It is a bit scary how people seem to genuinely be OK with violence (see this reddit thread [0]). Is just me or does it feel like the overall "temperature" has gone up.
Well, dropping bombs and threatening to end a civilization certainly made me think the temperature had gone up. I’m not sure I think a single attempted act against some guy is worth being worried by against that backdrop.
I think much the reaction to the Brian Thompson killing also seemed ok with the violence despite it happening before the events you describe, though I guess that could be an outlier.
I think more and more Americans have what C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination".
We pour tons of effort into punishing visceral, direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. But if white collar crime is being committed that leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, it's rare that anyone sees jail time. Maybe you could argue the decisions of Brian Thompson made only account for maybe 10% of why XYZ died but when you scale that out, you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder.
I think the younger generations are increasingly aware of this disparity in justice. If you find it hard to understand the celebration of violent vengeance but don't feel the same inability to understand the celebration of Jeffrey Doucet's retribution, then perhaps you are lacking the sociological imagination.
Fascinating to see Canada and the US and the opposite extremes of that. Also interesting to see Indonesia, who had a massive genocide within living memory, as second most trusting. Most of all I'd love to see this study replicated in different years to get a sense of how quickly these attitudes can change.
1. Claims of structural harm are far more speculative, and thus harder to establish, than direct violence like a stabbing or shooting.
2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.
What is most disturbing in your comment is that it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable". That logic erodes the distinction between disagreement, accusation, and a right to kill.
Once people treat their own ideological conclusions as sufficient moral license for violence, they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process — beyond just the letter of law, as in the Jeffrey Doucet case, but also in its spirit, for we have democracy and due process precisely to tease out the ambiguities that social questions of causation and responsibility are so replete with.
Democracy that produces outcomes advesarisl to the voters intentions, for example massmigration even though voters voted against that - has ceased to be a democracy. Making the government and its cronies as illegitimate as any bannana republic dictatorship.
> Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.
There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect.
> it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable"
There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crimes like burglary, murder, etc despite the abundance of scholarship we have arguing for social forces driving those actions.
I'm not against applying the sociological imagination in both instances. I think it's almost always more useful than a narrow personal perspective. I'm just pointing out the obvious inconsistency.
> they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process
This "democracy" has clearly produced a result where poor people crimes are heavily policed and rich people crimes are heavily underpoliced. All robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft amounts to about $12 billion a year while the total amount lost due to wage theft each year is over $50 billion. Yet one version of this crime is much more heavily policed than the other.
I never called for a "right to kill", I'm calling for fair application of justice. I don't think we individual citizens should have the responsibility of carrying out this justice. Instead I think a properly running representative system would be carrying out the justice. But it's simply not.
Nothing in my original comment was prescriptivist. I'm just describing the state of matters as I see it. And I predict we will continue to see a rise in this sort of vigilante acts of justice until we have a valid alternative to it
The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
More generally, I said there is a major difference between structural harm, white-collar crime, and deliberately killing someone. Your answer was to fixate only on general claims about inequality, underpolicing, social causes, etc, which insinuates that maybe Brian Thompson deserved to be murdered while maintaining plausible deniability.
Yes, the system is unfair, but in what ways it's unfair is up to debate, unlike whether the child predator in the Jeffrey Doucet case abused a child. You are trying to connect the fact there is injustice in the world to how justifiable it is to deliberately kill someone, by using this analogy.
You can deny that you are endorsing it, but your comment still does the same thing: it takes a personal act of violence and places it inside a moral story that makes it sound less straightforwardly wrong. That is exactly the problem.
Also in no moral universe, do you shoot someone in the head in cold blood because they were negligent, let alone negligent in some abstract way related to structural social forces. That is a blanket justification for all sorts of political violence.
On democracy, you are using disappointment with democratic outcomes to erode respect for democratic process. By your standard, every single political faction would argue against respecting the democratic process.
If your argument amount to saying that white collar crime isn't actually proven beyond a doubt for certain people who are the lead images for organizations that result in millions of people suffering, then you have lost the public's support even if you may win a debate.
The axioms for a majority of people right now are 1. Person X is doing bad things or leading an organization that does bad things 2. The government is refusing to address it and is actively abetting it 3. There is no way to stop this evil from occurring besides extrajudicial murder. The only thing you can suggest without breaking one of those axioms is that we must let evil happen because the alternative is worse, and frankly i'm not sure that argument is a good universal standard.
Which white collar crime did Brian Thompson commit?
As for letting bad things happen, every time the party we don't like wins the election, we let what we personally view as "bad things" happen instead of use violence to overturn the election. That's the whole point of democracy. We show some humility and respect the majority will. We respect the process.
The crime of making people suffering from illnesses go through a hellish process to be able to get treatment for them, or worse outright denying their ability to get treatment. It's a crime the US encourages insurance do, but it's a crime against morals nevertheless.
As for letting bad things happen, there is something to do when your side loses the election: wait 4 years. It's a very easy action to take, you know for certain there will be a change or strong opportunity for it soon. That is not true in all situations.
And what is your evidence that he was personally involved in any of these alleged crimes? He's the CEO of a huge bureaucratic entity. He plays his own highly limited, even if high-profile role. He probably doesn't even know what's going on in 99% of the company.
Before going as far as taking his life, you should be able to articulate exactly what he did wrong, how he is culpable, etc, and back your claims with objectively compelling evidence At least try to mimic the judicial process before taking such drastic measures. That even this bare minimum isn't being done by the mobs of people cheering on his cold-blooded murder shows a basic lack of regard for justice and human life.
And no, it doesn't work that way at all. I have problems in my life, stemming from government laws, that I might have to wait 80 years for any government to fix. It's likely everybody does. If everyone resorts to terroristic violence because of such problems, the very foundations of society would fall apart and we'd see mass suffering far greater than anything people experience now.
This is a long comment, but I swear it is going somewhere (new terminology).
Someone once said (I think Kay), that "a change in notation is worth 20 IQ points". Historically, people struggled with presently-mundane basic concepts, such as Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, and Maupertuis' Principle of Least Action, because they lacked the "notation" (concepts, really), that would have allowed them to integrate them into their consciousness (or otherwise were not willing to discard or diminish another pre-existing notation, like biblical stories).
The younger generations have the advantage of being exposed to a much greater variety of notations than any previous generation, thanks to the internet, and its unrestricted nature. There is a lot of alpha in being able to instantly find numbers, and compare them with other numbers. Those aggregations, and second-hand experiences (I did not need to get murdered by federal officers personally, in order to start questioning the legitimacy of the government more aggressively), are a kind of substitute for a few decades of lived experience (by the time you turn 30 or 40, you are old enough to understand a lot of the dynamics, but too old to do much about it).
What this does, in effect, is create an acute awareness of what I like to call "sign-flip institutions" (I have never heard/read this term used before). A sign-flip institution, is an institution, in which a "customer's" minus is their plus, the overwhelming majority of the time.
So for example, a bank is a sign-flip institution (unless you never take out any loans). This is in fact _codified_ in how they do their accounting. To a customer, a loan is (in the accounting terminology), a _liability_, while deposits are _assets_. To a bank (ask any accountant who works at a bank), loans are _assets_, while deposits are _liabilities_. Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans.
Historically, most sign-flip institutions were heavily regulated[0] (to prevent them from impoverishing the populace, or worse). In banking, it used to be the law that they could not give mortgages for housing, unless the purchaser can pay 1/3 of the mortgage up front. This kept housing prices very low. It also kept bank performance low. After decades of bribery (sorry, lobbying), the banks got those regulations removed, and now the housing prices are so high that people _have_ to go into debt to (not own, no), but _have access_ to a home[1], that they may never fully pay off.
