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Apparently some stuff has been happening with Luigi Mangione lately; the front page of reddit is filled to the brim with pictures of the guy, and today I saw posts showing part of his arrest video (full video here, but does not contain the full arrest), and finding that he had a ticket for a bus to Pittsburgh on the night of the shooting, and also that the bullets in the bag were what made him a suspect for the CEO killing.
I am seeing some commonalities in all these threads: either hedged understanding/support for Mangione's actions, outright support, and extreme skepticism of the police along with claims that Mangione was framed or otherwise dastardly policing tricks were pulled on him. Police misconduct claims include that the backpack with gun and manifesto was planted on him and that they used an illegal method to find him, yet are claiming that an anonymous caller recognized him and tipped them off.
I find it interesting how pervasive these claims are. My own brother actually has told me that the backpack was likely planted on Mangione, (part of a wider array of left-wing conspiracy theories; he also was the first I'd seen state that the Trump assassination was one random attendee shooting another random attendee and accidentally wounding Trump, then later stating that it was the teleprompter glass that injured him, not the bullet itself). It's true, it's a little hard to believe that a murder suspect would keep such dangerous incriminating evidence on him in the face of a nationwide manhunt. However, I think a murderer might not make moves that someone might expect them to, and I also think that police officers have to be cautious in following the rules when it comes to the entire U.S. news media and also defense lawyers watching their every move carefully.
The thought strikes me that this is probably going to be
one of the most televised court affairs since Rittenhouse.apparently not televised since it's in federal court, but everything that comes out will be highly scrutinized, at least. This time, for the first time in many years, it seems that this is a more Left-aligned murder trial. I desperately hope he gets convicted, but anything could happen. There are many ways he could get acquitted, including plain-and-simple jury nullification, which is definitely a possibility on account of his popularity.This case, in particular, is one that really shows me the reality of the two screens effect.
In the communities online that I follow, I haven't seen much response to this case either way. CEOs do awful things, that CEO in particular was probably doing pretty normal stuff for his class, and freelance vigilantes murdering people doing legal things is crossing a general principle of liberalism that we mostly don't want to cross when it comes to people peacefully doing legal but arguably vile things. The same norm preventing this is the norm that prevents, say, the father of someone screwed up (by the father's lights) by trans ideology and surgery from going and vigilante-ing intellectuals like Judith Butler who are, in some diffuse but obvious sense, clearly culpable for the ideology and thus its downstream material effects. Lode bearing norm etc - this gets fully general in a hurry in a society with meaningful liberal pluralism, because it means everyone is tolerating other people who are (by their lights) behaving like moral monsters.
But I have interacted with a few adults recently - people who have FAANG jobs or similar and pensions and families and mortgages - who brought up the Mangione case unbidden, and their frame of it was very much, paraphrasing, "This is a canary in the coal mine. People are getting fed up. There's going to be more of this. CEOs better take note." And... I mean, it's not like I'm unsympathetic to critiques about health insurance companies. I get the frustration, absolutely. But the moral frame of it, and the flat certainty of who had culpability and agency, caught me off guard, I have to admit. There was a distinct undercurrent that the communities these people were in had already reached consensus that, legal or not, this kind of assassination was, functionally, licit. Or perhaps something like, there no longer appear to be political ways to address this problem, so extra-political solutions are on the table.
And in that sense, it very much does remind me (along a different moral axis) of the Rittenhouse case - where, again, it really did seem like the moral debate hinged on whether someone saw the protesting and rioting and destruction as a normal part of democratic participation, and thus only to be responded to by similarly legal democratic moves, or if you saw the situation as having devolved into an extra-legal situation where certain parties were behaving, essentially, as outside bounds of law, and thus other private citizens were morally compelled to defend their community by force.
I guess it brings to mind that old Arnold Kling model of politics, where conservative tend to have a strong barbarism-vs-civilization axis, and progressives tend to have a strong anti-hierarchy oppressor-oppressed axis.
Spending time on Tumblr as I do, the argument seems to be that we don't need "the norm" to prevent this father from "going and vigilante-ing," because the force of the state will do that. One side gets to attack the other for "behaving like moral monsters," and the state will mostly let them get away with it, and the other doesn't get to attack back, because the cops and courts will come down on them like a hammer.
