Luigi Mangione's account has been renamed on Stack Overflow
substack.evancarroll.com
substack.evancarroll.com
But as a moderator, what the company is doing here is ridiculous and a seemingly flagrant abuse of license. If you take contributions under CC-BY-SA, you damned-well keep the attribution unless the contributor wants to be disassociated from it. If you don't want to be associated with a contributor, delete the account, and the content.
You can't pick and choose.
> You can't pick and choose.
Yes you can, when your goal is to stir the pot.
(One reason is part of the title of this post)
And pray Jon Skeet stays on the straight and narrow.
They're in the same position as Reddit: they have a bunch of cats to herd whose labor they depend on (not enviable) but every once in a while they do something capricious and arbitrary as a company and make everyone angry.
Delete - yes, if it's not the accepted answer or locked. But deleting highly-upvoted answers is generally discouraged.
Edit - Probably not. Editing to correct it might be possible if it's not locked but editing to add such a disclaimer would be problematic.
The best course of action would be to request disassociation, so that it's not attributed to them any more.
I've made drastic edits in the past... but the goal was always to capture the intent of the writer. From your anger it sounds like someone, a mod, went way beyond that?
Right. Editing a message should be for stuff like typos, markup, bugs in example code, etc.
If it's against the rules, like a meaning change rather than a correction, you can report it. I don't see how simply leaving your name next to it and leaving the site helps anyone nor lets the person who did it even know they made a mistake (without link, from experience moderating the edit queue I can only assume good faith by default since the overwhelming majority of the edits I reject are made for understandable reasons; one of my reject reasons is conflicting with the author's intent btw, and there's no qualification about the author needing to be correct)
Edit: I'm not sure this needs a disclaimer at all since I'm a normal user but, to be clear, I have no affiliation with Stackexchange. I posted answers mainly on the IT security site and one of them blew up the karma points, giving me access to some of the moderation queues on that specific site. I was always annoyed how slow these things are handled so I started looking at those queues on occasion, and that's basically all moderation I've ever done. No special instructions from, communications with, or particular love for the company that operates the site. I just feel that the parent comment misconstrues how the software works if it wasn't actually the company that made the edit in a hidden way (I only know of that happening for things like switching http to https)
The idea is supposed to be that you've been on the site long enough to learn what a valid edit is by the time you get access to those queues, and it's tested by having already-handled edits mixed in to your queue. IIRC if you get it wrong it tells you what you should have done.
One problem is that it's often invisible and inscrutable.
I've made comments on youtube that have not shown up. I know I've heard Louis Rossmann complaining about this as well.
At the time, it felt like there was a technical problem with the site not accepting my comment. But after reading your comment, in hindsight it absolutely feels like I was being AI-moderated.
Had I known, I would be more inclined to decide whether or not I want to further engage with a site that silently deletes my posts.
The digital bill of rights should definitely include some kind of mandatory feedback on why posts were moderated, ESPECIALLY if it was done using AI.
So let's put the drama behind us.
Besides SO viewership drops like a stone since LLMs became a thing. Soon it'll be an open-air museum rather than a staple.
From the attached .csv
Year Month NumQuestions
2025 1 2967
2024 12 25566
2024 11 26832
2024 10 30428
2024 9 32376
2024 8 36010
2024 7 42219
...
2017 12 142102
2017 11 165479
2017 10 166236
2017 9 158760
2017 8 173592
2017 7 175909
...
2009 12 36729
2009 11 37204
2009 10 34009
2009 9 28969
2009 8 28104
2009 7 27731Perhaps you can if the licensor is incarcerated and unwilling to enforce the license.
The criminal justice system already wields the responsibility of punishing criminals. Let the convicts go through due process and do their time. The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.
Another possibility is that being a good or bad are not inherent properties of people -- but only properties of actions. Bojack Horseman explains it well.
> That's the thing. I don't think I believe in deep down. I kinda think that all you are is just the things that you do.
and
> There's no such thing as "bad guys" or "good guys." We're all just...guys, who do good stuff sometimes and bad stuff sometimes. And all we can do is try to do less bad stuff and more good stuff [...]
Fred Rogers was unquestionably a good guy. He still made mistakes, and was very upfront about this. He made mistakes from the bottom of his heart trying to do the right thing but not always having the information (or patience to gather and process) to make better decisions, but he absolutely always made decisions trying to, even when advancing his own interests, take others into account.
Unfortunately, there are people who make decisions always with the intent to hurt others. Many of the actions that they take are individually neutral or good. It's hard to get anything done if you don't do some cooperation in society. It's quite probable that even for the most awful people, if you count unweighted they've taken more good actions than bad - but the magnitude of their evil is much higher.