Combine this with the fact that we have very aggressive anti-vagrancy laws (you are not even allowed to sleep in your own car/van, in an empty parking lot), and it should be no surprise that people will say that society is rigged, that those who govern (cities, states, federations, corporations, banks, etc), are illegitimate.
Most AI companies, are openly marketing themselves sign-flip institutions! I don't know how true this is in practice[2], but given their round-the-clock FUD-based marketing, one would think that they are designed to turn your time into their money. That they are designed to turn you into money.
The only surprising thing about this story is that it took a nation, known for school shootings, this long to get violent against the executive/governing class. It took them this long, to learn to leave their smartphones at home, and to bring their molotov cocktails instead[3].
[0]: Hospitals, for example, were not allowed to make a profit before 1978.
[1]: Landlords get a lot of hate, but, most of the landlords that I've spoken to, are in the same exact situation as most home-owners (mortgage, debt, inflation), which means that they are really just arms-length employees of the _true_ landlords, the banks. Similarly, if you peel back the finances of most AI companies (maybe even most Silicon Valley companies), I am sure you will banks at the center of that web.
[2]: My big suspicion/fear is that the anti-AI sentiment is being cultivated to scapegoat the nerds, and to protect the bankers/executives.
[3]: Most Americans stereotype the French, as a nation of sad artists, but to the contrary, their protests are glorious.
Try to find an old graph theory proof (eg of the five colour theorem) and be amazed at how describing things in terms of a walk around a zoo is so much less clear than sets of vertices, edges, paths, etc. The history of mathematics is full of examples of good notation making a big difference, though of course this is often because the notation contains some insights about what structures are important.
One of most important things I've learned as I have gotten older is that optimization is all about degree. Is it good that housing prices are higher? No, clearly not. Is it good that I can get a 30-year mortgage when I am 25 and live in a house and eventually pay it off? Yes, it is good (I just paid it off last year.) Does the existence of that 30-year mortgage inflate the housing market? It definitely does if there is not enough housing. And yes I gladly paid 2x the cost of the house in interest, because I got to live in it the entire time vs. paying rent on someone else's asset. Good public policy must have specific aims in mind or there are many unintended consequences.
I can't tell how much of this post is describing/LARPing a point of view, or expressing your actual beliefs. The last few paragraphs make me think it's what you actually think though.
Glorious as a personal sentiment isn't exactly how I'd describe the French Revolution.
Yes, stirring up anti-AI hatred is fine as long as it's directed at your I-Banker/PE friends from school who majored in economics, but totally bad if it's directed at you since you majored in Comp Sci (the source of AI to begin with) and went into tech.
"Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans"- is this how you think finance actually works? Maybe first learn how things work before inventing your own terminology or "notation" like sign-flip institution. It's not worth 20 IQ points if it's wrong. The younger generations (and I am a member) are certainly no smarter or wiser than previous generations. Many sure seem to think they are though.
> Nobody likes how insurance companies do business, but that doesn't make it "crime".
The way they "delay, deny, defend" as a matter of course shows a lack of a good-faith execution of the insurance agreements, to the point that a sane world would understand it as extremely obvious (and documented!) fraud. Sure, it is de facto not fraud, but tell that to someone who didn't get insurance payments which they were owed to pay for life-saving treatments (or, I guess tell it to their grave).
I won't pretend I had the foresight to purposely make this distinction but I do agree with and stand by this clarification.
The US is a very litigious society and Americans more than any nationality I've met are way too quick to conflate legality and morality. My personal guess is that this derives from a long running lack of class consciousness that is present in most other nations
What a crime is is determined by the population. For a very long time, the population has given the idea of a "justice system" to... Well, the justice system.
Things have deteriorated lately, and the population does not see the justice system as effective.
It is completely expected that we see vigilantism, but it is in no way extrajudicial.
There's been many examples of societies where killing or abusing people was legal etc. Law is not math, it can be (and often is) wrong; in many cases a law is just a way for ruling class to make money/keep power etc. It's completely OK to protest laws, and it may be completely reasonable to consider someone a criminal even if they haven't broken any laws.
The competitive incentives between insurance companies in the US have pretty unfortunate consequences, and it would probably be good for people if rules could be changed in a way that socialised costs more across ages, etc. But so long as insurance companies are expected to be profitable, this argument is pretty poor.
The bird’s eye view of a health insurance policy is that you have some amount in premiums coming in, some amount of administrative expenses, some amount of profit/loss, and the rest is claims going out. As a percentage of premiums, the profits and expenses are pretty tiny. The reason for claims being denied is making the numbers balance out so as to not have the insurance company risk going bankrupt (insurance regulators tend to want insurers to be only writing policies they expect to make money on on average as insurance companies going bankrupt is bad for other policyholders). If you have a policy where you pay more in premiums, you can expect to have more claims approved.
The big reason healthcare is so expensive is not so much the small profits made by insurance companies as the large costs from providers (some is profit, some is remuneration for well paid doctors, some is having more expensive facilities or equipment or treatments than necessary). You could imagine a world where the insurance company is more of an agent for the patient, trying to avoid providers overcharging to keep premiums down, but that’s not the world we live in. There don’t seem to be good competitive pressures to reduce the costs from the providers. If you compare this to places where people often pay out-of-pocket for healthcare, providers can be much more conscious of this, eg for dental work there can be a choice of having a tooth removed, and then various different qualities of filling that can cost different amounts.
It's almost as if we could solve the problem by having only one payer (a "single-payer", if you will) primarily motivated by patient interest instead of profit motive exerting downward pressure on costs.
I don’t think that’s sufficient without mechanisms to keep down providers’ costs. Eg if a hospital decides to have private rooms for patients as opposed to open wards, should the single payer have to pay more? What if they just decide to charge a higher rate for surgery? Or prescribe a name-brand drug instead of a generic? I think you can look at the fights between Medicare and doctors unions in the US for examples of this, where the doctors seem to do a much better job of winning over public sympathy (though they have even more success when it’s an insurance company declaring they will pay Medicare rates for a procedure).
It does seem to be nonsense, yes. The duck test makes more sense. In the duck test, you can't claim something is an eagle if it walks and quacks like a duck. In POSIWID, however, you can't claim you intended it to be an eagle.
And if the tradeoff was grandma's health for child's health, people would be sympathetic to what you are saying. But the tradeoff was your health for his profit.
And the reason for _that_ is because of the callous way American society accepts the deaths of thousands of people who die due to the Healthcare Industrial complex (of which Brian Thompson was a key member of). Just because those deaths don't happen with guns doesn't make them any less important.
This is exactly the point of part one of Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence, by Geoffrey Canada. Unequal or lack of access to the executive branch of government will create a culture of vigilantism and lends itself to organized crime as a replacement for the policing arm of the state.
People become okay with vigilante justice when they see the executive branch as compromised, just look at the insane plot/ending of the film Singham.
Many people see this happening in the US. We should expect to see more vigilante justice and organized crime if we see the executive branch as having a significant principal-agent problem.
Organized crime is also going to escalate as the economic squeeze continues to hit white collar workers. Pumping out a bunch of computer science graduates and rendering them unemployable isn't going to lead to all of them giving up and working at Walmart. A certain amount are going to figure out that they can make a better living by going black hat. Likewise for all the office managers, etc. who are put out of a job as belts tighten. Threatening the livelihoods of people who were led to expect a certain standard of living and who can organize and exploit systems is exactly how you end up with organized crime. Doubly so when the burden is falling on the young, who have more appetite for risky decisions.
When I say organized crime, I don’t just mean intelligent criminals. I mean a culture of loyalty. For organized crime to function, all of the members need to have a system of justice underpinning their actions in order to keep the organization whole.
I agree with you. I think such a culture is more likely to arise when you have people who believe in the idea of loyalty but haven't seen it bear fruit in their lives, and who are used to acting within such an organizational framework, which describes a fair number of the workers who either are being displaced or feel themselves to be.
