Sometimes, the best thing they can do is to not say anything. Walz could have said nothing, and pretty well nobody would have been upset about it.
Politicians have to say a lot of things whether they mean them or not.
I like ex-New York Mayor Ed Koch's take on voting. "If you agree with me 51% of the time, vote for me. If you agree with me 100% of the time, see a psychiatrist."
no campaigning or politicking here, just pure statesman. his words are absolutely appropriate and expected from a government leader.
Which is part of the problem. This whole expectation that our leaders should hide their true feelings and motivations behind a veil of niceties only serves their goals of hiding such things from the people trying to figure out who to vote for. We should know who our politicians are as actual people, since it's the person they are in private that will motivate their actions within the government, not the nice face they put on for the public.
Ah yes, the actual original meaning of politically correct.
His words were awful and defending a mass murderer that has killed at least tens of thousands of Americans just during his tenure because their boss decided to cheap out is beyond disgusting for a political candidate, much less someone in office that wants to remain in office with all their body parts still attached.
Agreed, I think that he should have said nothing or perhaps bring out the point that beyond how people may or may not feel we should not aim to live In a society that privilege vigilante that take justice in there hand as it can quickly slip into a very bad place.... I see people suggesting a purge.... I would recommend those people go out and meet some of the victims of the Rwandan genocide and see how they feel with there so called brave words...
It's easy to spout such things using social media because we are anonymous but we do not want such violence to reproduce itself... This is how collateral damage happens. In Montreal an 11 year old child died because of a car bomb that was set by the Rock Machines as retaliation against the Hells Angel's.... No one won that day, we only lost a fraction of our soul as a society when we had to bury a child.
This is the problem, this time someone did a clean shot, what if the killer choses bombs and causes collateral damage. Will any of you sacrifice your children for this so called justice?
Funny how the politicians and the media react with horror, but the entire rest of the Internet has an entirely different reaction. I wonder why.
A person died, murdered in cold blood. That person had people that loved him. Politicians need to be respectful. Would you prefer they celebrated the execution of mass murderers on death row?
It's a horrendous thing. To see a person killed before their time when they didn't have to die. Just like what happens to thousands of Americans each year who are denied coverage. If we're actually honest with ourselves, the only reason this one is seen as a tragedy by politicians and CEOs is that there was no profit to be had in it.
edit: spelling
That's not a great comparison, because no mass murderer on death row has ever come close to the level of deaths this CEO is responsible for.
Poor people get murdered all the time. It's not what they said, it's that they chose to say something at all.
Politicians and media celebrate killings or Arab leaders all the time…
Not a person, a CEO. Big difference.
During the campaign I've seen Walz described as down-to-earth, approachable and attractive to the working class voter base.
Fucking yikes.
Whether or not this is accurate about Tim Walz, it is accurate to say politicians, elected and appointed officials regard the ownership class as peers and vice versa.
This is also true regarding the upper management of news agencies, which figures in liberal or left-wing news sources that won't go far enough left to jeopardize a status quo in which the agency and its owners thrive. And yet, they will underestimate the right wing and its willingness to let the leopards eat their faces once they are in power. The recent nods to the Trump transition by WaPo and the Los Angeles Times will not save either agency from Trump's wrath against press once he is in power.
The Democratic Party is far right, just slightly more left-wing than the Republican party, and they are still beholden to the ownership class when it comes to campaign contributions, which is how we don't have four-day work weeks, universal healthcare, social safety nets or any of the features that most developed nations enjoy, because it's plutocrats that decide what our elected officials are allowed to do, not the public.
It's also why communist and socialist are bad words, even though that means the only thing else you can be is a monarchist which is about as anti-American as one can get (at least if you believe the preamble to the Constitution of the United States). We've literally been indoctrinated against public-serving government.
But then it's time to ask, what is the point of recognizing or serving the state at all if it isn't to serve the public?
Along those lines, monarchist is bad, too. The wealthy in the U.S. are notoriously touchy about being called aristocracy, and I maintain that it's because nobility not only punctures the meritocracy myth, but also carries with it the idea of noblesse oblige. They don't want any obligations to the peasants. (Won't be lauded as a great philanthropist for the dribs and drabs they give to charity, if it's expected!)
Yes, but they're not satisfied with one-party autocracy, but are at this point looking to pass it along to their next of kin, even when they're not fit for rule, leading to the Joffrey / Nero / John of England problems that arise with monarchy.
