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imagine a future where *we* appropriate the vicious symbolism of ICE in a merciless crack-down billionaires and the MAGA class: fancy production value videos of bashing down their fancy doors, slapping bags over their spray-tanned heads, black helicopters, shattered ugly gold homewares, etc etc

Okay, but since everyone on this thread seems unironically into it: the Cultural Revolution was bad, actually! Once you unleash the bloodlust, it takes on a life of its own - for the people running it, for the people participating in it - and it KEEPS GOING

And when it consumes the people you want to go after, IT WILL KEEP GOING because the appetites you've whetted and the machine you've created to satisfying it will WANT to keep going. Do NOT do the Two-Minute Hate from the classic scifi novel etc etc.

I am extremely familiar with the history of the Khmer Rouge and the Cultural Revolution. I am describing a highly public and perfectly legal process that will allow these criminals to live out their natural lives - mercy they likely won’t get if they continue their oligarchic reign of terror.

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I have no faith in people any more. Boris Johnson partied through Covid, nothing happened to him. Liz Truss appointed her boyfriend chancellor and they broke the economy overnight, nothing happened to them. And that's people who did big, flashy things, not even touching harm to minorities etc.

We joke about “guillotines are the moderate solution” but there’s a kernel of truth there. If we have a culture where laws and norms become optional for some, then it won’t just be the rich taking advantage. We have to reinforce the rule of law in a VERY obvious and clear way to stop this mess.

I used to be opposed to the death penalty in all cases, but these last two years have convinced me the system is incapable of keeping people with sufficient elite connections & cult followings in prison; ie "life w/o parole" will not actually last, leaving only one real option for Musk/Trump types.

Which is to say if someone wants to do prison sentences for those types instead of death penalty, it would definitely have to be a massive, highly publicized effort of the type you described to have any real hope of "sticking."

All of which adds another point to the argument that allowing the concentration of power into few hands is a really, really bad idea that society should endeavor to prevent: it should never be the case that a single person is so dangerous to the world that death seems to be only way to stop them.