To provide further example in a different context — the murder of Iryna Zarutska — someone made a comment about how, if our legal system keeps letting out people like Decarlos Brown Jr. to reoffend again and again, then eventually people will start resorting to vigilantism. The immediate reply was that, no, such people would be stopped immediately, because we've had laws put in place since the Civil Rights era to prevent such "vigilantism" — or, to call it by it's proper name, lynching — and the cops and courts all know how to properly deal with any such person, even if they decide this time to leave their pointy white hood at home.
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Everyone hates health insurance companies because their premiums keep going up and the system is a pain to deal with. It's not complicated.
All the way back in 2019 Cory Doctorow wrote a short story about people radicalized into doing violence against health insurance companies due to claim denials. In his story it was a bombing rather than assassination, but still.
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If I say "Hey, it looks pretty stormy out there - there's a very high chance of rain, so you should take an umbrella" I'm not actually saying "Rain is morally good and I support the rain falling on you and getting your clothes wet". People are simply pointing out that when you live in luxury and riches earned via rent-seeking in an industry which can just arbitrarily ruin people's lives due to an accident or illness they weren't at fault for, you're going to create more and more Luigis (or whoever the real killer was, if it turns out he is innocent). They're not endorsing extrapolitical assassinations as a means to effect change, they're identifying that a large underclass of people who have no ability to effect change politically while occasionally losing the lottery and getting their lives completely ruined by people like Brian Thompson (have you looked at what he actually did? That man was no angel!) is going to regularly produce more and more violence.
And when an Italian gentleman with a crooked nose says "nice business you've got here; it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it," he's just paying your shop a complement, and then making a true observation about an entirely hypothetical situation.
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It is true that one can say "this is a canary in the coal mine, CEOs take note" in a manner where they are not endorsing murder, just warning that it's likely to happen if things continue as they are. But in my experience, most people who say such things about the United CEO's murder are absolutely tacitly endorsing it. Perhaps not all, but it's enough to make one leery of anyone else who shares such a sentiment.
I'd like to point out that this is the exact same argument feminists use when they say that any advice like "Don't get drunk in a skimpy outfit and hang around lots of desperate horny men" is actually blaming the victim and morally wrong. That said, my personal position (not that I can speak for the people you're referring to) isn't so much "more health insurance ceos need to be gunned down in the streets" as it is "these health insurance ceos need to be reigned in so they aren't causing so much damage to society". If a fentanyl dealer gets killed because he sold a bad batch of drugs that killed a bunch of his clients, I'm not going to pretend that I'm terribly upset when someone gets revenge on him. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes - and when your industry performs as awfully as the US healthcare insurance industry does, profiting on the back of destroying lives and denying people medically necessary procedures, you're going to be buying a lot of tickets for the Luigi lottery. Sure, most of the victims will just die or suffer in silence, but all it takes is for the right person to get screwed over and something like this will happen again. The right thing to do would be for the government to crack down on these people and implement a much better healthcare system, but seeing as how that isn't happening anytime soon we're just going to get more and more cases like Brian Thompson as the years go on.
Insurance companies, in general, tend to make more money when they don't have to pay out. They often make the worst day of your life even harder by looking for any excuse to not pay you. I got rear-ended at a stoplight a while ago; I took a picture of the car that hit me, including their license plate, as they sped away. When submitting the claim, I included the license plate number, the photo, and described the person driving the car as a "man between ages 20 - 50 with dark hair". My claim was denied because the license plate I reported belonged to a 70s model car (the car in the photo was obviously an older model, so definitely matched) registered to a man in his 30s. Because it was a government monopoly (thanks, ICBC), I couldn't do anything about it, and had to pay the repair costs out of pocket. This was obviously infuriating, and the start of my character arc towards hating any and all governments.
With something like healthcare in the US, where the costs range from "all the money you'd make in a month" all the way up to "all the money you'd make in a lifetime", dealing with individuals who are determined to nickle and dime you over things your physician said you'd need in order to not be dead is something that boils the blood; like, it's more surprising to me that someone didn't do something sooner. I've also heard that Brian Thompson/UnitedHealthcare was particularly stingy; that may or may not be true, but it's probably a bit of a factor.
