I don’t disagree with the mods for enforcing their rules (I think online spaces ought to moderate and set rules according to their goals and purpose), but I really can’t see how anyone would be surprised that this reached such an unfortunate end. And it’s frankly kinda true that rights we take for granted today largerly WERE earned through bloodshed. The US ought to know that better than anybody; it was literally our violent refusal of monarchy that inspired the French with their guilotines. We were where they got the idea. And those are grotesque outcomes, but the ideal out come would be exploitation and abuses being prevented or resolved, a reality that people did not live. And the outcome of that reality was that violence really DID play a fundamental role in building the world we appreciate today.

The CEO destroyed a horrific number of lives and the positive outcome would have been the US government effectively protecting its people from exploitation. That never happened, and when people’s justified anger at being treated so abusively at a terrifying scale just SITS for that long, eventually it’s gonna boil over. And the consequence is that society is actually paying attention to how horrific of a death and abuse machine the company he built was. I don’t like that someone was murdered. I do respect the willingness to fight back against a man abusing you and a terrifying number of others, and reject that somehow it’s okay to intentionally abuse people if you’re making money doing it and call it a business. More than anything I hope it moves us forward and we address the issue. And it’s entirely possible it won’t be addressed, but to be perfectly honest it’s really apparent it wasn’t gonna get addressed without this happening, because our representatives demonstrated OVER AND OVER AND OVER that the only thing that matters is that someone is getting rich.

But this country really was founded on a violent rejection of abusive authority. Our declaration of independence was written in British blood. And the insistence that if rights and saftey are denied they will be taken by force (through protest, collective action, and at time throughout history, outright violence), really did create many of the rights and protections we now enjoy.

At a certain point people don’t just blindly accept that being abused is the way the world must always be, and sometimes that violence really has forged a better life for people. I just hope this violence actually yields that end. I’m tired of people being abused, and I also know that there will be more anger and violence if the abuse and destruction of lives continues to be the status quo :(