Most people are neither. Most people are stupid and selfish but trying not to do too much bad. Bojack gets this, but somewhat misses the other implication - that being good and bad is learned and practiced, and that you should learn from and practice the ways people who are Good at being Good people,
"I built bridges for 20 years and no one ever called me Joe the bridge builder, and I paved roads for 20 years and no one ever called me Joe the road paver. But I fucked one goat..."
Human judgement can be fickle and outright vain at times. If there's an idea of outright good or evil, I don't trust any human (let alone society) to cast a proper judgement as such.
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
It's "deep down" but not some unchanging, inherent aspect of "you". You just need more work to tackle it, and probably with help, not alone.
But yes, "good" it "bad" absolutely doesn't work when evaluating a single individual life.
https://boingboing.net/2023/06/10/noted-mathematician-ted-ka...
Why should the rest of society be forced to continue associating with someone?
That sounds abstract, but such concepts already exist. If you have a restaurant, you are allowed to refuse to serve someone who happens to be a member of a race R, but you are not allowed to refuse someone _because_ they are a member of race R.
This sounds like you forcing them to adopt your views.
But this does break the CC license by unattributing content but not deleting it, so that's bad.
Well that's just a violation of the license they attribute posts to
>Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
That's not even a moral argument. They just broke the contract they signed up to.
Do you feel that you are being forced to post here, or read comments and responses from other humans?
An entirely voluntary social contract. I'm not required to read a specific person's posts and can chose not to based on new information I'm told about them.
The author has licensed his posts to Stack Exchange under CC-BY-SA, which requires attribution.
By removing that attribution StackExchange has commited copyright infringement, which is punishable with jailtime (as seen in the Kim Dotcom case).
Well said.
When people are facing jail time, they are usually told to expect to be brutalized in prison by the other prisoners and guards.
Putting additional punishment in the form of abuse (physical, mental and sexual) and then putting the onus of that additional punishment on a vulnerable population is a recipe for disaster.
Prison is the punishment, anything on top of that is a crime and a lot of people turn short sentences into life by targeting other prisoners with certain crimes.
This culture of retribution runs deep.
How horrific. I don't understand why the people of the US accept this.
Not only is that sort of thing much less prevalent in prisons than media would have you believe, media still perpetuates this stereotype, just as it perpetuates the "all gay men are fruity heyyyyyy" stereotype that I also loathe. But the extract media and popular opinion is; rape jokes about men are funny, men being assaulted or kicked in the balls is funny, men dying on screen is just a bad guy or a henchman but a woman dying on screen is either not done, camera cut away or a huge plot point with emphasis on how _evil_ the victim is for doing such a thing.
Men are the victims are of the majority of crime, however because of sexism many people (including women) are happy to lump men in all together with each other. People don't care if the victim is a man, because the criminal is a man, too. And that's like...the same! :O
That is the privilege of corporations....
Not so Fun fact: a second coworker, from the same company, different crime, has also been convicted and is serving 14 years. (Victim died when police shot the wrong person). His stack overflow account is still up.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/968075/gareth-pursehouse
Luigi, in the Mario bro's sense, goes through a lot of pipes. Perhaps I'll call it LuigiFS.
You dont have to use passive language like our media.
ReiserFS retain its name when Hans Reiser is convinced of murder.
There is no reason to remove one's name or close their account when they are convicted of a crime.
Be honest, the coverage of your ex co-worker's crime was not comparable to Mangione's murder, was it?
I bet companies are getting uncomfortable with just how many of their users are supportive of murder, and how much it's going to increase TOS violations for incitement to violence. Do you think advertisers want their products next to threads fawning over a murderer and saying more need to be shot?
Sounds like society's problem, not SO.
Put it another way, how many people would be checking on Luigi's account On SO in this way without this streisand effect it caused by banning the feww dozen users up voting him? How many people before this even knew Luigi had a SO account? How many of his posts talk about justifying murder?
If denying "fame" was SO's goal, they failed tremendously.
> Do you think advertisers want their products next to threads fawning over a murderer and saying more need to be shot?
Find those threads before we start worrying what may happen retroactively. Luigi had a manifesto, but it's not like he pasted it all over the internet as some sort of deliberate plan to gain social media clout.
There are quite a few people legitimately named Adolf Hitler. We don't ban them for their assossiation to a more famous Adolf.
When Stack Overflow starts losing advertisers because they don't want their products appearing next to posts calling for CEOs to be murdered, it becomes their problem too.
