of history. Terrorist is a term people use for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change. Freedom fighter is a term used for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change that you are sympathetic to.
Both words have identical meanings, the only difference is if you happen to agree with the people commiting the violent acts or not.
No, not at all. Methods and targets/victims also matter. Using violence to achieve specific military objectives or as a response to violence is not the same as indiscriminate murder and terrorism.
> as a response to violence
Literally every terrorist group ever claims they are responding to some sort of violence or oppression.
So what? It what they are actually doing that matters.
Terrorism very much does work. The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded (in one case formally, in the other almost) because they weren't needed anymore. Taliban also got the US out from Afghanistan pretty handily with mostly terrorism.
> The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded
That’s certainly not how it works.
They just became highly unpopular amongst the populations they were trying to liberate (which generally preferred more peaceful solutions) and lost their support base and had to disband.
The Taliban absolutely did not terrorism the US out of Afghanistan haha
When the population was complaining that they had to go to the Taliban for help because the Americans could do nothing to help them when the local military was corrupt and abused the people.
Why do you think they left, then?
Because it was expensive and the local population did not care for the Kabul government we were protecting. It is hard to prop an unpopular government in a country of 40 million.
The US military was averaging only 12 deaths in the years before withdraw.
Most of what the taliban was doing is closer to asymmetric warfare than terrorism.
yet you fail to account for the fact that said people wouldn't wouldn't be in power did terrorism not have occurred in the first place. How many bad leaders in the west resulting directly or indirectly from terror attacks?
About as many as bad terrorist groups that began due to catastrophically bad decisions of leaders in the West. I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics. Imperialism and neocollonialism are real, actual policies, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that. If such policies hit locales where it's not culturally wrong to die for a cause, it's obvious you'll get terrorists after a while. I suspect this was calculated risk until it stopped being that: the locals got their own exploding sticks and decided to use them.
It's so incredibly sad to watch: for decades, tons of people made mostly rational (from their point of view) decisions, yet each step inevitably brought us closer and closer to the current situation. Add a few cultural, social, and personal pathological cases into the mix, and what you have is basically a speedrun to 9/11.
Note that I'm not justifying terror attacks, just saying they are a very predictable consequence of decades of policy-making.
> I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics.
Then why doesn't south America perform a lot of terrorist attacks? If that was the reason then you would see sub saharan africa perform way more terrorist attacks than the middle east.
No, the elephant in the room is religious zealots, they perform terrorist attacks, most other groups do not perform a lot of terrorism. A history of oppression just makes you happy the oppressors left, it doesn't make you a terrorist that go and try to make the oppressors come back like the middle east does.
no, it's nothing specific to "The West" or the decisions it has taken. The typical "They hate us because our bad policies" does not explain why every empire (western or not) has had to contend with dissenters keen on overthrowing its "yoke".
How would the Mongols, the Russians, the Egyptian empires have solved the israeli/palestine conflict? Do you know where the terms zealots and sicario come from? Did the Romans solve these terror attacks by reconsidering their "catastrophically bad policies"?
Blockback is a "fun" podcast about this.
Two towrers falling, man of the weat warring man of the east, all seeing stones in every mans hand for the kings to see and understand through and a fiery behavioural ring, burning in the dark ready to consume all civilzation in endless war.
Not if it's detrimental to their cause. E.g. the just-stop-oil people have only garnered haters. A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
> A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
This is also why twitter drove journalism (and perhaps even the country) off a cliff.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.
>A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Did it achieve the effect that everyone is getting cheaper healthcare now?
OR, on the contrary, it only achieved that CEOs are now getting more anonymity and private security, while the plebs are getting more invasive law enforcement tracking like Palantir and Flock shoved up their ass to prevent them from doing something like that again?
Healthcare was much cheaper for several months after Luigi Mangione.
Source?
From https://www.newsweek.com/brian-thompson-muder-health-insuran...
> The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has prompted healthcare executives to say they will address growing frustrations among Americans struggling with access to and costs of medical care.
From https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/health/health-insurers-preapp...
> Months after the killing of a top health insurance executive unleashed Americans’ pent-up anger over denials of medical care, the industry announced Monday that it will take action to “streamline, simplify and reduce” the preapproval process.
However, from https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/health/insurers-prior-authori...
> However, multiple provider associations and patient advocacy groups interviewed by CNN say that little, if anything, has changed over the past year.
So, hard to say for sure.
> hard to say for sure
I don’t think it is. Healthcare prices are widely tracked. They’ve been rising faster than inflation for years. I have seen zero evidence that trend even temporarily abated after Luigi.
