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It's a pity that people are content to just quietly hate from home. If we had the gumption to get off our asses and sabotage our enemies I think the world would be a better place.



I think the stereotypical Hacker News response would be to encourage people to disrupt Deere with a startup farm equipment company.

Maybe that could rectify this ridiculousness in about 5 - 15 years (if successful).


Starting a company is the heroic way to solve this problem. I mean head over to the dealership with an angle grinder and just start breaking things.

If the company is truly a threat to your community, and if the damage is targeted and restrained enough to be considered an act of protest and not chaos for the sake of it, then a jury of your peers ought not convict.


What do you mean?


In the US we're taught to believe that the market will handle this kind of thing. But it won't. Relatively few of us are in the market for a tractor. We can't all "vote with our dollars" and go buy a tractor from a less shady vendor.

But as a human who likes food, my desire to make sure that nobody has a "press here to make the people hungry"-button is legitimate.

If it turns out that the existing political machinery is ineffective at preventing the creation of this button, US norms provide no recourse. If the government makes you mad enough, you overthrow the government (ideally peacefully).

But what do you do when a private company becomes a significant threat? Send them a strongly worded letter? Companies don't speak english, they're just sensitive to their bottom line. If you want to communicate with them, you have to influence their bottom line.

So I mean that I think we'd all be better off if we considered periodic slashing (drilling, maybe?) of for-sale tractor tires, and other forms of nonviolent sabotage, to be legitimate political speech. If certain lines were crossed, we ought to encourage each other to get off the couch and go practice that speech.




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