You can barely answer questions correctly without getting them removed unless you're high rep. You think an off topic response will last more than 2 minutes?
While I personally disagree with copyright on principle, I'm not sure if you've fully considered the ramifications of your argument.
10 man-hours of work, at minimum wage, is about the price of a video game right now.
Your argument would mean piracy of video games is pretty much always right
The posters to SO give copyright to the company as per the TOS. No copyright violation is happening.
> You agree that any and all content, including without limitation any and all text, graphics, logos, tools, photographs, images, illustrations, software or source code, audio and video, animations, and product feedback (collectively, “Content”) that you provide to the public Network (collectively, “Subscriber Content”), is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive basis pursuant to Creative Commons licensing terms (CC BY-SA 4.0)
That requires named attribution, which SO violated, voiding the license.
Stack Overflow failed to enunciate their own rules (or - let's be honest - imagined new rules after the fact), blamed you for breaking non-existent rules, sent you an obviously mostly copy/paste suspension notice (the bit about secondary accounts seems bizarre and non sequitur), and gas-lit you with the imaginary claim that you cannot vote on a post you already voted on which for whatever reason hadn't been logged.
FWIW also a high-rep SO user and had to create a burner account in case there's retribution. We shouldn't have to hide ourselves just to talk sanely.
SO is right to try to protect the bounty system from unintended uses, but not to make rules up on the fly and enforce them heavy-handedly and retrospectively, suspending someone for breaking non-existent rules.
Stack Overflow should make rules for bounties and make them crystal clear and unsuspend you. Can they admit they're wrong - will they do this? Of course not.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty#:~:text=Users%20may%20....
I am aware of vote fraud and it's ok that SO warns/suspends if one engages in it. In this case it arguably does. However it needs to be a proportionate response to the action, and not done as retaliation.
I'm also a fairly high reputation SO contributor (in current rankings top 150).
* I asked a question about a moderation policy (are we allowed to delete comments? here are two conflicting sources. Which one is correct?)
* A moderator requested an edit in a comment, then shortly after, deleted it due to not having that edit.
* Since there's no way to edit a deleted question, I posted it again with the edit.
I think the ban was actually for questioning SE's inconsistency. Like all dictatorships, they punish you for not obeying in advance.
StackOverflow has been sending that exact email ("the motivation for doing so needs to be anchored in the merits of the post, not the person who wrote it") for at least nine years. It's not a new policy.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/314073/moderator-in...
When should I not vote up?
Posts should be voted on based on the content in the post rather than the person who wrote it. Voting for specific people, whether you know them or not, can negatively impact our ranking system. Here are some examples of common cases that should be avoided:
- Repeatedly upvoting several of a user's posts to say "thanks" for one great answer.
- Repeatedly upvoting posts created by people you know because you know them – often friends, family, or coworkers.
- Targeting a specific user with votes for any other reason.
-----
The rules around abuse of the voting system are by necessity somewhat fuzzy, you can't enumerate all the possible cases clearly. And bounties are even more fuzzy as they can be similarily abused, but users still have a lot of freedom in deciding how to use them.
Usually misuse of bounties would likely just result in the mods warning the user and undoing the bounties, exactly because this is an area where the rules are not necessarily clear to users and the boundaries are somewhat fuzzy. But Evan Carroll certainly knows how the system works and is a user with a very extensive history on SO. Suspensions and especially suspension lengths are heavily influenced by previous behaviour. A year-long suspension means this is at least the third suspension for that user according to the guidelines given to mods for suspension lengths.
Edit: Just adding so no one reads anything into my post, I have not read any of the SO posts in question and this was more of a question to trigger thought about what appears to be a poorly reasoned application of a policy.
This probably got noticed because it set off some automatic warning that caused someone to look into it.
Three 500 rep bounties awarded to a single user in two minutes to answers that were from 2015 is a bit unusual. Users can only offer 3 bounties at a time and the maximum value for each is 500 rep.
The reputation history for the account can be seen here - https://stackoverflow.com/users/4616250/user4616250?tab=repu...
Opening the December 10th and 11th sections shows 1590 reputation was removed - that's 1500 for bounties and 9 upvotes, some on the same posts. Three of the votes on the 10th were within the same minute with one two minutes later - that's not much time to actually judge the quality of the posts.
Additionally, just reading the answers, they don't seem to be particularly good answers - certainly not worthy of huge bounties.
Considering the age of the posts (2015), quality of the answers (low), and the rapidity of voting (high)... well...