We did this in the late 1800's and early 1900's because the upper classes understood that they needed to be afraid of the masses. Prior to that political violence seems like it was the order of the day. The US has always had a pretty strong aristocracy, but the aristocrats were variously either moral people or they at least had enough of a sense of self-preservation that they wouldn't get too greedy.
One of the most interesting aspects of the policing power in the premodern era was the existence and split of a powerful church.
Religious institutions had some access to legitimate violence in a way that the state couldn’t control. Once authoritarianism gave way to more democratic governance, that effectively disappeared.
I wonder how much the complete impunity of those involved with Jeffery Epstein has destroyed the faith in the executive branch? People like Leon Black, Les Wexner and a couple of presidents not only escaped justice, but pretty much any scrutiny by any institution, media included. I think it's hard for people to look at that and not think they need to take the law into their own hands.
Yeah, especially that same offender who was let off easy with 12 unindicted co-conspirators because he "belonged to intelligence" and had deep ties to Mossad.
Yeah, I'd totally let that guy manage my billions after all that.
It blows my mind that people still think Epstein is just a big conspiracy theory and nothing happened.
Pam Bondi said Epstein's black book was on her desk ready to be released, and then a month later she said it didn't exist. She couldn't have been telling the truth both times.
The camera in Epstein's jail cell "failed" for the exact two minutes he was (supposedly) killing himself before magically starting to work again.
Congress told the DOJ to release unredacted documents, and they said "F** you" and released redacted (properly redacted, even) documents any way.
But you're asking a random guy on HN for evidence that there's a cover up and crimes going on. It's pretty clear the powers that be don't want the evidence released, or it would have been already.
The idea that the cut happened when Epstein was supposedly killing himself is something you invented yourself, not something even remotely supported by evidence.
I'm confused what your core disagreement is? It seems like you're narrowing in on some relatively unimportant detail. Using your own source, what is the likely explanation for the tape shenanigans? Who cares if op was inaccurate to the exact specifics of the missing footage? Or am I not understanding the implication of the article you cited?
Okay, I got that part wrong, but doesn't the fact it was edited out make it even more convincing there' a coverup? There's not even plausible deniability when it's been edited.
They edited out cameras restarting at exactly midnight?
That seems totally unsurprising to anyone who has ever worked with real CCTV setups, they’re flaming heaps of garbage from garbage suppliers set up by garbage contractors.
I think the problem is that no-one is seeing justice being done.
The Epstein survivors had their names released in the publication of the Epstein files whereas the perpetrators had their names redacted.
Without any serious attempt at carrying out justice, I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that anyone associated with Epstein was part of the criminal conspiracy.
People are not seeing the prosecutions they were expecting. I think some of that is because the person who would be prosecuted is dead, part of that is because the justice system makes a successful prosecution difficult (eg some people may be likely to have been victims while also not being sufficiently credible witnesses to win at court), part of this is because prosecutions that are deemed unlikely to win are not pursued, but I also think part of this is that there is a belief within parts of the public that more people associated with Epstein ought to have been guilty of something (abuse related rather than misconduct in a public office) even if there is not actually any evidence of it other than that association. That isn’t to say that many of those people weren’t acting immorally but immoral isn’t the same as illegal.
Those people are so deeply involved with Epstein, it's impossible to sum it up in a HN comment.
Innocent until proven guilty if we have a functioning executive branch for the proving part. Epstein showed the world that we don't, which is my original point. You may not be convinced (although if you don't know who Wexner is, you're not very informed about the case). Most people do though, and they think our justice system is a fraud.
Spoiler alert for the film. The film ends, not with any kind of officially sanctioned justice, but with a completely extrajudicial killing, for which audiences are expected to cheer. This is exactly the point of an untrustworthy executive branch getting us cheering for what is essentially organized crime that favors our side over another.
Just watched the end scenes and this more like an execution in a heroic light.
I have not seen something like this in this significants, vibe and presumed statement in western media. There are a many examples of uncelebrated murderes of “the bad guy” which the hero does not want or does “against their will” but I have seen no western examples of this kind of celebration of killing the bad guy.
Not defending them or even Luigi but I would argue a lot of it is the abysmal labour institutions the USA got (lots of union busting, few modern laws against modern exploitation and classical institutions are undermined politically and legally).
And the growing class divide in the USA I think is the reason why folks are increasingly seeing violence against the upper class is seen as the only option.
Again doesn't mean it makes it right, but it explains why it is almost only an US phenomenon.
Well I guess it doesn't count then. Pack it in everyone, America was nice for some while it lasted but we got help from the French during the revolution so it doesn't count.
Do you have any evidence that Luigi carried out any violence whatsoever? He's been accused of a murder, but there seems to be no appreciation that people are innocent until proven guilty.
Happy to clear this up for you. Only courts of law are held to the “innocent until proven guilty” standard. Ordinary people are free to form and share their own opinions based on reported facts. Mangione is a murderer. Hope that helps!
I don't think you should be opening yourself up to accusations of libel like that. It's foolish if you don't have any proof to incur the possible threat of being sued without any upside, apart from appearing "edgy".
Opinion based on disclosed facts is not illegal in the US; Mangione would lose the suit, if he bothered to sue. Unlike the UK, we have free speech in the US.
Surely that's a libellous thing to say, or is there no rule of law in the USA these days?
Luigi has been accused of the shooting, but there's discrepancies with the possibly illegal search of his backpack and the body cameras of the police were turned off for 11 minutes which raises suspicions of planted evidence.
You appear to be based in the UK. Speech laws are very different in the US. It is a mistake to project your understanding of censorious UK speech laws on us.
Unlike the UK, expressing opinion is inherently legal here. What would be illegal is lying about specific facts, or expressing opinion based on secret facts you falsely claim to have. However, the standard for damaging a public figure, which Mangione certainly is, is very high -- Mangione would need to show "actual malice" (that is, that the speaker knew or should have known they were making false statements).
These are message boards. The obvious sentiment, that firebombing attacks are awful (perhaps cut a little bit with "the perpetrator appears to be someone deeply in need of help) is boring. This is an availability bias issue: the only sentiments that actually spool out into threads are edgy. Once you learn to spot these effects, message boards make a lot more sense and are less jarring.
It's an interesting exercise to compare these threads.
My own position on the matter is the not an edgy one: political violence of any kind, is never justified, but it does signal that something deep in society requires a change.
I'm of the view that it's violence of the non-political kind that is never justified*. Political violence can be legitimized, as an option of last resort. There's plenty of historical examples where groups of people were denied every avenue of redress until they turned violent. As an example, read up on the history of most labour unions.
I am european and not american, but since reddit is mostly used by americans I would say that from their prospective political violence is justified and encoded in the constitution. How would you explain the second emendment?
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State
Isn't really political. By my reading the clause also invalidates the entire amendement soon as the US aquired a standing army, but I'm not from the US so, who knows.
- Go onto a Reddit thread about ICE, everyone in the comment threads says they don't like ICE. That's the obvious statement, not edgy.
- Go onto a Reddit thread about Trump, everyone says they don't like Trump. That's the obvious statement, not edgy.
Why would we think the Sam Altman thread is any different? I unfortunately think the Reddit thread might be the real deal, or at least a little more real than you are saying.
I'm not saying that violence is legal -- which is definitely not. But it is part of the "packages" and totally depends on whether the one wants to use. Historically violence has been a very...effective tool.
When people feel that law and order do not protect them, some eventually will go "the extra mile" (somehow managers always like this phrase). It's not something we can prevent. It is human nature. I guess super riches really like AI because this gives them extra protection.
Not all violence by the state is legal. In a properly functioning democracy, the state cannot carry out arbitrary violence with impunity, only that which is consistent with the powers granted to it by the constitution and laws written and passed in accordance with that constitution. That was the case in the US for long stretches of its existence.
