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I don't understand. Where's the culture-war angle? AFAIK this guy wasn't a notable CW figure, and while the left is friendlier to going single-payer they're not TTBOMK specifically murderous as a group toward private insurance companies (the way some of them are toward the fossil fuel industry, or some religious-right types are toward abortion clinics).
Or are you more concerned that there might be a rash of copycats with more CW-loaded targets, due to this guy apparently getting away with it?
Maybe not intentionally going hot but it seems very culture war just going based off of reddit's reaction. The response is either shrug, "good", "more of this", or "I don't wish violence on anyone but..." and those are just the ones that aren't removed by the mods. But this is nothing new for reddit, there's a fair number of subs dedicated to anti-capitalism sentiment and they post often about killing rich people in the same way that pol would post about the day of the rope or whatever. I've seen many conversations on reddit that all boil down to:
Then it sort of just devolves into people agreeing with the sentiment that wealth inequality's only solution is violence. You can say this isn't culture but class but it seems to me the lines have already been drawn where being rich is always bad unless the person is sufficiently left. The CEO being despised for being in Healthcare seems like a fig leaf that just fits better than most for people from the outside looking in, but if this was an oil exec or a finance exec, the talking points would be different but the people celebrating would be just as fine with it.
I tend to avoid the anti-capitalist subreddits and whatever overflow they might have into the many left-wing subreddits. So, I imagine, there's more than I think. A decade ago there wasn't any specifically large anti-capitalist subreddits, then things like /r/antiwork and /r/workreform started, now there's stuff like /r/fluentinfinance and other hydra heads that are all the same thing, when they're not celebrating or justifying events like this they're just posting the same things that they must know are lies, whether they pretend that profit is revenue or that rich people's net worth represents the amount of currency they can spend at any moment. It seems clear that the celebration isn't coordinated by the left but the overlap between the tail and the head is pretty hard to figure at this point. There were memes in /r/adviceanimals about the killing and at some point it became a specifically left wing subreddit, but /r/pics, which also became a specifically left wing subreddit, doesn't have anything about it which leads me to believe the sentiment is organic, to the extent that its possible to be on Reddit anymore.
Hatred is lifeblood in the culture war and if the rhetoric is constantly "nothing will change unless poor people decide to rise up and kill their oppressors" and something like this happens where it's no big deal to kill a CEO, comments are talking about how they'd get off with jury nullification, "it's literally the same thing as killing a nazi," or venerating Shinzo Abe's assassin because he deserved to die for being conservative in a thread about this killing, then it's definitely going to either give the culture war fuel or become another overt part of it even if it turns out that the culprit was a hired assassin by a rival company.
It reminds of Trump's assassination attempt and how, whether or right or wrong, it was claimed that it wasn't political. Just because something is done absent a culture war motive doesn't mean that there isn't a culture war angle.
90% of the Facebook reactions to the company's post about the death were laugh emojis. It's not just the Reddit kids. This guy is gonna be a folk hero.
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Aside from a lone schizo mass shooting in 2015, the last case of an actual murder against an abortion clinic was before Obama.
Actually, both energy executives and abortion doctors have to worry about harassment from people who don’t like them for ideological reasons, but I haven’t heard of energy executives actually getting assassinated either, despite their apparent need for heavy security.
I said "some" and I meant more the people with terrorist-friendly ideologies than specifically the terrorists. We had someone taking this position in the QCs for last month.
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agree. people are reading into or assigning a motive that fits their worldview.
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Yes to the latter.
Reddit’s “There Was An Attempt” subreddit is for failed attempts at doing simple or easy things. This news article was posted there as “To stay alive as a PoS who made millions off the suffering of others.” As of now, approx 8000 upvotes and 1000+ comments, most of them cheering on the assassin.
It’s culture war because the Democrats forced the country’s insurers via the ACA to stop offering all healthcare except “Cadillac plans,” and to cover all pre-existing conditions, and reduced the employer-provided requirement down to 30 hours.
Then they successfully blamed Republicans and the profit motive for increasing the percentage of 29 hr/wk jobs with no healthcare, making all healthcare costs skyrocket, making doctors and nurses quit and new people not want to go into the field, and making Big Pharma rich.
I get the 29 hr/wk thing, assuming it's basically a variation on the minimum wage leads to less jobs argument.
Why does skyrocketing healthcare costs drive doctors and nurses to quit?
How does Big Pharma specifically benefit?
I wrote that as a list of individual things the ACA did, not a causal sequence. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Sorry you read too much into this. The main effect of 29 hr workweeks for low income labor was to shift their healthcare from partial plans (now illegal) to Medicaid, being meta-insured by taxpayers in higher brackets.
Again, a list of things the ACA did, not a causal sequence. Medical professionals leave the field for a variety of reasons. One of the big ones is the bureaucracies both public and private (their own business insurance, for one) which turn their days into endless paperwork, and turn the brightest and kindest of humanity into overburdened cogwheels.
Per Google’s search AI: “the ACA mandates that all health plans cover essential health benefits, including prescription drugs, which means more people can afford to purchase their medications.” It wasn't specifically caused by the lack of personnel.
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Agree with all of this.
Many people don't realize just how expensive health insurance is now because somebody else is paying it for them.
A bronze plan for a family of four is now over $20,000 a year and covers essentially nothing. Obamacare was an abomination.
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