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Feminists are saying that it is possible to say such things sincerely but most people who say them in real life aren't? I find this unlikely as a feminist position.
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But they're not. US healthcare is overpriced, but the money is flowing to doctors and hospitals, not to the insurance industry, whose profits are small. The insurance industry are just the middle man, paid to redirect the customers' ire from those lovely doctors and nurses.
Although your misunderstanding does really highlight how bad the 'randomly execute people I assume are responsible for my problems' method of political activism is.
This is a more complicated question than it sounds.
It's true health insurance companies have very thin margins: almost always <5%. And it's even true that the ratio of premiums paid out to revenue collected (the 'loss ratio') is rather high across the board: >80%. ...But the reason it's strictly >80% is that that's the legally mandated minimum per the ACA. If they fall below that number, they have to issue rebates to customers to meet it.
On the face of it this sounds like a good thing, right? I've argued in the past that corporations aren't always eager in practice to maximize profit (principal-agent issues where employees and not owners are making most of the decisions), but they largely do try to maximize their own size. The law limits administrative bloat!
Except... it doesn't. It limits bloat to a percentage of payouts. If they negotiate well and push prices down, they reduce their profit/operating budget! Unless it's compensated by more custom, of course; the normal competitive pressures do still exist. But this rule absolutely acts against that pressure.
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law. Without this requirement, loss ratio is a good measure of efficiency; since a company will always try to minimize their expenses (the ones that involve sending checks to other businesses and don't benefit any employees, anyway), high loss ratios just mean there's adequate competitive pressure to keep them lean. But now? Who can say? The number is going to be >80% no matter how much or little competitive pressure they're under. If competition is insufficient, they'll just throw money at doctors and hospitals, because that's the only way they're allowed to raise profit/operating budget (via higher premiums). And if they were, it would exactly like you're describing.
But are they? I'm really not sure. Loss ratios were often lower before the ACA (sometimes as low as 60%), but a lot has changed about the healthcare market since 2011. Health costs are going up everywhere, not just the US. It's a murky subject and I don't think there are many easy answers to be found.
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I don't see any numbers in that linked post, or in the posts linked from that, that compare hospital profit and insurance industry profit.
And even some of the links from that post blame the problems on the insurers when you seem to think they don't.
The bloat is not necessarily "profit". For instance, when insurance companies and hospitals hire armies of bureaucrats to argue over the claims, all those bureaucrats get paid and none of that is "profit" to either side.
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Er... what? I'm not making any argument of the sort, simply observing that most any time I see someone expressing the "that's to be expected" point of view it's because they are actually happy the guy was murdered. I'm not sure how you get from there to some kind of thing about victim blaming.
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There's a slippery slope going from "I'm warning you about this bad thing and you aren't listening" via "Why are you still not listening? Honestly when it happens the I-told-you-so moment will feel good" to "I want this bad thing to happen to you".
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Boogaloo rhetoric is bad, and I think PMC Blue Tribers engaging in it may be a new low, but it is very LARPy. If everyone is thinking "I'm mad as hell, but I'm too pro-social to raise the black flag and start slitting throats myself. There are other people like me are just as angry and not as restrained so I'm hopefully anticipating things going down when someone else does." then nothing goes down, or worst-case you get a bunch of disorganised pseudo-political violence by people who aren't quite right in the head, which is what we are seeing in the US now.
I don't know why 2020's America, a society which produces mass material prosperity on a grander scale than any other in human history, is full of people (on both sides of the aisle) claiming that they are suffering to the point where raising the black flag and starting slitting throats would be an understandable response. But empirically 2020's America is not full of people who are actually suffering to the point where raising the black flag and starting slitting throats is a likely response.
But given that all the cool kids online are raising metaphorical black flags in their mothers' basements, it doesn't surprise me that people who should know better are talking like this. And given the taboo against assassinating elected politicians, health insurance CEOs are the closest thing to an acceptable target in places where the high-status politics is pro-establishment left.