But under an authoritarian regime, it doesn’t matter whether what the state does runs contrary to statute or constitution because there is no one who has both the will and the ability to enforce any restrictions against the state.
that's violence by the state though. That's exactly the kind of violence GP said are legal (in my reading, no moral stance was taken about this state of matters)
> it is part of the "packages" and totally depends on whether the one wants to use.
Could you explain what packages are and what depends on (what?)?
> Historically violence has been a very...effective tool.
This is dramatic sci-fi for anarchists of all political stripes.
The critical reality to understand is that violence is the most ineffective tool, causing catastrophic harm for others and outcomes that the perpetrators rarely control or foresee. Revolutions can overthrow status quo power but what follows is rarely what the perpetrators aimed for. The same happens in warfare - the outcome is rarely what anyone envisioned at the start, a fundamental lessons that experts try to teach hot-headed amateurs that think warfare will solve their problems.
It also establishes violence as legitimate - usable by everyone else too, a very bad outcome and the opposite of the rule of law, incompatible with freedom; it elevates violence and destruction over life and liberty. In contrast, the American Revolution was founded on principles of freedom and law (for example, in the Declaration of Independence), did not embrace violence as desireable, and laid it out for example in the Declaration of Independence.
The most successful societies have freedom, the rule of law, and allow violence only as a last necessity to restore freedom and the rule of law.
> The most successful societies have freedom, the rule of law, and allow violence only as a last necessity to restore freedom and the rule of law.
The ugly, uncomfortable part is that when a certain fraction of people decide violence is the answer, a tipping point is reached and that's what happens. Historically, people have reached that point en masse without a great deal of provocation. So for a society to remain successful--or to remain at all--it needs to prevent this tipping point from happening. Force alone can't do that.
A lot of people in the US feel like they've already tried the nice way, and it's failed. Given the increasing wealth disparity between the haves and the have-nots, it's hard to argue otherwise.
Many, close to most of the "have-nots" just voted to help the "haves" at great cost to themselves. The economic decline across fly over states isn't going to stop. It's going to continue. Resulting in those angry uneducated voters to double down. Those old factory jobs are gone. Unlikely to come back in our or our children's lifetime. They are ideologically opposed to education. Leading to more of the same, just more so. Economically, politically, and educatively.
> look at Iran and US. Where is "rule of law"? Who is going to give it magically?
Rule of law - in this case, international law - has governed the Strait of Hormuz and relations between the US and Iran for decades. It's not magical or fantasy at all, but a very well-established and effective mechanism that has been the foundation of the most peaceful world arguably in human history. There is no valid argument that it doesn't work (saying it hasn't worked 100% of the time is not valid).
The Trump administration explicitly aims to destroy that rule of law. I think that's why they attacked Venezuala, Iran, civilian boats, etc. Stephen Miller advocates that power, not law, rules.
You can see the outcome when international law was used, and the outcome when it is intentionally destroyed: Look simply at the Strait, which had free navigation under international law, despite the extreme emnity between Iran, and the US and its Mideast allies.
And now, with international law under assault, free navigation has ended. To be clear, I don't only mean the US's and Israel's attack: Developing nuclear weapons would also violate international law, and maybe so does developing highly enriched fissile materials (e.g., uranium). I'm not sure about sponsoring insurgent proxies in other countries, but that has long been practiced by many countries, including the US and many in NATO.
The rule of law allows societies to function. We don't want the world or our communities to function like failed states - those people are poor, starving, and brutally oppressed.
> The Trump administration explicitly aims to destroy that rule of law.
It's not just Trump. Trump and Biden both shredded the rule of law for Israel. I think both parties being captured by a genocidal foreign government has caused mass dissolution with the ability of the US to act within any framework that brings justice.
That's because that statement is marginal. The founding father's were very keen to the arguments given by political theorists of their time, such as Locke. It's a large reason why the 1st and 2nd amendment are the two first amendments. They believed the rights to speech and violence are foundational to protecting our natural liberties from succumbing to tyranny.
The critical reality to understand is that people have always used violence. If they don't believe that they live in a successful society, or if they believe that the success of the society is not distributed fairly (or in a way that benefits them), violence starts looking attractive.
Enlightenment and industrialization created societies that were fairer, wealthier, and more free than anything before. They also created ideologies such as communism and nationalism that killed hundreds of millions. If your ideas are good and successful in the long term but create poverty, suffering, and feelings of unfairness in time scales people care about, there will be violence.
Compromises are the key tool in preventing violence. Unfortunately, the word itself carries negative connotations in too many languages, making effective compromises less likely.
>If they don't believe that they live in a successful society, or if they believe that the success of the society is not distributed fairly (or in a way that benefits them), violence starts looking attractive.
Especially when the answer to every "well why doesn't it work this way" you could possibly ask seems to come back to "state violence has put its thumb on the scale of society". The government or "the ruling order" or "the system" (whatever you want to call it kind of brought this on itself by taking so much crap under it's umbrella
To play the advocatus diaboli: Violence is always condemned the most if it happens to a member of high society directly. The members many people on this very website picture themselves to be in the future. But if you structually starve half a continent to save a few cents on the dime or fire 30.000 workers that isn't only okay, it deserves a bonus.
If you call one violence but the other is okay because there are some layers of misdirection in between you may have to reconsider your ethics.
I don’t think it’s surprising - some people already consider the actions of AI execs and tech companies to be synonymous to violence. Like, comparing something like this to destroying the livelihoods of millions of people, a lot of people would consider the latter far worse.
Temperature is certainly going up, but it definitely hasn’t reached historic levels yet lol.
The Ministry of The Future (Kim Stanley Robinson) lays this scenario out clearly -- people will resort to violence to try to stop what they consider to be the destruction of their lives or society.
Illegally mass surveying Americans, and mass murdering people in other countries is "useful work"?
Because Anthropic just lost their US government contract (AND got slapped with a completely false order that prevents them from working with any government agency) because they wouldn't do the above ... and then OpenAI slid right in and said "yeah, we can do that".
After watching children literally be liquified in Gaza for two years, violence directed at Sam Altman doesn’t even move the needle. Our entire human rights framework what obliterated by Israel (with the blessing and support of the US and Europe).
What do you mean by violence? Do you consider someone building a monster of a server farm near your home and messing up with your drinking water, electricity and life in general violence? Why violence is only immediate physical one that counts?
All of that has presumably gone through the proper public approval process. Just because you might think the process is flawed, does not justify retaliatory violence in a civilized society
Are you joking? What civilized society? A society that let people who can't afford insulin die? Let kids starve if they are from poor neighbourhoods? What civilized society are you talking about? The one bombing countries left and right and financing a genocide? What civilization is that? A society where people with full time jobs live paycheck to paycheck with no savings? A society where millions cannot afford shelter and where homelessness is a crime? What civilization is that? When is it OK for you to revolt?
People being okay with violence when they lose the democratic vote is a problem. The system isn't perfect, but again, if you're resorting to violence instead of campaigning for change, society either has to crush you, or we're all going to anarchy
This is an incredibly privileged take. Also incredibly wrong.
We've been trying peaceful and democratic means for the better part of a century. It hasn't worked and is met with increasing levels of violence from the government. Right now, today the US government is abducting and murdering innocent citizens in broad daylight. No amount of lobbying is going to stop that.
The explicit and overt goal of this administration is to seize power and do away with democracy. No conceivable democratic process can stop that. Peaceful protest doesn't work, the government kills people when they try.
Every means of peaceful protest is met with extreme violence and suppression. And the violence keeps escalating.
People are resorting to violence because violence against the people is escalating. If you can't see that, then you're the problem. If you think violence is inexcusable, then you must also think that peaceful protesters deserve to get executed in the street.
