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Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

To me it increasingly seems like there's no version of reality where doing anything will solve the problem, unless you're one of the special few people who can influence the world. The violence is a sign of that. Average people don't do things like these, but when they start feeling helpless, the most unstable people of that society that don't have anything to lose will start acting more erratically. If there's no pressure relief, these actions propagate and will become more common and normalized. This is driven by desperation, not strategically weighing the pros and cons and what impact it'll have on society or what have you.

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We invented something called “democracy” to fix this, and then we allowed enough wealth to accumulate that the wealthy just bought it and nerfed it.

We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.

That was a design feature of democracy all along, not a bug.

This is not the reality in every democracy.

I live in Switzerland, which has a highly functional democracy.

Don't forget we created our own 'papal indulgence' system where if someone hides their morally bad actions/choices behind articles of incorporation/LCCs then somehow everything that person does is morally excused away by society and almost said to be an act of nature as if those people HAD to make those choices (because shareholder accountability or the market demands or whatever).

Shareholder accountability > societal accountability. Accountability falling on a made up corporation > accountability falling to the humans that made the choices.

You can only get away with this structure up to a certain level of morally bankrupt behavior. But there can be a point where people refuse to defer to it as being legitimate.

I think the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic was the beginning of the end of legitimacy for this 'indulgences' system where the government wiped away/waves away horrific immoral behavior just because it was done under the government's papal indulgences system. You can literally ruin millions of lives, push thousands to hundreds of thousands of young girls/boys into prostitution, cause death and community destruction, and the consequences are mostly waived away because the Sacklers were protected by their papal indulgences.

when government’s aren’t wealthy and investing heavily in the public private individuals are and that’s where inequality starts. the only way out of this is with enough taxation to level the playing field for the common man and to provide the government with the resources to lift the welfare of it’s citizens

There are a LOT of stages between "resigning and doing nothing" and "deadly violence" that have some effect.

Demonstrations are a start, though they seem to be more useful for networking inside a group and forcing the press to pay attention to some matter. Decision makers can easily ignore them.

What's less easy to ignore are strikes, especially general strikes, as e.g. port workers in Italy threatened during the total blockade in the Gaza war.

Not just strikes: go-slows, work-to-rules, using whatever power you have at whatever level to act more ethically.

Also: disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades.

Start small, increase the pressure over time, be clear about what you're doing and why.

Given what AI has always been about, since well before LLMs, go-slows and work-to-rules aren't going to help, they'll just speed up transitions to AI.

The disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades, I can see those working. Certainly seems to have an impact in the video game news I see.

Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.

Isn’t violence just “no I get to be one of the few not them”?

Even then I don’t they they get a lot of choice as far as results go.

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