@dalias @quixoticgeek I just read it, so I'll happily address it directly.

To get to guillotines, you have to change society. By the time you’ve changed society, you don’t need the guillotines.

an as-yet-undetermined person killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year.

echoing what has already been said, this is a false dichotomy. the revolution will happen gradually over time, and not globally in a single moment. sure, once a global revolution has completed and we have Fully Automated Luxury Gay (Space) Communism, killing billionaires (with a guillotine or otherwise) is pointless, gratuitous violence, but that doesn't happen overnight.

If you focus on the guillotines instead of building that society, you will end up with a more brutal and repressive system than the one you started in. See the history of the French Revolution and the USSR.

The South of France is literally the place billionaires go to hang out on their Yachts and Russia is literally the most oppressive and exploitative oligarchy in history. Like… That shit didn’t work.

what are you talking about?

the French Revolution was quashed twice. the USSR was violently overthrown against the wishes of the vast majority of the populous by capitalist interests, supported by the US. arguably the USSR might still be around if it had repressed those capitalist interests more violently.

If you focus on the guillotines instead of building that society, you will end up with a more brutal and repressive system than the one you started in. See the history of [...] the USSR.

in spite of its flaws, the USSR was so vastly better for the proletariat than both the Tsarist regime that preceded it and the current capitalist oligarchy that followed it, and any historical analysis that doesn't acknowledge that is frankly clownish. the USSR was not "brutal and repressive". it rapidly industrialised an agrarian nation without pillaging the global south, all while simultaneously fending off outside attackers. it provided housing for everyone. it had an extremely good track record for feeding all of its people—only failing a few times during famine (with additional kulak sabotage)—unlike the US which has had the capability of feeding all of its people for a long time but deliberately structures society so that some people go hungry to this day. incidentally, the US is not better for workers than the indigenous nations that preceded it.

A guillotine is a machine that can only be used against someone who is disarmed, bound, and ultimately helpless. If you have already disarmed someone, they are not a threat.

if the opposing forces had killed Napoleon the first time, there might not have been a second revolution.

If you can tie up a billionaire, then you already have the structural capability of taking away their power (and have probably already done so).

again, what are you talking about? organised criminals abduct people with some regularity, and as mentioned previously, a CEO was shot in the street last year.

The machinery of systematic execution is a social machinery that must be built (built at the expense of other machinery, I might add).

guillotines are extremely cheap and easy to build, as has been demonstrated by the internet. you need some timber, a rope, a steel plate, an angle grinder or cutting torch, and maybe some nuts and bolts and bearings.

also, the blog post acts as if every time someone mentions guillotines they mean literally beheading someone with one. most [citation needed] people mean it symbolically. guns and knives work too. some people might mean it literally and specifically, but mostly the point is removing billionaires from the equation.

want something worse than a guillotine, something they acutally fear, I want them to know they are unnecessary, that they are the villains, that their power was never earned. I want them to live in a world where they are socially poor, where they have as much social debt as they once had monetary wealth, so they can feel the absolute powerlessness, helplessness, and precarity that I felt growing up destitute in a home broken by their wars and economic policies.

honestly, not a great take. sure, better than killing them for no reason I guess? but better for billionaires to be rehabilitated and contribute positively to society, to feel remorse and grow and become better people, than to be miserable all the time.

but pragmatically, that rehabilitation is not going to happen in many cases.