We are already in anarchy. Laws don't matter, only the whims of our dear leader. Private citizens can be plucked off the street or outright murdered with zero consequence or accountability. Dear leader can declare nuclear war without congressional oversight.
If you think violence is inexcusable, you should really read the goddamn declaration of independence. It is a fundamental human right to remove tyranny by whatever means possible. Just because you, personally don't feel threatened by the us government does not mean that innocent people aren't dying. How many citizens do you think a government should be allowed to execute for no reason? How many nukes should one be allowed to launch without cause?
Democracy has been eschewed by our government. Democratic means don't work and haven't for quite some time. Laws no longer apply to the government. If you want to argue that violence is still inexcusable, you're actually arguing for complete and unquestioned obedience to a fascist government. That's not an exaggeration of any kind, this is what's actually happening in the US right now. Democracy is over, we've been an anarchist state for a few years now.
this is true for just about everything, there is always some as outliers for whatever but isn’t true in general. there are people I believe are rotten to the core but would never wish any violence against them
A significant proportion of people are ok with violence as a means of solving problems. True pacifists such as yourself are relatively uncommon. And even if it was rare to be ok with violence (it's not), those few who behave that way force violence on the rest.
Are you kidding? Read the news. Many Americans are totally fine with dropping bombs on other countries (which, you know, kill human beings) if they feel that their cause is "just". They're also OK with violence against human beings in their own country if those people happen to not have the proper documentation, or they're protesting against violence.
Also generally anything critical of capitalism, imperialism, or the military-industrial complex. It doesn't really matter whether it's a measured analysis or shrill shrieking; literally just using any of those words amounts to soliciting downvotes.
This is true but I don't think the downvotes are "fake" though. There's just a whole lot of people who truly believe they are Making the World a Better Place Through Capitalism
Maybe this is just a symptom of my screen addiction, but I keep a close eye on this site for a lot of the day. I’ve noticed a pattern where my commments initially get one or two upvotes (within the first 5-10 minutes of posting) but will then immediately get a greater than or equal amount of downvotes very quickly. It happens consistently enough that I’ve noticed a pattern. The upvotes happen sporadically and the downvotes happen simultaneously.
The quickest way to rile up an existing mob is to make them fear their livelihood is being reduced or removed. The _robot_ is not taking away healthcare, but the effect of the robot existing hit directly at the livelihood of the masses.
In the US, health insurance is largely tied to employment. Health insurance, in a personal economic sense, reduces to being able to pay for healthcare. This policy is largely a left-over of World War II era employment policies. No one is taking healthcare _away_ from anyone (strictly speaking), but the ability to be able to _pay_ for healthcare is reduced to zero when employment ceases. Accessing the safety net is a separate skillset. This skill set becomes more difficult to achieve because the political class does not want to provide healthcare for everyone, only the worthy (their loyal voters).
I grew up in and am still a member of the precariat. I am educated and doing well, but I wear a well-polished pair of golden handcuffs due to how my ability to afford healthcare for myself, and my family, is tied to employment. Politically, I _do not_ like being tied to my employer by such a chain, but my arguments to change the system have been met with quite firm push-back.
Insurance companies are using AI (whatever that means in this case) to make coverage denial decisions. That can be reasonably summarized as robots are taking away our healthcare.
Also, to be clear, I don't think violence is the way to confront the oligarch sociopaths. There is clearly enough momentum to fix a lot of the monopoly / anti-consumer issues over the next 4-8 years. Assuming Trumpty Dumpty doesn't try to put our military at polling places or some other anti-democracy putinesque bullshit like that.
My bad, I thought you were referring to the implicit assumption about momentum. Not the explicit assuming that Trump doesn't put troops at the polls. He sure is trying his best to normalize troops in civilian settings.
That is scary but the methods traditionally used to deny claims aren't really any better. I've had claims denied after they were explicitly pre-approved because of string literals not matching exactly.
It at the very least provides more cover to the ones denying the claims. They can blame it on AI in the hopes they're not the next one being targeted by vigilantes.
Well in the US you get healthcare from a job (either directly in the form of insurance or indirectly in the form the money to pay for healthcare). If the robot takes your job, it takes your healthcare too.
Robots can take away healthcare also by algorithm (or AI) denying healthcare benefits, while still being employed. It doesn't need to be a robot in cogs and hydraulics, but rather just a computer program. Probably already happening.
I understand (I'm not from the US), however, wouldn't healthcare in the US would get drastically cheaper (even eventually free?) if hospitals/clinics were composed of humanoids instead of humans?
Interesting idea. I cannot say that I can answer affirmatively nor negatively. There are also human elements to be considered. Humans are status-seeking social creatures. There will always be a stain of humanoid-delivered care, no matter how high-quality, as being not as high quality of all-human delivered care. This is, status accounts for a lot.
I can also draw pictures of how dangerous humanoid care can be, as there is a possibility in a break in the chain of responsibility. If a human medical professional messes up, you (or your survivors) can sue and seek damages directly, as well as sue the hospital and insurance system (with mixed results).
With humanoids? Currently, the bar is higher as the entity being sued is not the hospital, nor a person, or even a team. The only entities that can be addressed are the corporation the runs the hospital and the corporation that produced the humanoid. These two entities have an incredible out-sized advantage in terms of sheer delaying tactics, not to mention arbitration clauses and other legal innovations. Most injured will simply give up, which is a legal win for the two entities.
In my opinion, humanoid care will take a large amount of time, damage, and treasure to lower the costs. No actor will willingly give up their cash flow. My view may be too strong.
This is definitely a potential future state, but not one I could imagine happening soon. Given that the robots which are currently deployed do not benefit people directly (and even the indirect benefit of lower costs or better investment returns appear to be captured by the upper tiers of the economy), we have no confidence that they would deployed to benefit anyone but their owners.
More likely near-term states are less rosy, given intelligence takes off.
The price is set by how much providers can extract, not by their costs to provide. It's not at all obvious that a vast reduction in their cost of labour would translate to price reductions.
It's worth keeping in mind that in the U.S. the health marketplace is extremely complicated and cannot be analyzed with simple demand/supply graphs.
Doctors are an incredibly powerful lobby in America and are massive beneficiaries of the status quo. Across America, doctors live in huge mcmansions in gated communities, even while medical bankruptcies cripple the working class in the same town. Oh but the administrators! It's not the doctors, it's the administrators... Who are more often than not also MDs.
This is to say, doctors protect their own professional interests and would never permit this.
As income/wealth inequality grows expect class violence to grow until there is a revolution. We let rich people get too rich and this is the consequence.
Sam has so far lost say $100B so far, and he is compensated by already being a billionaire. You can see how this might lead to disillusionment with the system.
It's gotten to the point that I walked in to some water cooler banter at work the other day, where they were discussing their favorite means of public execution.
It's not that people are accepting of violence. That doesn't just happen. Societies don't suddenly turn violent against the state. This only happens when the state has failed and become violent towards the people. If you're surprised by the rising level of violence toward the state, you haven't been paying attention to the rising violence towards the people.
The US was quite literally founded on the idea that it is an inarguable, fundamental human right to overthrow a tyrannical government. The nice and polite mechanisms for doing this have all been broken, removed, violently suppressed, or outright ignored. When there are no peaceful options left, humans will always revolt with as much violence as is necessary. History shows us this over and over. Violently oppressed societies don't tend to stay that way for long, and they certainly don't become hardline pacifists. They always eventually fight back, or they die.
The rising level of violence from the people at large is a proportional reaction to the increasing level of violence against the people. The level of tyranny has recently upgraded itself from merely an existential threat to the USA as a society, but also an existential threat to the entire damn planet. Of course the people are going to get violent. They feel there's no other choice, because all peaceful options have been exhausted and met with extreme violence.
That's the consensus I see on the street: all nonviolent options have been met with ever-increasingly extreme violence. When all peaceful options are removed, you pick the only one left.