The name Heritage Foundation spills the whole plot. They want to allow their kids to inherit their legacy and secure an extremely stratified society.
Socialism is not immune to monarchist or capitalist takeover, and the Democrats are not far right in this backwards ass country. They're the big tent of liberalism, which is right wing, but not as right wing as I wish it was. It's a distortion to believe that this country will democratically choose socialism. They're too invested in selfishness for egalitarianism.
That's where the permanent revolution would help. The workers must not allow splitting the revolution into stages of concessions and compromises but fight until total victory and the dissolution of the state.
Also this is the reason why communists are not pacifists — the working class has the right and a duty to defend itself and it's gains. That's what Marx meant when he wrote that under no pretense must workers be disarmed.
Socialism and Communism are, as per other political ideologies, only simple models by which to base construction what will ultimately be a complex system in order to preserve the values of the society (such as egalitarianism, liberty and mutualism) ( as per 1789 ).
None of these things are to be used just as an ideology we worship, since doing so doesn't actually make it so. Look at how the US worships freedom even as it tries to lock out trans rights and women's rights, and has a justice system that is stratified to favor the wealthy, and to incarcerate the marginalized. You can praise and chant an ideology all you want, and never actually see its virtues in action.
Just as democracy has (huge, egregious) issues that can be subverted (and are) and need to be addressed before the powerful exploit them to retain and increase power, so it is for other models of social conduct like socialism and communism. They're a starting point.
And frankly, the world has only started to veer away from models of dictatorship and bonded servitude, and are still trying to do the same thing just with extra steps with different names, hence how a gross amount of the US lives in precarity and the poverty line is lowered so that those above the poverty line still live in squalor (just slightly shinier squalor).
It's up to us to turn the notion of socialism or communism into examples that work. And there have been examples. The Black Pathers were anarcho-communist, though they suffered mass-assassinations by FBI. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico is also anarcho-communist, and still at large, if quiet right now (no actions have been taken by either side for a while).
The US is going through a phase where it has to change, and currently the path of least resistance is towards a grisly death, first through mass purges, then through obligatory war, at which point we're going to look an awful lot like Germany after the Soviets take Berlin. You are now a part of the resistance, presently unorganized, to prevent this fate. In the meantime, if we don't create a new public serving order, we will be here again.
(And then we have the climate crisis and the plastic crisis to address, both of which are running out of time. Stupid ice zombies)
Read the room, Tim.
remember when everyone thought this guy was gonna secretly turn bernie-bro the Kamala campaign into being good
No.
He was a best a signal Kamala was going to be a departure from Biden. There were a few weeks where that seemed to be the case too.
If anybody ever believed that, they were a fool. Kamala's campaign promises were to tax the rich and legalize weed, Tim Walz from a deeply conservative district was the moderate to balance her out.
Deny, Defend, Depose
We need bumper stickers of this.
Any clue why it said depose instead of defend?
There have been rumors that the guy got 4 bullets engraved: delay, deny, defend, depose. But only 3 have been recovered. Or that 4 were recovered but news outlets reported incorrectly.
All rumors.
Bourgeois parties support bourgeois fat cats? Nihil novi. A proletarian mass party must be built urgently. Revolutionary Communists of America do a lot of laudable effort in that direction.
google translates from latin
so true!
And nobody ever sees or hears from them.
The next time someone says "we gotta get behind the Dem nominee to stop ______" HUNT THEM DOWN AND BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THEM ON NATIONAL TELEVISION
the billionaire surveillance guy wants us all to start wearing glasses that record everything.
that is to protect the billionaire surveillance guy not to protect the rest of us just like cops wearing body cams is not to protect non-cops. they would even build in a way to remotely disable the bodycams if they could.
surprise surprise.
that said seeing United Health's stock drop more than 25% since open this morning does feel like xmas. I'm all in on them losing money and status and access to protection. but without them having to live in the fear that the rest of us have for decades is a bit of a .... i don't have a word for that.
As it was said on Some More News. The democrats should harness the hatred towards the rich elites instead of playing into Trump's anti-immigrant game.
no! we need to become transphobic!
(satire)
That's not how political parties work, though. Political parties are largely ideological institutions, they exist first and foremost not to win elections but to propagate an ideology, and winning the election is just a sign that they succeeded in their goal of convincing people of their ideology, and so now enough people agree that it can take root in the state. When political parties lose, it's very rare that they will interpret their loss as "we need to abandon all our values to match the opinion polls." No, they interpret their loss as meaning they failed in their goal of convincing people of their values, and thus should change their strategy of their out-reach, not changing their whole ideological position.