I don't think this is particularly a partisan issue - online pro-2nd amendment culture definitely includes sharing wish-fulfillment fantasies about how one more Blue outrage will finally drive other Reds (but definitely not the poaster) to take back the country by force of arms. The one time I went shooting IRL with American 2nd amendment activists, everyone spent the drive to and from the range talking smack about shooting Democrats, but reverted to talking like grownups as soon as their hand was anywhere near an actual gun. I particularly remember ESR's post about armed anti-lockdown protests in Michigan because he has written a lot about healthy gun culture and is definitely smart enough to know better than to engage in Boogaloo fantasies.
I'm currently watching the ken Burns documentary about the revolutionary war. The 13 American colonies were a relatively prosperous place, and the absolute value of the taxation they were facing was relatively minimal to what British citizens were paying, and what most Americans would have to pay after the war ended.
In 1773 they could be described as loyal subjects of the crown. They thought the differences and problems they were having with England were reconcilable. Many thought the King would help by supporting their cause in parliament. Three years later they are declaring independence, calling the king a tyrant, and fighting a hot war.
It gives you a sense that things can kick off real fast. And I think people know this in their gut as well. The time to signal your loyalty is not once things have started kicking off, that is way too late. You need to let people know where you are beforehand.
There is a difference between prepping for a bad situation and wishing it to actually happen though. Anyone with two brains cells to rub together should know that a revolution or civil war in the US at this time would be completely awful, so they talk a big game just in case, but no one tries to make it come about.
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Everything is cheaper and easier to access now. Except food. And housing. And cars. And gas. At least electronic gewgaws are cheaper... oh wait that’s over now.
Is food, excepting beef, really more expensive in real terms? Or do you mean like eating out?
Processed food(here used broadly to include things like bread as well as sodas and lean cuisine) and beef are a majority of most Americans' grocery bills, and those things are much more expensive regardless of the cost of staples like potatoes and milk.
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I think there is certainly an element of "people's domestic skills and reflexes have atrophied to the point that they can't cook for themselves" (and despite whatever the spreadsheets say, the cost of eating out decently seems to have about doubled in real terms in the past 10-15 years) + blue cultural norms raising expectations (eating similar slop every day no longer registers as a fulfilled life, and who has time and money to master making foods from a dozen world cultures?), but you also have to consider complex factors making cooking for yourself less viable: small temporary habitations and frequent moving (-> can't accumulate equipment), jobs with high time demands and irregular hours, and delays in formation+overall decline of stable pair relationships reducing the opportunity for division of labour (one cooking for two).
since I started working, I stopped cooking on the stove. My heater is having issues, so I just, 5min ago, turned on the burners to try and add heat. Should have vacuumed the dust out first. Posting this face-down in the floor on the opposite end of the building.
I'd rather min-max food than obsess over concepts like variety and 3 meals a day of specific categories. So when I'm writing the grocery list, it's peanut butter, tortillas, rice and produce. And nuts, because we can't finish a thing without something overpriced making it in :( .
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COULD IT BE that there are other forms of suffering than lack of excessive material prosperity?
Have you tried finding a spouse, raising a family, or buying a home lately? Have you tried finding a good career? Particularly if you're young enough to be competing with AI for entry-level positions? Have you tried finding a healthy community to be a part of?
By the grace of God I have succeeded in all these categories. But I can see the writing on the wall and now I'm terrified about the world in which my children are growing up.
Lots of people seem to be settling into pod life. Thin gray walls, netflix, delivery slop, no (or exclusively poor) romantic relationships, sterile sex only, if any. They do not know their neighbors. The prospect of ever having property or children -- especially multiple children -- recedes farther into the realm of fantasy every day. There is no unifying identity; no shared values. Just alienated fragments of what used to be a collective human organism, dying in infantilized isolation. More and more turn to substance abuse just to feel okay for a little while. Others turn to increasingly-radical political movements which blame the pain and horror of modernity on the other side. This is about to get much, much worse.
Man does not live by bread alone.
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I think this is because 2020s America is even better at showing everyone all the people just a little bit better off than you (and then cherry picking only their best moments so it looks like with all that material prosperity you're actually falling further and further behind).