In a historic lens, it's all very unsurprising. This is how revolutions happen. This is what humans have always done when met with tyranny and violent oppression. It's only surprising if you willfully ignore and excuse the tyranny and violence against the people.
Altman keeps on telling people he’s going to take away their jobs. He says that because it gets cred in tech circles, but in America this is an existential threat, not much different from telling someone “I’m going to break your kneecaps”. Of course some subset of people are going to respond with violence.
The sheer tone-deafness of AI marketing is going to come back to bite us very hard. This is probably just the beginning.
Yeah part of me thinks the reason we know all their claims are bullshit is because you’d have to be pretty dense to think that you could promise eliminate >50% of jobs in many high value sectors within 12-18 months and _not_ expect to create more than a few people who’d have nothing to lose…
Flip it round: if you have $999,999,999 then would it not be rational to expect random violence against oneself? I’m not saying it’s justifiable, just that it is prudent to expect to be targeted by crazies.
Flip it again: as a crazy, isn’t it reasonable to enact violence against Johnny Nine Nines? If he’s so innocent, how come his house is behind two security fences?
To be a little more reductive: my house is made of gold bricks so I hired an extra-legal anti-marauder militia, but now the marauders see me as a fair fight because I chose extra-legal militia instead of cops and judges… game on and QED.
Around 2014, a new political candidate entered the scene. Commenters and the news media at the time widely reported something remarkable and new about this candidate: he readily endorsed political violence and showed a continual pattern of escalation, never taking an off-ramp to lower the temperature in domestic politics. Over the years research has shown that the rhetoric of this candidate has materially contributed to political violence in the US. [0]
This candidate was later elected to office and in the time since has shown a continual pattern of endorsing violence. He has endorsed violent actions, told reactionary extremist groups to "stand back and stand by", defended state violence against protestors and immigrants, pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of political violence and an attempted insurrection, and recently started a war before threatening to destroy an entire civilization.
Yes. Yes the "temperature" has gone up. People have been talking about this WIDELY, for years now.
I simply make the observation that the 40-hour workweek took a bunch of violence to enable. As have other forms of progress that we take for granted. Luigi Mangione is a hero to many. It's not bad that the most powerful need to consider negative outcomes in their lives. Decry violence as one, sure, but if there are none other, psychopaths have no check on them. It'd be good if maybe there were others available, eh?
Ineffectual molotov cocktails are just a cry for help.
People are routinely killed for far less all over the world, including America. It's a fact of life.
Obviously people aren't going to be happy about debt fueled spending inflating prices and crashing the economy again (for the 4th time in most young people's lives).
> You think people will put up with wildly accelerating inequality forever?
No. Nor do I think they should. But UBI, higher income tax at the top and a wealth tax for the ultra rich sound like a much better plan to me than to blow a bunch of things up.
Yes, and it's not too late! Plus, sama is one of the only ultra rich I've heard talk about policies that could actually help society cope with reduced aggregate labor demand.
But when I look at how the US handled previous rounds of globalization and automation, I have very sober expectations for our ability to pursue the "happy path." Still, one has to try.
Someone should tell the people assisting in the accelerating inequality that, because unfortunately our system is massively biased in their favor when it comes to enacting any of those things. Except the last, which some will, understandably, see as their only recourse.
Put simply: people _have_ been fighting for those things and the wealthy have fought tooth and nail against it. I don’t at all understand why anyone can be surprised when all other avenues are closed, people resort to violence. It’s literally how this country was founded.
The average person can make one of those things happen, and not the others. Yes, the alternative is obviously better, but once violence becomes the only course of action with reasonable chance at good results, violence is what you will get. Just watch, this is going to escalate. A lot.
Maybe Altman and the other oligarchs should donate money towards candidates who are actually pushing for higher taxes, UBI, and universal healthcare then. So far they've all been throwing most of their money and influence behind violent, hateful, assholes who repeatedly cut their taxes and start wars.
Crazy people used to gun down schoolchildren who could be conveniently ignored. You can be sure that the ownership class won't just be sending thoughts and prayers here.
People are apathetic at this point. When a large amount of americans can barely afford to live while threatened with replacement while the economy booms on the backs of their claimed obsolescence, they don't care that a billionaire could've gotten hurt, especially when that billionaire is working against their interests.
> People should demand a new deal and lobby for that.
Lol, really? You think there is any chance of that happening in this current political climate? Any whisper at all of rights for workers is immediately shot down as Godless Communist rhetoric.
The billionaire class has enabled armed masked police in our streets, endless layoffs, basically don't pay taxes at any reasonable percentage, and basically have rigged politics with Citizens United.
Given that, I can see how people are resorting to 18th century French tactics.
The top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all the federal taxes collected. The top 25% pay 89% of taxes.
Net of transfers, 60% of households receive more from government transfers than they pay in taxes.
The idea that rich people don't pay taxes is just not correct. The entire system is basically rich people subsidizing everybody else through byzantine distributional systems.
GINI is still going up. That means we are getting less equal over time. The entire system is subsidized by the rich because nobody else has any money! By definition rich people have to pay.
If we have a pool of $100 and I take $99 and you get $1, and then I get taxed $5 and you get taxed $0, I still have almost everything. Is this.. unfair to me?
It's in fact the opposite of what you said: everyone else is subsidizing the rich, who have gamed the system to live extravagant lifestyles. Eventually this will lead to a revolution and all us rich people will be beheaded. It's the normal outcome of this sort of thing.
The top 0.01% still pay enormous taxes. Elon one year personally paid $11B in taxes.
I get that a lot of people think people's unrealized capital gains should be taxed, so maybe the argument you're making is something like:
"People with very large paper-gains based on appreciation of the market-value of the assets they own pay 0% taxes on those unrealized gains"
In which case, yeah, that's definitely true. But if they sell those assets, they pay taxes. Some of the taxes from those sales can be offset by doing things like donating enormous sums of money to charity. And sometimes people take loans against their equity, which is not a taxable event. Though, in order to pay those loans back, they have to sell something (taxable) or earn money elsewhere (also taxable). So loans are tax deferral...
Buy assets (stocks, real estate, etc.)
Hold them as they appreciate (no tax on unrealized gains)
Borrow against them (loans are not taxable income)
Die without ever selling
What is happening is that they are becomming richer and lower ranks are becomming poorer. Simply, they are so much richer that the little fraction they pay on taxes looks big.
This perception that "lower ranks" are becoming poorer is just empirically not true.
On every metric, people in all income brackets are earning more on both a gross and COL-adjusted basis. It is the case that top quintile income has increased more than bottom quintile income, but a faster relative increase does not mean the other group is getting poorer.
The other very interesting thing is that there is statistically not really a "upper ranks" and "lower ranks". The majority of people in the 1% each year are there for the first (and often only) time. And a very, very small percentage of people in the bottom percentiles remain there for their whole life.
Some interesting research:
* 12% of the population will find themselves in the top 1% for at least one year
* Nearly 70% will spend at least one year in the top 20%
* More than half will have at least one year in the top 10%
* While 12% may reach the top 1% at some point, a mere 0.6% stay there for 10 consecutive years
All of that is to say, the idea that there are is some entrenched upper class waging war against some entrenched lower class is just empirically not true. If you dig through the data what you'll find is:
1. People who are just entering the workforce don't make a lot of money
2. As people spend time in the workforce, they make increasingly more money
3. When they retired, they start making less money but tend to have assets to live on
It's far more dynamic than most people's intuition leads them to believe.
Billionaires aren’t becoming billionaires from income. It’s increased stock valuations that create that level of wealth.
I constantly see posts focused on high earners already paying tons of tax. They do, but this should reinforce the point that the ultra wealthy should be paying more tax. People aren’t saying the guy on £500k should pay more, they’re saying the guy with £100m in assets should be.