How would be the US now without Luigi Mangione? Would you have cheaper healthcare? Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
You don't understand how it works, imagine a world where 9/11 never happened.
Do you think that this alternative universe would not have the equivalent of TSA and Five Eyes?
It would. These things do not exist because $event happened, they exist because they are useful to those in power.
Look at the city of Trinidad, TX for example: Lady is arrested because of Facebook about how she heard that brown colored water coming from pipes has hospitalized people. Another guy because he is protesting the arrest. Her crime is "Felony false alarm". His crime "Disorderly conduct".
Both laws created, I am sure, to combat issues the community or state has had to deal with. But also able to be used to suppress people those in power dislike.
>How would be the US now without Luigi Mangione?
More or less the same except a family of kids would not be missing their father and grow up with the idea of wanting to get revenge on their father's murderer. An eye-for-an-eye never makes good societies which is why all civilized countries outlawed their practice.
>Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
The more elites you murders, the more of your tax dollars the elites will send to the military and law enforcement to better protect them from you and the more of your tax dollars they'll send to Palantir and Flock to spy on you. You can't win this by killing elites, they have more money, more guns than you and their guns are bigger and more powerful than yours. You win by enacting change through popular votes.
> Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Successful in winning over the public.
Clearly not since members of the public turned him in to the police.
From what to what? Be specific.
Were there people that liked high Healthcare bills that changed their mind?
Was there a way of politicians elected to implement socialized Healthcare that I missed?
The public was already on Luigi Mangione's side in theory.
In practice however he didn't inspire further revolutionary action by the public, because they were pacified by memes. And that's why he's a failure.
Also because most people presumably aren’t really into indiscriminate irrational murder. The victim was a merely an entirely replaceable cog in an unfair system (also a human being who had a family and there is no real evidence he personally was anymore nefarious than other men in similar positions).
> how was that murder successful?
One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
It seemed for a brief moment like some of the other psychopaths CEOs might start changing things for the better.
But you're right, when there wasn't a wave of "finding out" for other health care CEOs they seemed to go right back to it.
> in charge of
Please, he was a middle manager with a CEO title.
>One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
What kind of broken logic is this? What good did this do for you if the end result for you is the same or worse now? Other than feel good for vigilante vengeance than then backfires on you in the end. It's not like there's a shortage of CEOs to take his place and keep doing the same thing.
You're not in a comic book movie where if you kill the main "bad guy" then society magically fixes itself at the end, because there is no main villain here, society is broken not because of the decisions of one CEO, but because of a combination of decisions of thousands of people, factors and incentives accumulated over decades that lead to healthcare and other things sucking, and you don't fix it overnight by killing one guy, you instead just make it worse for everyone else who isn't a murderer.
You fix it by talking, campaigning, gathering people and voting, knowing that it will also take decades to undo, the same way as it took decades to get to this stage. That's the only way you enact change that will will guarantee bi-partisan buy-in and actually stick around for the long term. Policy changes implemented by populist movements under threat of violence rarely produce good outcomes that last.
> What kind of broken logic is this?
It's not even slightly broken.
It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping, instead abusing those people for personal gain.
Is that really something you think should keep heading in the same abusive direction it's been going for many years? :(
It seems like people are happy to dish out this rhetoric applied to others but less happy to be on the receiving end.
How do you feel volunteer groups rounding up Luigi supporters and gunning them down in the street like dogs?
There are a million reasons why we don't want to live in a society where each person tries to solve their political grievances with a gun
>There are a million reasons why we don't want to live in a society where each person tries to solve their political grievances with a gun
You and me are preaching to the quire here and wasting our time. Some on HN they just wanna see rich people get killed, as if that fixes anything that's wrong with society. By rich people, they mean everyone richer than them of course.
>It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping... instead abusing them for personal gain.
That's what the justice system is for. If you don't like the way it works, then vote to change it. Look how Luis Rossman is doing it for a good example.
But shooting people you don't like as vengeance for what you perceive is wrong, is some third world banana republic shit, and no such country where this is normalized is remotely safe or functional, look at Africa and parts of Latam.
You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
> third world banana republic shit
Welcome to America. Are you new here? :D
My biggest wish in life would be that every champagne socialist that unironically says "America is a third world country", we just send them to an actual thirld world country like Zimbabwe, Congo, Sudan, Cuba, North Korea and import a genuine refugee from there in their place.
This way we can make two people happy at the same time(three if you include me), and the lottery of birth advantage evens out, so the world becomes more fair and less unequal.
what the justice system is for is redirecting anger by making people like you think the justice system is going to fix the things you're angry about
funny how this went from +3 to -2 score during American waking hours
Sorry the justice system is setup to protect them, not you. By putting fear in the leaders of these companies, and showing people that yes, you CAN actually stand up to their corrupt ways and beat them because in the end they are just people, even if they don't see you that way.
