Would it help if I killed somebody?

November 8, 2021 2:16 PM

"On one track we have the millions of people living and bound to be born in coastal areas who will find their homes and lives literally underwater in 20 years, plus the various social and political implications of displacing them at roughly the same moment we radically diminish nature’s capacity to support life. And on the other track we have Joe Manchin."
posted by ssg (13 comments total)

I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but what if we all wrote to all the senators who refuse to act. And by "we", I don't only mean all MeFites, but all the people all over the world who want change. We could write to Greta Thunberg and ask her to help spread the word. Hundreds of mails won't have much of an effect on conservative corrupt politicians, but could we letter-bomb them with thousands or millions of mails, like in Harry Potter?
posted by mumimor at 2:35 PM on November 8, 2021

I think it says something about this day and age that a publisher and an editor can decide to go ahead and hit post on this kind of article, which despite its protest is in fact about what it says it is.

Joe Manchin has himself to thank for the way people feel about him, if he even cares, which I doubt. He can barely hear us from atop his pile of money. But it's interesting, as even Brooks points out, that he writes this article about Manchin and not any one of the Republican senators. Brooks has given up on them as moral agents, as most thinking people do. (Except when Lisa Murkowski decides to favor us with her presence.) And so Manchin, by nominally aligning himself with the only party interested in real governance, gets all the blame for the sins of the other. Again, he earns it by basically caucusing with them when he feels like it, but there you are. It is a hell of a statement about where we are right now, that we don't see GOP senators as independent actors and have good reasons not to do so.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:36 PM on November 8, 2021 [16 favorites]

I don't know, as someone who was giving the Malm book out as a Christmas present, and am sympathetic to the idea that Something Big Must Be Done, I think the trolley problem is really the wrong way to think about Manchin or climate in general, because no individual's hand is on the switch. Manchin is a convenient villain, but he's a molecule, an essential atom of the problem but easily replaced. Capitalism creates complex problems of responsibility--we can blame, say, Exxon for its role in climate change, but aside from putting it out of business, you can't really kill Exxon, you can't really arrest Exxon. Brooks sort of gets this, mentioning it's a collective action problem, but it's a collective target problem too, as every problem of capitalism is. The fact this piece even exists, means that we're still stuck thinking of personalities rather than systems.

I'm reminded of that bit in Grapes of Wrath, where a tenant farmer goes through the list of who he'll have to kill to keep his land, before asking, "But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me." And the response? "I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all. Maybe like you said, the property’s doing it."

If capitalism is a creature of laws, of codes, of societal programming, then we have to look elsewhere for solutions--ways to hack those codes (better laws, or even, as Malm would have it, attacking physical capital to make fossil fuels too expensive to operate), rather than focusing on the personalities. (Whether there's time for that is another, more depressing question.)
posted by mittens at 2:48 PM on November 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

I would like to letter-bomb a few senators in the more traditional sense [PARODY IN MINECRAFT].

The trouble with systemic oppression is that you can't fix it with a couple of carefully chosen assassinations. If you shoot Mitch McConnell, someone else just as obstinate as he is will replace him. And so on.

We have to rebuild society entirely. It would be a difficult task if everyone agreed that that was true. I don't know how you do it without a spectacular amount of bloodshed trying to wrest control from the people who currently benefit from those oppressive systems, or with any guarantee that what replaces it will be better.
posted by JDHarper at 2:54 PM on November 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

I read this article sort of the same way I read the last paragraph of Sarah Miller's "All the right words on climate have already been said" (previously). That article is how I learned of Malm's book; this article is how I learned that the book doesn't actually have, like, blueprints in it.

I think it says something about this day and age that a publisher and an editor can decide to go ahead and hit post on this kind of article, which despite its protest is in fact about what it says it is.

Countess Elena: YEAH. Like, do Dan Brooks, and his editor, and legal counsel at Bustle Digital Group, know what stochastic terrorism is?
posted by brainwane at 2:56 PM on November 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is something organizers (union and other) deal with all the time. In order to get people to act, it's not enough to care about the issue and want change. People must feel that their actions will make a difference. That's part of why organizing is so hard, progress is incredibly slow and you have to believe in something that you may not see for years. People will do nothing if you can't convince them that their actions will have consequences and meaning. Or, well-meaning activists join, exhaust themselves, and quit.

I think about this all the time. Of course I would do a big thing! But what would actually help? I don't know! And that's why I go to meetings and am in groups, etc. We need to build power and then use power. But I think the idea of being some kind of political assassin as a solution is a fantasy when the entire system must change, and no one person controls it.
posted by Emmy Rae at 3:02 PM on November 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

Manchin is obviously corrupt as all zuck, but there's only one of him and there are fifty Republicans, some of whom (e.g. Kinzinger) show quite promising signs of humanity. Is it going to be a more productive use of time to try to flip a couple of those than to keep banging our heads against the dinosaur running the dinosaur mines?
posted by flabdablet at 3:36 PM on November 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

But in the words of Lawrence Block, or more precisely, in the words of his characters, the defense of capital punishment is ; "That particular son of a bitch isn't going to bother you any more."
So go ahead and kill Manchin if it makes you feel better, but it isn't going to change the situation. The only time assassination works the way it's supposed to work is if the bad person is so uniquely bad, that no matter who replaced them, and someone would replace them, the replacement has to be better purely by default. Josef Mengele is the example usually used, though Stephen Miller is the example used lately.
And neither of them were assassinated.
posted by dannyboybell at 3:52 PM on November 8, 2021

I don't remember where I saw it (Might have been Ministry of the Future), but there are roughly 500 people that have the decision making power to extract the remaining fossil fuels on the planet.

As far as leverage, that's not an insurmountable problem. What form that takes remains to be seen, but I think getting around the idea that the roadblocks are people and things, not concepts like the corporate entity.

You can't stop Exxon. You can break Exxon's stuff, or convince Exxon's leadership. The problem really is a human problem at the end of the day.
posted by Lord_Pall at 4:01 PM on November 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Welp, this is certainly quite the article, isn't it. It's...kinda....?... advocating for one-off Hitler-ish murder? Wow.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:03 PM on November 8, 2021

There's more than one way to blow up a pipeline.
posted by flabdablet at 4:04 PM on November 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

Wow. This is a helluva thing, this article. It’s beautiful, in its rage and sadness. I want to cry.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 4:10 PM on November 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Man, it is really comforting to hear someone else coming out and saying this. Every time I hear news about Manchin getting another concession in neutering Biden's two big bills, I ponder how effective killing him would be. I haven't made any kinds of plans for doing this but I sure as fuck would donate to the legal support gofundme of someone who did it.
posted by egypturnash at 4:10 PM on November 8, 2021 [2 favorites]