Democrats going against the rich elites would be an abandonment of their party's values and everything they stand for. In most countries, if you dislike the ideology of a party, you vote for someone else. The party itself has no obligation to change its entire ideology for you, such a thing very rarely occurs. If that was the case, then every political party would all have the exact same position, just all copy/pastes of whatever the opinion polls say.
I keep seeing all this bizarre rhetoric about how if the Democrats were "smart" they would just abandon their whole party's platform and adopt some other platform, but this makes zero sense, because you have to consider motivation. Their motivation is not to just win the election, but to convince you of their ideology, and abandoning their ideology does not achieve this. Democrats are not stupid, they just don't have the same motivations as you. Yes, they want to win, but they ultimately want to win on their platform, not on someone else's platform.
That's how political parties work. They have a platform, and the platform is paramount. If a green party adopted all pro-coal and pro-oil lobby positions just to win an election, that would not be a "smart" decision for them, because, even if it leads to their victory, it still is an abandonment of their ideology. Democrats are unabashedly a pro-rich elite party, it should not be smart for them to become anti-elite, because it is not aligned with their motivations.
I made a large collection of screenshots from Facebook of people who had their claims denied by United Healthcare today.
Yes, we know.
Sorry I'm not trying to be an attention getting asshole. I just really think people should see this.
So close to being a empathetic human while not being a corporate shill.
Democrats never saw a billionaire or war they didn't love.
Politicians are almost all sociopaths, not even trying to be funny. Sometimes they do things you like and sometimes they dont, but that never has anything to do with the interests and priorities of citizens. They are just people whose job is acting their entire life according to some doctrine, they dont have real personalities.
The political system we live under is rotting. It’s holding us back, suffocating real democracy, and clinging to relics of an era we should’ve buried centuries ago. Why are we still pretending centralized power structures, dominated by presidents and parliaments, are the best we can do? It’s time to turn the whole thing upside down. Imagine power flowing not from the top down but bubbling up from councils—real, grassroots bodies in towns, workplaces, and universities where people directly decide what matters to them. No presidents. No untouchable elites. Just democracy as it was meant to be: local, participatory, and alive.
Critics say that direct democracy would be too costly and cumbersome in large countries. But that’s a lie told to make us think power belongs anywhere but in our hands. The truth is, it doesn’t work their way—infrequent, clunky referenda that barely scratch the surface of what real participation looks like. But why not councils that meet regularly, that use technology we already have to count votes and hear every voice? Why not frequent, transparent, and accessible decision-making? We have the tools. What we lack is the will—and that’s on us.
And about the politicians. They’ve turned ruling into a career. They live above us, pocket bribes, rub shoulders with CEOs, and laugh at the idea of accountability. Enough. All representatives should be recallable at any time, earning no more than the median worker’s salary. Partial sortition (random official selection) could ensure even more fairness. It worked in ancient Greece which was (for the free male citizens ofc) closer to actual democracy than the unaccountable neo-aristocratic order we have today, so why not today when we have the formal equality before the law and equal rights, but we know the reality.
But if no one will be above anyone because everyone will get their chance to actually change something about the world and their life without running into the stone walls of the system, it will be a complete revolution in human relations that will uproot the poisonous root of disdain so many feel for their fellow humans for simply being worse off than them.
Imagine a system where politics isn’t about who has power but about how power flows and where the needs of the people are actually heard and resolved. Blockchain (and no, I'm abso-fucking-lutely not a cryptobro. PoW is still useful for things like captcha replacements but the whole thing is the biggest example of capitalism's way of turning useful and promising inventions into means of speculation and outright scams by and large) could be used to make the process more transparent than ever. It's not the technology that hold us back, but their fear of us using it to take what’s ours.
Term limits, too. No one should sit in power long enough to forget what life is like for the rest of us. Politics should be service, not a career. If we’re serious about democracy, every single one of us—no matter how "uneducated" we’re told we are—needs to learn how to govern. Because democracy isn’t just voting for the lesser evil every few years. It’s taking the reins of your life, your community, your future. It’s about ruling instead of being ruled.