Historically indiscriminate extra judicial murder has never worked as a tool for addressing societal injustice, it has been tried countless times, usually it just made things worse.
>By putting fear in the leaders of these companies
I'm sure people who control the economy, pahrma, law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies are shivering because of fear from people with glocks.
> You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
Nobody wants this. This is the result of the breakdown of trust in the judicial and democratic processes. GP is just acting the zeitgeist.
If the system is rigged heavily against you, relying on it to affect change does feel like a losing strategy.
The fact that such a large part of the population supports literal murder could also be considered a political statement. One that would not have been expressed so strongly without what happened.
So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap. Musk’s wealth grew by $1 million per minute over the past year. Who can seriously argue that this is fair and balanced?
Are you talking about income or actual wealth?
Your income may remain constant while your wealth rises significantly (say... because your investments are doing well, because you inherited... etc). The two are often confused when talking about (tech) billionaires.
Wealth, not income. The statistic is about net worth growth. Saying "that's wealth, not income" doesn't refute it. It just clarifies the mechanism.
> Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
There's many anecdotes of people who managed to get lifesaving or lifechanging treatments in the panic after the CEO got murdered. Obviously, anecdotes aren't data - but it is highly likely that even though one life was lost, many were saved.
doxxing and/or stalking the kids (minors) of the person you disagree with is still kind of a d*ck move though
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I don't know about this case, so I can only speak in general.
A lot of times people that say this don't make a strong case that some theoretical more moderate protest would be effective. There is just a feeling that if they personally feel offended by the actions of the protester then it's probably a bad thing.
In reality it's often more complicated. I know some people that are involved with controversial protests, and the effectiveness of their actions is definitely something they think about. It can't be too extreme, that will put people off like you say. But often there is conversations like in this thread, "this protester goes too far, but they do have a point". This moves the Overton window in the desired direction.
The goal isn't too make you like the protester, it's to make you think about the issues.
Yes I totally agree, and there are nuances and details
But it's easy to push to one side or another
Worked for the IRA. Working for Hamas. Working for the Islamic Republic.
Cowards would have you believe otherwise, but force is sometimes the only way to get what you want.
It really doesn't matter if you come across as the villain as long as you impose great enough costs for not delivering your desired reality.
How is force working for Hamas? The shift in general sentiment towards Israel came from Israel's blatant disregard for civilian life and from their apartheid politics being put in spotlight. Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane and their Oct 7 attack served as an excuse for Israel to set them back and hunt them regardless of collateral casualties, terrorizing their compatriots
On examination of the evidence, Hamas appears to be an organization dedicated to harming Israel, not helping the Palestinian people (or improving public opinion of Hamas). In this regard, I would say that Hamas has been very effective at provoking heinous overreach by the zionists, causing severe damage to Israeli credibility. To Hamas, it seems that Palestinian deaths are the price they are willing to pay, being integral to their strategic mission and personnel supply chain.
You seem to think the conflict will be decided by the vibes and sentiments of people who don't matter.
Why would you think so? The conflict will most likely be decided by Israel (and by extension USA) having the biggest influence both globally and locally, and the biggest guns, but there is no misconception about it, so I decided not to add it.
> How is force working for Hamas?
Brilliantly. It coaxed an Israeli overreaction which has led to basically the entirety of the rest of the world turning against Israel.
> Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane
Why would Hamas care? They remain firmly in control of Gaza, while their cause is winning hearts and minds globally.
Both sides always assume that people must fall on one side or the other instead of disliking both and wishing they would stop trying to make their hundreds of years religious regional conflict the world's problem
> wishing they would stop trying to make their hundreds of years religious regional conflict the world's problem
This is an entirely backwards way of portraying the situation. American evangelical Christians are by definition not based in the region.
They believe that they must supply Israel with the weapons it needs in order to bring upon apocalypse.
It’s sounds like you think it’s brilliant that more Palestinians were killed as long as it negatively affected Israel’s PR.
lol
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Noone is responsible for others' (overre)actions.
So if you think justice for Palestinian civilians is their cause, it's not them who are responsible for it winning hearts and minds globally
While there are useful idiots in any situation (especially inside the UN), the level of sympathy for them - while was never high is going down steadly
The level of general sympathy for one of those (and their level of success) is much higher than for the others
Maybe because they were actively avoiding civilian targets
And even then mostly because a lot of people were supportive of their cause even if they were against their methods
>And even then mostly because a lot of people were supportive of their cause even if they were against their methods
But IRA didn't win because those people supported their cause, IRA won despite those people being against their methods.
