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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2963 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 14, 2025

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I don't really understand why joker-types on the left profess love for Luigi Mangione the health care CEO assassin but are trying to dodge any association with Tyler Robinson the Charlie Kirk assassin?

I'm not really trying to adjudicate what Tyler's beliefs are (or Luigi's for that matter, he was a trad conservative in some ways), just... they both did political assassinations that leftist joker-types are in favor of. Why the selective embracing/rebuking?

Is it because Luigi's cute and has six pack abs? Is it because Luigi killed at the end of Biden's term while Tyler killed after Trump demonstrated a more fierce commitment to law and order?

Why the selective embracing/rebuking?

Cost/benefit. You can sell that healthcare CEO is a supervillain that deserves death, and some normies could buy it, because US healthcare system sucks, and a lot of people hate it. Selling that the guy whose only thing was to debate anybody who would talk to him was a supervillain is much harder.

But here shouldn't the ire also be directed at those who make and enforce the laws? It seems we have a legislature and those who enforce the laws who allow Insurance CEOs to behave to the detriment of society. If we had better laws or enforcement I could imagine people not being as mad at their health insurance. Anger at CEOs maximizing profits seems akin to anger at dogs barking.

There's a wide gap between "illegal" and "detrimental to the society", and it is not closeable in any reasonably organized society that allows any freedoms to its members. You have conflicting interests here - the consumers of healthcare want to have maximum care for minimum cost, the providers have limited resources which will never be enough to provide it, and the middlemen want to extract profits. There's not really an optimal arrangement that you could legislate. Even if you make a totalitarian dictatorship fully dedicated to regulating and distributing healthcare, you still will have people who think they don't get enough care, and some of them will blame the providers for it. Sure, you could legislate against some of the toxic behaviors, but you'd get a set of others in response, and another set of people being mad about it. US is not in a great spot here, for various reasons, but there will always be something to complain about.

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