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Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

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Re: Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

#391

Post by UncleMeat »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #388
UncleMeat wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The police did that. Not the students.

> police did that. Not the students Potato potato. It’s a predictable, even necessary, response to occupying a building. Same as increasing police present if vigilante violence ramps up somewhere. People who don’t understand that will keep trashing the causes they purport to represent.

"People do nonviolent thing which produces a violent police response so we can criticize them for being violent through their indirect cause of police violence" is wild to me.

It seems so clear that this is not about violence but instead about people who don't know their place.

Re: Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

#392

Post by morkalork »

lores wrote: post #309
avaer wrote: post #7

In case someone reading this is thinking similar thoughts: there's no version of reality where doing this will solve any problem. Don't.

Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish? The specific stigma against physical violence (and…

Similarly, as one meme puts it "Unions were the answer to violence" but now they've been ground into dust we have people torching warehouses instead, saying "All you had to do was pay us enough to live"

Re: Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

#393

Post by JumpCrisscross »

thrance wrote: post #389
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> French Revolution was pretty peaceful 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]. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023

IIRC, you've already made this argument in the past, but it's a bad one. Yes, the Ancien Régime 's nobility became the bourgeoisie in the successive governments of the French 18th century, but it allowed many from the tiers état to rise to places that were literally illegal for them to occupy under the old monarchy.

> it allowed many from the tiers état to rise to places that were literally illegal for them to occupy under the old monarchy

I’ve never argued some upward mobility wasn’t permitted by the revolution. I’m just pushing back on the notion that elites should fear an American revolution. They don’t, because historically, they shouldn’t. Nine times out of ten they’ll consolidate power among themselves, which means more wealth flowing upwards. Nine times out of the rest of the time, they’ll escape with most of their money.

And for the average Frenchman, the revolutions were terrible. Some folks win. But they were seldom powerless before. Just wealthy. Compare that to the British case, where land and electoral reform permitted the emergence of a broad middle class, one that continued accruing power for another century.

Re: Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

#395

Post by vkou »

refurb wrote: post #288
mbgerring wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked on electoral and initiative campaigns, and traveled thousands of miles to knock on doors. I’ve donated money. I’ve called my congresspeople. I’ve gone to and spoken at public meetings. I’ve protested, been tear gassed, beaten, and thrown in jail. I’ve been doing all of this continuously for about 20 years. I can tell you, from extensive experience going through the official channels, that the formal mec…

If you don’t have large support for your ideas then it shouldn’t be a surprise it’s hard. But that’s the intent of the system? Represent what most people want.

> But that’s the intent of the system? Represent what most people want.

It would be great if the media channels that manufacture wants weren't co-opted by the very people who are the problem.

Re: Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

#396

Post by _DeadFred_ »

mbgerring wrote: post #182
tavavex wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

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.

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.

Re: Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

#397

Post by vkou »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #375
abenga wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The billionaires will blanket the airwaves with bad-faith argument ads and you will lose.

> billionaires will blanket the airwaves with bad-faith argument ads and you will lose This is a long way to say you don’t have the votes. Airwaves affect turnout. They don’t flip people on positions.

> They don’t flip people on positions.

They absolutely do. On September 12, 2001, ~nobody in the United States was interested in starting a war with Iraq.

Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11.

A decade later, all of a sudden, nobody wanted to fess up to wanting anything to do with that mess.

Public wants aren't discovered in some interference-free democratic vacuum. The people who own the press put a millstone on their side of the scales.

Re: Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

#398

Post by JumpCrisscross »

vkou wrote: post #397
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> billionaires will blanket the airwaves with bad-faith argument ads and you will lose This is a long way to say you don’t have the votes. Airwaves affect turnout. They don’t flip people on positions.

> They don’t flip people on positions. They absolutely do. On September 12, 2001, ~nobody in the United States was interested in starting a war with Iraq. Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11. A decade later, all of a sudden, nobody wanted to f…

> Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11

There was desire for vengeance on 12 September. Reporting and politicians channeled it. That’s very different from driving consensus against something people would otherwise support.

Re: Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

#399

Post by ndiddy »

mplanchard wrote: post #353
lores wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish? The specific stigma against physical violence (and…

Yes, and in addition to this, we see examples daily of violence being inflicted on the poor by the rich, both literally (ICE, police militarization, harsh prison conditions, poor oversight of prisons) and figuratively (reduced social safety net, threat of ruin and bankruptcy due to medical debt, thread of lost jobs and corresponding loss of safety, a lack of consequences for criminal behavior directly correlated to w…

In the United States, not having a job for the short term means you lose your healthcare, for the medium term means you're living out of your car, and for the long term means you're out on the street, incarcerated, or dead. AI executives talk to the public like "investors are pouring billions into my new invention, the Job Killer 9000. Sure millions of people are going to get laid off and over time it'll force the price of wage work closer and closer to zero, but that's just the price of progress!" That in itself is inherently a violent threat. I am not surprised that some people are responding to it with violence.

Re: Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

#400

Post by JumpCrisscross »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #144
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If violent attacks start metastasizing, it legitimately justifies a police crackdown. Most of the population will be for that. The pro-Palestinian activists set their cause back a year by overplaying their hands in Columbia at the start of the war. If we want to ensure zero AI legislation for the next 2 years, I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure that than to start potting randos in the streets.

It depends on what kind of violent attacks they are exactly. I believe that most of the population would either not care about people of the Altman and Zuckerberg wealth level getting killed or would be happy about it. I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown. If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer peopl…

> most of the population would either not care about people of the Altman and Zuckerberg wealth level getting killed or would be happy about it

Someone blindly shooting at Altman’s house is going to kill a neighbour or the housekeeper. Not Sam Altman. Probably not even his family.

The internet may be happy. But the locals will get scared. This happens every time these lone-wolf escalations occur.

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