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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Germany could have a rate of healthcare executives being murdered 4x as large as the US and given it's happened a single time in the US, a country >4x larger than Germany, we still wouldn't know it because it's only happened a single time over a very long time horizon.

Good point. I do think that there is a difference in public sympathy. Brian Thomson's killer gets more sympathy than the killers of politicians, for example - implying that health system executives in the US are less popular than politicians. If you are at a medical law conference where all the lawyers are in one hotel and all the hospital and insurance company executives are in the hotel next door, and you only have one bomb... In the US this is a difficult question. In most other countries, "don't set the bomb off" is the right answer.

I don't think this forum is a good place to make large long-term conditional bets, but I would bet at 4:1 odds conditional on a German healthcare executive being murdered by a stranger in the next 10 years, the killer does not get public sympathy from anyone as prominent as a backbench Bundestag member. 10:1 for an NHS senior manager in the UK.

In the US this is a difficult question. In most other countries, "don't set the bomb off" is the right answer.

I know a whole lot of Americans in real life and not on the internet and no this isn't a difficult question. If the hypo has 3 options, with 1 being "don't set the bomb off," the overwhelming vast majority of Americans wouldn't set the bomb off. America is not the curated social media posts Europeans see on the internet.

Again, this has happened a single time. Up until a couple weeks ago, this never happened. Healthcare execs and CEOs walked the streets of rough cities without security all the time.

the killer does not get public sympathy from anyone as prominent as a backbench Bundestag member

If you're defining "public sympathy" as saying "murder is wrong, but I understand why people are upset" and perhaps some quibbling about "prominence," I would be happy to take either of these bets, depending on the custodial conditions.

I've seen Bundestag members express public sympathy by lamenting the "rough childhoods" and "different cultures" of child rapists, so I would hope one would stoop so low as to express "public sympathy" by recognizing justified frustration. If this wouldn't qualify as "public sympathy," then I likely wouldn't take the bet as I don't have much experience with German or most European discourses.

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