It was the force they used which directly led to the GFA, without the bombs and the killing the British would never have surrendered.
How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.
> How can we know the IRA “won”?
In signing the GFA, the UK effectively gave up on it's sovereignty over NI. That was never going to happen through "peaceful and democratic means"
What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.
> What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet.
Look at where the border is, the separation has already happened to a very significant degree.
Good god!
It's difficult to make out if this is ignorance, a poor attempt at satire or simply trolling.
Which part do you disagree with?
The border is in the North Channel today, so the bit about sovereignty clearly holds up.
Are you saying the GFA would have been reached through peaceful means?
The rabbit hole goes much deeper than simply "they gave up on sovereignty"
2 out of 3 for "bombed to shit". I wouldn't call that "working".
I'm not sure if Iran's regime has the staying power, but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
Even if every single Hamas was killed - you have a whole population totally traumatized. That's extremely fertile ground for something like Hamas to pop up again. So, a lot of sufferring but Bibi and "Hamas" (or whatever) prospers.
Hamas has been killed. Again and again and again. But people keep joining this "Hamas" resistance group against Israel so the group never seems to go away. And do you know why they join? They join because Israel killed their whole families.
> but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
And who do you see on track to displace Hamas? After years and years of conflict and being "bombed to shit", they're as entrenched as ever while their enemy declines much faster.
Israel is getting to a point where it has no friends left in the world, where the average European youth thinks nuking Israel and turning into a glass parking lot would probably be a net positive. Jews are starting to be broadly despised again thanks to Israeli policy, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Hamas operatives lead shitty lives in the Gaza strip as they have for decades, but they certainly aren't losing control.
Over the course of a few years, Hamas managed to turn wearing a star of David in big EU cities into a dangerous political statement. And we're supposed to believe that they're not winning?
There are two actors and you're mixing up who is responsible for which outcome. I explained in more detail in another comment
There's no credit due for correctly reading your adversary?
Obviously the Israelis could have just kept their mask on, but Hamas was clearly correct in their calculation that they wouldn't.
Your arguments are self-contradictory. You say force is great, but only for Hamas - not for Israel.
A youth who thinks Israel should be genocided doesn’t care about genocide, so why hate Israel?
The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway, and who naively think that the hatred won’t backfire on them. Once you start promoting racism it comes for everyone.
>The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway
You are mistaken, the sentiments are shifting across the board.
This is probably driven to a significant degree by the Israeli national policy of tying any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the broad acceptance of that policy by Jewish communities globally. Because of this implicit endorsement, it is not surprising that many would struggle to separate between the actions by taken by the state of Israel and those who call themselves Jews.
You can’t blame the victims for racism. The whole point of racism is that it lumps people together based on the actions of some.
It’s the same way Islamophobia doesn’t become justified based on the actions of some Muslims.
Anyone who does do that is already a bigot, and would do the same to any other group, regardless of what they do.
A culture that normalizes hatred of Jews (or Israelis) as a group, will very quickly devolve into one where other minorities are hated as well. Because the youth, as gullible as they are, can still detect when a system of values is inconsistent.
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A youth who hates Israel thinks genociding genociders is okay
The final victory of Islamic Republic was after they did NOT used force against west, but when America and Israel started idiotic war, bragged about using force and then promptly lost.
This was quite literally the case of "actions backfire" situation.
Attacking families is firmly across the line and looks like crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
No wonder he gets raided, at one point it becomes a topic about protecting one's family, left or right, moral or crook doesn't matter anymore.
Its not activist anymore in any meaningful sense, just a fanatic.
> crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
You just committed exactly the kind of escalation that you condemn when it's about him.
So what if someone can vouch for him? What's that worth? "Vouching" is worthless in any circumstance I can think of, and nobody can give you guarantees about anything. I can't vouch that you won't do exactly the same, or that you weren't the masked police who raced to the breakers so he's not filmed while breaking the law (innocent people have nothing to hide, right?), or that you're not one of the politicians pushing for oppressive laws for your personal benefit.
Jeez, you grabbed a single word from an expression that even non-native speakers like me know very well how to interpret and went a bit too deep into your self-made projections and on-purpose incorrect interpretations.
Just to be clear - there is no actual vouching, there never was, nor any plans for that. Fanatics are unpredictable, it doesn't matter in which area, their decisions are primarily emotional. He certainly behaved as one. Rest are details.
Or do you consider family stalking as a correct sane approach that actually achieves the goal effectively?