Here’s the thing: the ruling class will not go quietly. When we start to take real power into our hands, they’ll fight back. They’ll use every dirty trick in the book to claw it back. That’s how this game works. But if we stand together, if we build a united force that can’t be undermined, if we refuse to let fear or complacency stop us—then they lose. And we win something they can never take away: the power to determine our destiny. That’s what’s at stake. Let’s stop settling for scraps. It’s time to demand the whole damn table.
Maybe it's because the guy is a relevant public figure, and if he were to say something along the lines of "the bastard deserved it" he'd face a ton of consequences for it? This is so much easier to do in an online space where you are anonymous, especially in an admittedly echochambery place like lemmy.
I do recall the Trump's first assassination attempt, and some celebrities (can't recall the names right now) did come out and say something along the lines of "shame the guy missed" which made the media start hounding and targeting them, with their colleagues being forced to disavow or kick them from their projects entirely.
It would be cool if Tim Walz or any influential figure went "rip bozo" regardless though
Instead of saying what he said here, Walz could've just not said anything and nobody would've batted an eye, aside maybe from some shareholders at "United" "Healthcare"
Yeah, fair point
nd if he were to say something along the lines of "the bastard deserved it" he'd face a ton of consequences for it?
Right because american politicians totally get consequences for their words lmao. Where have you been since 2016?
I had the impression this was a privilege exclusive to the conservatives
Dunno. Thoughts and prayers is seen as some as politicaleze for bless your heart.
I think Governor Walz is successfully threading the needle here.
i will believe this if at any point in the near future the man comments on the popular reaction to this event in relation to the need for national healthcare.
he won’t but that’s what i would believe if he did.
Any political that is praising that jackass getting what his due will get my loyalty, that's for sure.
You and he were... buddies, weren't you?
Gosh it's almost as if murder is a bad way to win hearts and minds outside of edgelord social media bubbles.
You think? Then how come they get away with murdering thousands of people every year?
They don't care what the public thinks of them.
Tim Walz isn't a very progressive politician to use as an example, he was the moderate that the DNC threw on to balance out Kamala's campaign promises to tax the rich and legalize weed.
Tim Walz's former congress chair was a deep red district before he won there. He's a zionist.
jfc what is wrong with this country when legalizing weed and taxing the rich are ideas that need to be balanced out by a "moderate."
The vast majority of pundits in hindsight have noted that the Harris Campaign's attempt to attract moderates and turn over conservatives failed spectacularly.
it’s weird that you thought the goal was selecting a “very progressive politician”? if you want to, let me know why you think that.
it’s pretty clear to me that OOP’s goal is to select a representative of establishment and the DNC. as a literal dem vp pick, walz is definitely representative of establishment in the democratic party.
Genuinely confused by the responses here. Like what do you want him to say? Because no politician is going to come out and say "Yay Assassinations".
Jesus Christ no wonder American is is the dam shape it's in because of bullshit like this. The political IQ of a four year old
Personally, if I were in the position, I'd say something like: "It is a tragedy that a murder happened. No one should ever feel like murder is the only chance at justice." Maybe expand on it a bit and add a link to a bill proposed to either fix the justice system to not favor the rich, a bill that forces health insurance companies to do a better job and not be as greedy, or, even better, a bill that provides Medicare for all.
Like what do you want him to say?
Nothing. Nothing would be perfectly acceptable. See: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10402549/8792150
Edit: Also, a mitigating alternative I would accept would at the very least not laud the “business and healthcare community.”
Like what do you want him to say?
He didn't need to say jack shit.
I want him to say nothing.
Jesus Christ no wonder American is is the dam shape it’s in because of bullshit like this. The political IQ of a four year old
And the effect of media bubbles. Including self-selected ones, not just algorithm driven bubbles.
The plurality of voters this last election voted for greed and selfishness as celebrated norms. Over a third of voters said they didn't care. Of the remainder, a significant percentage of them are obsessed with civility and the proper way of doing things.
Laughing about capitalist cunts getting their just desserts is funny, but not as popular in touch-grassville as it is on Lemmy, and public figures have to deal with that fact
Yes, the pundits are saying DISCLAIMER: Shooting is bad. Murder is bad before they talk about how the healthcare service executive really had it coming.
And that's coming from the liberals, not us radical left pinko-commies who have Bolshevik choruses back us up when we talk.
Something along the lines of "Murder is wrong but also this man's policies at his company led to a third of people's claims being denied and 22 billion dollars just last year being taken as profit off people actively having their healthcare denied and maybe, just maybe, we should do something about that."
