Uh, this isn't the direction I was expecting this to go. When you start killing judges, corrupt or not, you have Mexico. I was thinking more along the lines of being disbarred and exposed to civil and criminal liability.
Gag orders should be required to have a short duration and, once lifted, be subject to an open and thorough examination, where it's the state's responsibility to prove that the gag was necessary. Failing that, the prosecutor and signing judge would be liable.
The problem is our lack of political momentum and any lever for average citizens to use to move the judicial system to reform.
When has assassination ever accomplished what the assassin wanted? Most successful political movements, at least in recent history, do not involve killing anybody.
With higher profile assassinations, the results seem to be less predictable. But I think we tend to ignore all the smaller assassinations that gave just the right edge to the opposition since those people just fade into the background noise.
Do you have an example? If you're talking about government-sponsored assassinations, I think that's less relevant, we're talking about how "normal" people can influence politicians.
The assassination of JFK & RFK put Johnson into power. Power mongers pulled all kinds of schemes from there. The assassination of MLK per testimony in court case was intended to stop overthrow of U.S. government by masses tired of their shit. That didn't happen. Numerous witnesses to various things in intelligence misconduct never lived to say it in court. Those things are still debatable due to missing information. And so on.
Assassinations that have worked so far were done by the power establishment to expand or protect its power. They tend to work. They're rarely needed, though, as they can do things like media spins, disenfranchising voters, regular arrests, and so on.
As I said in another comment, this thread was about how average people could influence politicians. Government-sponsored assassinations are a different discussion.
Assassinating the most corrupt officials on a regular basis could have similar influence. They'd know they could pull schemes for money but would die past a certain point of damage to the people or elimination of their end of constitution. It works similarly.
It would just be harder as they'd have (a) lots more security, (b) most police going after whoever killed them while simultaneously ignoring whatever the politicians were doing, and (c) media protecting them since corruption works to media owners' benefit as well.
Your first sentence assumes we know the assassins' motives. I question that.
Your second sentence assumes that any assassinations would be publicly known (eg assassination of a public figure). Assassination of non-public figures may well be impactful and yet go largely unheeded.
I'd have a vastly different view on politics if I believed in the Kennedy assassination being an inside job, as your offhand "grassy knoll" comment suggests you do.
In all seriousness, and meaning no disrespect, have you researched the Kennedy assassination and come away with the impression there was no conspiracy?
Because I didn't even think it was particularly controversial that the official story is bunk. Making no more assumptions about the circumstances of his death (ie, who or how), a conspiracy would be required to produce an official explanation that was lean of some inconvenient facts. But I'm always in the market for convincing evidence that I'm wrong.
Yeah I've been quite interested in it an other conspiracy theories, like the 9/11 conspiracy theory (also bunk) etc.
Most of what these conspiracy theories consist of is just anomaly hunting, you take a really complex event and try to find any sort of unusual things, which of course you're going to find since it's a big & complex event.
Check out this interview (around 40m) in [1] with Gerald Posner, the author of Case Closed[2] (a non-conspiracy Kennedy assassination book) for a good start down the rabbit hole of non-conspiracy coverage of the Kennedy assassination.
Sorry for the late reply, but I didn't mean to imply anything about an inside job or other conspiracy theory. My point was that a sure-fire way to affect a politician is to kill them. Everything else is a "this might work..." proposition. I prefer absolutes.
I see how my comment could have been misinterpreted by so many people in hindsight. Sometimes I look at things through a very specific-to-my-experience lens. In another life, myself and squadmates(think coworkers) would get orders such as "Cleric(foreign equivalent of mayor/publicly-supported-bad-actor) <John Doe> and all his/her supporters are threats and should be neutralized". That didn't mean we should protest their policies or otherwise attempt to subvert them...those aren't guaranteed solutions. The finality of killing is a guaranteed solution. If they become a martyr and create even more undesirables through their demise...don't despair - just accept that the list of undesirables has grown and await the very predictable orders. It's tried, true, and only protested until the protester's name joins the list and is subsequently checked off.
