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I find it interesting that the people celebrating the "vigilante justice" of the UHC assassin are the same people upset about the Daniel Penny verdict.
I suspect that those people would have been more sympathetic to Mr Penny if Mr Neely had been responsible for the cessation of the metabolic processes of an order of magnitude more Americans than Usama bin-Ladin....
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There's no mystery to solve. The leftist instinct in America is always to sympathize with the poorer person whose life is in disarray. It's extremely clear which way this breaks in both cases (everyman subway rider / deranged lunatic and CEO / presumably indebted twenty-something).
But isn't Luigi Mangione from a rich family? It seems like people on Tumblr that I follow still stan him (and are posting joke quizzes asking if he's hot), so it's not obvious to me that he's an underdog in this way. Like, sure, he's objectively poorer than the CEO, but I think a lot of the "appeal" of the assassination is the "righteous fury" at insurance companies, which many Americans have had bad experiences with.
We know that now but I think the sides had already been chosen before that became know several hours ago. I don't disagree that there is a special hatred for the insurance CEO but I don't feel that the overall reaction would have been any different if this had been any other major company's CEO, do you?
Definitely yes. Killing Bezos or Pichai or Nadella would have gotten a much more mixed reaction, for instance. Musk, the same times a billion. Killing the CEO of Ford probably wouldn't have garnered any positive reaction; killing the CEO of GM would have gotten the "horrible to kill a woman" thing (at least from the press). I'm not sure if there's any CEO universally loved, but this guy (or rather, anyone in his position) was likely among the most universally hated.
Disagree. People who are already celebrities like the names you listed have battle lines already drawn around them to some degree, so let's leave them aside. If it was the CEO of Ford, my gut instinct is that on e.g. Reddit the reaction would be essentially the same. They would have to work a little harder to identify the "violence" that said CEO had inflicted on employees or consumers, but not that hard. It's second nature for "late stage capitalism" thinkers. "I'll extend him the same consideration that he extended to the thousands of drivers who died when Ford covered up evidence of faulty brakes / the millions dying from climate change due to lobbying against emissions standards / the families who went hungry when layoffs happened while he pulled down $50M / year."
Disagree, with an insurance-related CEO one can immediately think "that guy's responsible for denying care to thousands of people, literally killing them", and that goes much farther to intuitively justify it than "the CEO of Ford ... didn't pay workers enough? Polluted?". Maybe from very committed anticapitalists it would, but the average person on reddit or twitter isn't one
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The left construes violence incredibly broadly and intentionally eliminates distinctions between different types of "violence". The mere existence of socioeconomic inequality is a form of violence/genocide to them. I imagine that if Bezos was killed the reaction would be even more positive just due to him being wealthier and infinitely better known.
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I suppose you're right that commies will be commies and you would see that sort of stuff, but I still think you'd see a lot less hate for the Ford CEO, and a lot less sympathy for the killer.
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Do you have examples of this? I was perusing Bluesky today, and none of the lefty accounts I follow on there have said anything about the Penny verdict.
This is the real story. Cases like this have been rallying points for activist progressives since Michael Brown, at least in the meme's current iteration. That they make very little hay of this and prefer not to discuss it at all is a potent sign that they feel on the backfoot in the culture war.
Given how much of the Neojacobin's success I attribute to their relentless will to just keep pushing and pushing and pushing, this is remarkable. Maybe the optimists were right and we have indeed reached peak woke. It won't mean anything of course as long as the institutional capture is not at least partially reversed.
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Same with me, Twitter search shows a few disparate BLM posts but no major interest from lefty accounts otherwise.
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Goes both ways, people celebrating the vigilante justice of the Penny verdict criticizing the assassination of the UHC CEO. (For the record, that is the correct, prosocial position.)
What's prosocial about profiting in death?
Health insurance is a fleeting necessity. It's been useful as structural opposition to American single-payer, but AGI approaches as does the panacea, and the industry will cease to exist by 2100. Healthcare as a whole has to put a price on human life, health insurance does too, it's the cold calculations of what's needed to stay solvent and I would only say remain attractive to investors where this latter is necessary to the former. Not when it's simple profiting, and that's what's happening here, profiting in death.