I don't condone violence, but it's hardly surprising that people would resort to or support it in this case, considering that by stepping in where Anthropic refused to help the US military, sama essentially agreed that OpenAI will serve as the IT Department for Trump's secret police. Either that, or he's willing for OpenAI to endure a similar punishment when he refuses the inevitable demand to assist with domestic mass surveillance.
Your way of life is dependent on slave labor and military conquest.
Your only noticing the "temperature" going up now is just a sign of how privileged you have been to be able to ignore war and conflict that's existed around the globe since your birth.
The temperature has not gone up. You can't ignore the flames anymore.
it's a bit scary how a lot of people are completely fine with an insanely wrong status quo of a fully corrupt and anti democratic government and of ppl like Altman allying with them.
I think you're extrapolating a lot from my comment... One can reasonably think something has to be done to address the current (and upcoming) economic situation and think that molotov cocktails won't help. Acts like these will likely make things much worse before settling into a new situation that's probably just slightly worse.
Wondering why people might want to resist their lives becoming worse at all just so some assholes can gloat about how much richer they became is literally the same as asking why they can't just eat cake.
Thinking something should be done, means nothing is being done. The poor in france didn't start with bread riots. They begged and pleaded and asked nicely first, and while lots of people thought something should be done to help them, nothing was.
Being worried that people choose to channel their energy into actions that undoubtedly make their situation worse rather than have a chance of finding a solution is not the same. Or I guess it depends on how you decide to view things as being "literally the same".
Worry is not an action to making something better.
People will take actions when the threat is against their livelihood, health and homes, particularly when there is no action being taken on their behalf. Their risk assessment may be different than yours.
The legal system is owned from top to bottom by the ruling class. You will not be able to use it to loosen their death grip on society. They will not allow it.
Get ready for more. If the tech bros are right and millions of people loose their jobs and healthcare, we are in for a rough couple of decades. Millions of angry people, with nothing to lose and a bunch of free time, all with one name in their heads, Sam Altman. He better start working on his robot army.
"Violence" does not only include "physical violence". It also includes "structural violence". And precisely, temperature is going up because people is sick of structural violence.
- AI Psychosis is actively tearing apart families and communities, after social media and opioids have already had a pass.
- Negative social outcomes are in the service of _making money_. Not money to pay taxes to fund a healthy society, but money for the people running these systems.
Humans that lack community, safety, and purpose will embrace more drastic means of exerting control over their lives at the expense of others, no?
It is probably safe to say the temperature has been firmly up for a while. And certain subsets of the population have come to trust their Dear Leader's embrace of violence as a solution, for sure.
Jobs were already lost because of AI capital investments. None of the hyper scalers had the cash flow to support the target investment levels and had to reduce labor.
I think you meant to reply this elsewhere? My comment was in response to the apparent social willingness to accept violence towards oligarchical behavior.
There was a rumor going around Silicon Valley that if ICE came to San Francisco in force that Mark Zuckerberg's house was going to go up in flames in retaliation. You will be surprised to learn that the oligarchs talked to Trump and they did not come.
It’s a distinct minority. They’re convinced they’re the majority because everyone they talk to is in the same bubble, especially online. I saw the same thing with Mangione and Kirk and Pelosi.
Do you spend much time with people not in the tech world? I think you'd be surprised how many people hold similar sentiments, even if not to such an extreme, especially once you talk to people in the real world. I've heard far more support for this sort of thing in real life than I have online due to fear of repercussions.
Hell, even the president regularly calls for and promotes violence, so I don't think it's that much of a minority. The US was founded on it, after all.
> Do you spend much time with people not in the tech world?
Most of it. Across the political spectrum.
> even if not to such an extreme
That’s precisely the point. There is a massive difference between doing or aiding and abetting such behavior, cheering it on, and giving into the impulse of “couldn’t have happened to a worse person” before self correcting. There are a few saints who reject the violence at first glance. But most people are in that self correcting phase, and the correction happens the more they learn about the specifics of the assault.
> even the president regularly calls for and promotes violence
I mean, he literally just posted a video on his account of a woman being violently beaten to death with a hammer as a call for people to do something about immigrants.
> he literally just posted a video on his account of a woman being violently beaten to death with a hammer as a call for people to do something about immigrants
Zero dispute. I’m challenging the notion that Americans are rising to that call. (Or cheering on specific attacks, versus general notions of violence.)
In a weird way, maybe social media helps in this one instance. We can’t let the enemy be faceless. There is no glory in shooting a specific mother or nurse.
You're missing that the Americans rising to the call are employed by the state itself. ICE over Trump's tenure with a burgeoning budget has become filled with folks that were part of known white supremacist groups. The most violent believers have been state sanctioned and paid to inflict his agenda.
> Americans rising to the call are employed by the state itself
This is a problem. But it’s categorically different from vigilantism. That sort of grassroots violence is basically impossible to stop once it gets started without major abrogations of rights, at least temporarily. And we have not seen organized grassroots vigilantes taking up arms to pot Trump’s enemies. Not systematically or at any scale that doesn’t just scream gun-control problems.
It's not categorically different and it requires you to really dig your head deep in the sand. The 'unite the right' rally in 2018 was filled with the sort of vigilante violence you say is a problem. The reason why these rallies dwindled is not because of any sort of advancement or government attempt to squash out the problem; it's because they've become embedded within the government.
You're attempting to find step 1 when we're already passed that and into step 2. The vigilantes are coming from inside the house, and the murders committed in Minneapolis combined with the government working overtime to shield them should be the primary signal.
How many people live in Iran, who he just threatened to genocide? How many people hold views that Trump thinks make them his enemy, including being critical of ICE? How many immigrants are in the country? It's going to be a very large number, no matter how you slice it.
Those are real examples, and we should be vigilant about them. My point is they’re still numerically rare compared with population and societies that enter periods of civil strife. (I’m sorry about your own experiences. People say things that are abhorrent. It’s no comfort to know most of them wouldn’t act out on them.)
What I think is different today is -- regardless of how many people organically think this way -- social media is normalizing the idea. We're all being exposed to it.
It's only a minority of people who are radicalized, but it's a growing minority. Radical ideas are more accessible than ever for people to latch on to.
Radical views on violence, social relations, science, politics, distrust of institutions, etc are all way more common than they were in the 90s.
I’d want to see this interrogated with rigor. The alternate hypothesis, and my null, is a relatively fixed fraction of folks is more connected and visible today than before.
Yeah, the number of people connecting a potential war crime in a military operation to Sam Altman’s San Francisco residence with violent intent are slim.
> war crimes blew the Overton window for violence wide open
I see no evidence of this. We didn’t see it after Iraq. And Luigi predates all this.
These aren’t organized political movements. They’re lone actors reaching breaking points. That don’t need a theory of violence, just access to guns and a day of mental instability.
I think youre misreading it entirely, doesnt surprise me given that you're a VC.
Here's one of the posts on that thread: "I mean one thing is to use AI or even ChatGPT as a product, and another is being aware of how billionaires treat the rest of the people
As for Sam, he also has pretty controversial views for how this whole thing will pan out and how he doesn't give a shit about the consequences it might have for the rest of us. Also more recently, the whole Pentagon contract thing"
People can both use LLMs whilst having a distasteful view of the leaders of the industry.
I don't wish violent ends on anyone. I'm not open to sacrificing that part of myself in a rich, historically-free society that retains peaceful means of power transfer.
Should we just let these terribly evil people who are responsible for thousands of deaths roam freely free of consequence then? It's not like they're breaking any laws in their evil acts, so we can't hope for our legal system to prosecute them, in fact we can count on it to protect them.
Zuckerberg played a major role in the Rohingya genocide.
Sam Altman disagrees with you about violence being bad, he just signed a deal with the same DoD that killed a bunch of innocent schoolgirls in Iran.