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Liberals get the bullet, too! "I'm one of the good bourgeois" has never saved anyone, and they should perhaps consider the fact that they are much more like the CEO getting shot than they are to the usual suspects that get shot without too much news coverage.
Everyone calling to "kill the rich" or "eat the rich" conveniently defines "the rich" as everyone in the income percentile immediately above theirs, or higher.
That's perfectly natural, once you accept "eat the ____" as a goal. Anyone richer than you is likely to have higher nutritional value than someone poorer than you (not an endorsement of cannibalism). This particular scenario seems more like a complete lack of self-awareness. Something like "I'm a better than average driver," or "advertising doesn't work on me".
Given the inverse correlation between socio-economic status and BMI, I'm not sure if this is true.
Hah, good point. On the other hand, leaner meat is usually more expensive.
In the current American market, yes, but fattened meat has often been more expensive in history.
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Absolutely. I was more caught off guard that people who really ought to know better (or, well, really need to know better) had latched on to these arguments and were repeating them. Historically, these were the kinds of people who occupied the middle or upper middle classes who served as a bulwark against radicalism, which is obviously exactly where their interests lie. I think it mostly made me think that these people were marinating in subreddit forums (which I know they frequent) and were thus internalizing a certain point of view as being normal and consensus that was really, at least by my lights, quite radical.
Lenin, Trotsky, Castro and Robespierre were all middle class university graduates that could have had pretty decent careers in the square world if they had wanted to. Same with Mao, although he was more from landowning small gentry than the university set. Stalin was born in the lower class but was able to get into seminary and probably could have had a pretty comfortable middle class life too.
Che Guevara was a medical student when he embarked on his famous motorcycle journey (in fact, the trip is what radicalized him), and completed his degree before he got involved with communist guerillas. He could have totally led the easy life of a doctor in Argentina, but he didn't.
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I thought the argument that I had generally seen (not sure if it's true) is that the ranks of revolutionaries, especially in late 19th century Russia, were often occupied by the children of the middle class and upper middle class bourgeoisie (especially lawyers, doctors, and bankers) who had been bred for success but weren't seeing it, or had a sense of their opportunities drying up. Even now, the most actually radically inclined people I know, generally, are grad students who have no actual career prospects in universities - their education and self-regard is highly unbalanced with their actual economic prospects.
I was thinking more of their parents - the actual middle and upper middle class that had launched successfully, had valuable credentials and professional experience, owned meaningful property... basically the layer of society that has skin in the game to lose if significant disruption happened. I'm almost positive Aristotle talks about this, so the idea isn't new.
Only 14 percent of Zoomer college grads actually have a job that requires a college diploma.
The WSJ gives a number of 52% for "jobs that don’t make use of their skills or credentials"
https://archive.is/ZZ6le
This includes some younger Millennials as well.
Either way, that’s more than enough to drive radicalization.
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Maybe higher education was only meant for the upper class after all. Warrior poets with no fiefdom to take care of (and no peasant revolts to avoid) seem to be hell-bent on reshaping the entire world instead, based on your presented examples.
Well, the whole reason for the initial bourgeois revolutions in England, America and France was that the ruling aristocracy had devolved from warrior poets into a bunch of incompetent inbred pajama boys.
Yes, so catereng to them by expanding higher education was mistake.
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FAANG forums may as well be /r/politics as well - it's the water they swim in. See: Damore, Eich, Donglegate, etc.
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Rittenhouse didn't shoot anyone because they were rioting.
Well sure - but if I remember correctly, I think the progressive argument was something like "just because they were rioting in a community he cared about, that didn't give him any justification for being there and being armed, which was obviously responsible for the provocation and escalation". Something like that. I mean, this was the specific tangled set of arguments that tore the sub-reddit apart for a time and led to that theSchism breakaway subreddit, right? The argument about the frame of the argument is the real argument, on some level. I'm not a progressive, so I'm not going to do the best job of steel-manning their argument here, but I remember people at the time making them.
Lest we forget the argument that he crossed state lines with a firearm! Ignoring the fact that the guy he shot did the same while being a prohibited person.
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