There is nothing prosocial about that behavior. Civilization does have a long relationship with profiting in death, but the avarice underlying that is iniquity's millstone we trudge ever against. Great men have been driven by their want for something to make the most lasting achievements, but it is grossly reductive to categorize it as greed. If that is a fair term, then it applies truly to precious few men who have ever lived. Better to know those traits are found commonly, and those great men were motivated by something ineffable and gestalt, rather than mundane greed.
So to suggest, in this not being prosocial, that civilization was not raised on the line of people being murdered randomly in the street, is to view it in a hypermodern and wrong lens. Thompson was not a random person, he was a modern nobleman who led an organization that profits in death and reaped finally a historically appropriate reward. That historic archetype did fear murder in the commons, so whoever among them today who do not fear being struck down, or who did not, they are or were living in that hypermodern lens, and that's not civilization, it's castration.
AGI approaches, the panacea approaches. Some here, I hope all, will live to see the extinction of health insurance, but regardless, by the end of the century it will be gone, as will the majority of occupations in healthcare, and civilization won't bat an eye. In 200 years it will be a morbid curiosity of 20th and 21st century life, and probably considered in studies as part of humanity hurdling the real problem of the lost jobs and purpose caused by AGI. But those are the things that matter, not "lost" profit opportunities, and not a nobleman dead in the street.
This guy worked for an insurance corporation that had like an 8-9% net margin. That’s not exploitative. That’s not greed on a grand scale. The US public consistently rejected single payer at the ballot box. They are frustrated with the current system, but cannot propose an alternative upon which most can agree.
And you ask, How magnanimous is Lockheed-Martin? I tell you yea, they profit one cent off the dollar when Hellfire smites an apostate's wedding.
I recognize the necessity of health insurance, I endorse it verbatim as part of the bulwark against single-payer. I understand they have to make hard decisions, because healthcare is triage, and when resource allocation literally is life-and-death, cold calculation is required. This makes it better, it does not make it good. While I'm at it I guess I also should clarify that I see no good in a man being murdered in the street. This may cause deaths downstream, I assume no one's taking that CEO role now without United providing private security, that cost, likely trivial as it is, may be pushed on the consumer, so a rise in rates or claims denied and both lead to reduced life outcomes and death. On the other hand if it causes them to approve claims they otherwise wouldn't, we might see life downstream of this, but I'm not saying let us do evil that good may result. It was murder, and his condemnation will be just. I only plea to history in what constitutes "prosocial" behavior: Thompson was a plebeian who made himself a patrician, and civilization continued all the same through those periods where noblemen who profited from commoners' deaths still feared earthly vengeance.
It doesn't matter if it's 8%, the misdeed is not meted off the margin.
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I think it's not exactly useful to gauge a company's level of "greed" by its profit margin, particularly these huge companies. They are not tight ships running as lean as possible: they inevitably swell with thousands of useless, well-paid employees. Not to mention well-paid executives. These firms love to tighten the screws on their clients in order to avoid cutting the fat.
And of course using this as your proxy will make out better-run companies as being "greedy", and poorly-run ones saints.
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Was it though? A sane account of the event is that the guy was out of his brain, drugs likely involved, and he may have had an OD related cardiac event while he was being restrained. Guy was even still alive when the cops got there, and they refuses to touch him to try to save his life because he was so filthy they were afraid they'd catch something. I'm not sure preventing someone from harming others with a fundamentally nonviolent hold (Neely wasn't bruised, broken or bleeding) and then handing them over to police who allow him to OD to death counts as "vigilante justice" in the same way Batman or The Punisher conjures up.
Vigilantism isn't just when someone ends up dead. Spiderman is still a vigilante when he leaves perps bound and webbed for the cops to find (fits the legal definitions of battery and false imprisonment).
Unless Penny set out that particular day to detain someone on the subway, he was not a vigilante. Defending yourself or others is not vigilantism, it is defence.
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Spiderman is a vigilante because he seeks out crime to stop. Penny is a guy who had an assault nearly happen in front of his eyes. He finds himself in this situation again I'll have questions. But we can't just expand the definition of vigilante to "Anybody who's not a police officer who makes a criminals life harder in any way, shape or form." And it's especially egregious in a self defense situation. Makes it sound like you are obligated to allow yourself to be victimized, which I know the tribal "restorative justice" types actually believe, but all the same, no.
Is blood vengeance vigilantism? It's not exactly seeking out crimes to stop, after all.
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I agree. I just wanted to say that vigilantism isn't just limited to extrajudicial killing.
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