The US can be counted on to protect these people, just like it protected Kissinger, rather than ever prosecuting them.
The US has even threatened to invade the Hague if it were to ever try prosecuting for the warcrimes they do execute.
There isn't a justice system we can rely on anymore.
That healthcare CEO would still be alive and completely consequence-free if Luigi hadn't killed him.
> Should we just let these terribly evil people who are responsible for thousands of deaths roam freely free of consequence then?
No.
> It's not like they're breaking any laws
Then it’s not categorically evil. If it is, change the laws. Anywhere.
> he just signed a deal with the same DoD that killed a bunch of innocent schoolgirls in Iran
Yup, not okay with the precedent that anyone affiliated with our military deserves summary execution. Because then someone will justify the same for anyone affiliated with Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or who shops at Target.
> That healthcare CEO would still be alive and completely consequence-free if Luigi hadn't killed him
Was a middle-managing CEO within a subsidiary. The actual billionaires are doing fitness—they don’t walk the streets of Manhattan. United has changed zero policies and thus zero patient lives have been changed. Well done. Glad Mr. McDonald’s got his ab pics out for his moment of celebrity.
Tell me who I should vote for this next election cycle to do that.
> Yup, not okay with the precedent that anyone affiliated with our military deserves summary execution. Because then someone will justify the same for anyone affiliated with Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or who shops at Target.
I think it's a false equivalency to draw a line between an organization that kills children and an organization that campaigns for the protection of the environment.
> Was a middle-managing CEO within a subsidiary. The actual billionaires are doing fitness—they don’t walk the streets of Manhattan. United has changed zero policies and thus zero patient lives have been changed. Well done. Glad Mr. McDonald’s got his ab pics out for his moment of celebrity.
The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].
Vigilante justice usually starts by aiming for the top (or a minority group, if conducted from the top). But it's inherently anarchic, and eventually attacks anyone vulnerable in striking distance. I have Indian and central European heritage. My dry bones are knowing the cost of violence and value of peace, and degree to which even those who initially embrace violence tended to wind up regretting the offramp they previously precluded.
> The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos
You sound like you're trying to convince me: I am not pro-violence, but I have cracked open a history book and the same thing happens over, and over again when the masses don't get what they deserve from an out-of-touch ruling class. I briefly braved life in a very unequal society - no one is safe there. Telling a person who hopelessly feel like they have nothing to shun crime and violence while they walk the same streets as the very rich is not as effective as you think it is.
> But it's inherently anarchic, and eventually attacks anyone vulnerable in striking distance.
Here's the brief, recent timeline on anti-elite radicalization:
-2008 the Great recession resulted in corporates get government bail-outs, while regular people got foreclosed, no one went to prison. Even getting a McJob is difficult.
- 2014/2015 K-shaped economic recovery in progress. Populist politicians decide to harness the still-angry "burn it all down" demography to turn out the vote. This is what was behind the Bernie bro to Trump-voter pipeline, "drain the swamp" and all that
- 2020-2022: Covid shutdowns. Businesses get bail outs again via loan forgiveness. High inflation. Cops chill outside during active shooting in Uvalde. Layoffs begin.
- 2024: Brian Thompson gets shot; elites get shocked by public support expressed for the shooter, but don't introspect on whether they are out of touch, instead, executive protection budgets go up - problem solved! Layoffs continue.
- 2025: DOGE cuts, SV CxOs and VC class goes completely mask-off, cuts to "entitlements" proposed, ACA subsidies killed. The who's who of elites show up in the Epstein files: not a single charge is filed. AI promises to kill jobs and companies embrace it, layoffs continue. Swamp is still not drained, crypto scams go mainstream.
- 2026: (we are here) 2 citizens killed by ICE while protesting. War with Iran. Layoffs continue, now naming AI as the cause. Inflation spiking.
With all this, would you be surprised that some folk may feel the scale is thumbed against them? Elites in every generation or 2 seem to need to relearn the same lesson: keeping their end of the social contract is really fucking important, in whatever form it takes in their age: giving alms, noblesse oblige, workers rights, the New Deal, etc.
Nowadays, it seems common for genocidal regimes to be supported by other countries, so it looks like abhorrent violence is just part of the world order.
The temperature has definitely gone up; one could look at what the current President says and has done for reasons why people might be on edge.
“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” the president responded. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime.” ... The radicals on the left are the problem. They’re vicious, and they’re horrible,” Trump said. “And they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women’s sports. They want transgender for every one. They want open borders.
“I always say, we have two enemies … We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries … We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard—or, if really necessary, by the military.”
He reguarly referred to January 6th insurrectionists as "hostages" and "patriots" then gave them all a pardon. If you breach the capitol and interrupt election processes, injure/kill police officers, and chant "hang Mike Pence" then I guess you're a patriot worthy of a pardon.
The job market's shit, it's nearly impossible for young people to buy houses or pay rent, well paying jobs are disappearing to AI, inflation is sky rocketing and people are getting desperate. But then we're told the economy's doing great and billionaires like Musk and Altman are rolling in money.
Maybe because people got used to violence being used against them?
All this violence against the innocent in various places and levels, and you think it’s weird that people are fine with violence used against a billionaire conman?
I'm not saying throwing a MOlotov cocktail is ok. It's not. I think most people are analyzing the incident as being indicative of the times we're living in, particularly with the warehouse fire.
But where people are "OK with violence" is with state violence.
State violence include police violence (>1000 people are killed every year in the US by police), prison violence, violently rounding up immigrants and putting them in concentration camps, criminalizing homelessness, denying people life-saving medical care, evictions while landlords collude to raise rents, genocide, sending random people to a maximum security prison in a foreign country (ie CECOT), mass shootings, going with a firearm to a protest to instigate an incident and get a legal kill, intentionally creating the opiod crisis and so on.
For a large number of people some or all of these incidents will get a reaction somewhere between "thoughts and prayers" and "no, it's good actually".
Compare the state's reaction to one healthcare CEO being murdered and the perpetrators that are implicated in the Epstein files. Epstein himself was known to authorities since the 1990s and got an absolutely sweetheart deal in 2008.
So I'd say the real problem is what people view as violence and who's allowed to do it, seemingly without oversight or consequences of any kind most or all of the time.
AI company marketing is pretty overwhelmingly "we're going to take away your job and leave to you starve on the streets". People concluding that the public face of this is their enemy who must be stopped is just a really unsurprising outcome.
That is what Ilya (and many other employees) (fore)saw.
They did not want a target painted on their backs or being involved with the company responsible for mass job displacement.
Let's hope that SF doesn't turn into a free-for-all after the IPOs, since the silliest thing is for everyone to move to SF and buy up the houses and then the have-not's realise who got rich.
I'd donate that money away or give the employees (who have nothing) a one-time bonus / raise like the five-guys owner [0] to not be a target.
(although: 1. not really 2. kind of a nightmare 3. conservatives and liberals are two sides of the whig hegelian dialect 4. plz make it stop 5. can we all just be normal)
We can’t vote our way towards a better future. The corrupt MAGA and DNC institutions strangle any nascent grassroots movement in the crib. And we cannot make them relinquish their death grip on our country with only bare hands.
Seriously shocked that this is the aspect of this moment in history that you choose to focus on, and not the absurd levels of violence perpetrated by the ruling classes against common people.
I don't have a problem with violence, but I do take issue with the mass dismissal and outright hatred for AI by people who don't even understand what it is.
It absolutely has. Both the Left and the Right have seared consciences and take no issue with murder and thuggishness as long as it's "their guy" doing it to "the other guy".
The world was never a wise and virtuous man's paradise, but it has been quickly sliding into ever increasing and monstrous irrationality. Give Plato's "Republic" a read and you might find it concerning how closely we exemplify the last stages of political and social decline.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1shugf8/firebomb_t...