I don't think you have anything to worry about.
What I find glossed over is that the article quotes Stackexchange saying that the author would have gotten the same demotion anyway, just that now someone opened their profile and was like "oh hey an unhandled flag, wonder what that's about" and looked into it. The system being quick for once doesn't make it retribution in my mind, which is the conclusion they draw. If they'd say "probably the punishment was worse because of the context at that point", I could have followed the logic because it doesn't say anywhere how they got to 1 year demotion (it's not a ban, another exaggeration afaik: they can use the site like anyone else just without reputation/karma privileges, is what it says at least), which seems like a lot for what they did, but that's not the argument made
Somebody publishes their thoughts contributing to how the world should be in their view on the internet. We all do that, me here.
They are then accused and arrested for a horrible crime. Murder, for example. This garners their thoughts a great deal more attention than they would otherwise get as now they are (in)famous.
No removal of publication until conviction.
Is there now an incentive to advertise your views by committing crime to attract as much attention as possible? Easiest way is to make it as horrific as possible.
I am thinking extremist racists will take those rules. More than one of them. More than once.
So now we're somewhere pretty uncomfortable. I think it wrong to suppress Osama Bin Laden's screeds recently removed from the Guardian online, however much I loathe him and everything he stood for. So what about some neo-nazi mass murderer? Or the copycat? Or the following ten? Is that really so hypothetical that we can't see a body count with it? Is this alarm-ism? I hope so, I genuinely do and have no hidden motive here.
I'm not buying that this situation has easy policy nor that whatever is done results in something we are going to be fully comfortable with.
One outcome may be very much worse for many more people than another, so thinking it through fully is really needed. Something I am yet to make much more than this vague start.
Online publishing policy seems like a relevant framing.
"No" is a reasonable response if you can support it.
Luigi Mangione's comments on stack overflow don't even register in terms of violence caused.
These kinds of removals are simply attempts at information control by the elite, and -- assuming you're not part of the 1% -- you're playing straight into their hand.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." - Karl Marx
This is completely and totally true.
Totally irrelevant in terms of what policy /should/ be and one of the reasons to move it away from one example because what fits one example may not be generally applicable. I have not and do not stick up for S.O.
Marx, yeah nah I don't think he's helpful here or indeed anywhere.
You don't have to be a communist to realize that Marx was instrumental in giving us the labor movement, including unions which most people who haven't been indoctrinated over generations with red scare tactics will realize where good things and important mechanisms against overreach by the powerful.
Obviously, less people's behavior will be changed if there are no consequences to doing the illegal thing.
Gun control implies the need for enforcement, because you need to act on something in some way to control it. A piece of paper with some words on it (which is what an unenforced law is) can't act on people by itself.
Others are responsible for their own actions. Don't impose information control on me because others do stupid shit.
Indeed. That's only to justify blatant censorship. Reading books doesn't cause people to kill other people. If someone kills someone after reading a book, that person already had huge issues and was on the edge to kill already, and instead of a addressing the issue by investing more in helping those with mental illnesses, we take the dumb cheap and easy way out of blaming books, video games, forums, incels, toxic masculinity, etc.
Everyone is quick to blame incels but nobody asks why do men become incels in the first place and how to prevent that by addressing the causes and not the effects.
The truth is our current society has a disproportionate lack of safety nets and help available to males and male issues, when compared to females, hence why there's 10x the rate of suicides and homelessness for males vs females, and is also one of the reasons why men have statistically been going more conservative and right wing in the last decade or so. Yet nobody talks about this or wants to do anything to address this and just resorts to shaming men who draw attention to this as incels and "far right" and calls it a day.
When society takes away young men's communities (previously it was the church) and purpose in life, their prospect of building a family, good job (men used to be able to support a family by bolting bumpers to Fords in a factory) and owning a home, and demonize them for the sins of their fathers (patriarchy and male Privilege) while depriving them of any help, it's no surprise they become radicalized against the society that hates them and that void gets filled by manosphere bros who tell them it's the fault of the Rothschilds and that all women are hoes.
Changing healthcare and the culture is necessary. Because healthcare is only effective when men are willing to accept it, not cling to harmful ideas like "only the weak take meds / do therapy / cry / talk about their feelings / avoid violence".
But it's also like trying to stop shit rolling down hill. Ultimately we need to stop the source of the problems and limit the damage of those that slip through the cracks. And the manosphere and machismo culture are part of the problem, not innocent symptoms.
Said another way, the problem is multi-faceted and there is no silver bullet.
If you demonize all current generation men in such a reductionist radical fashion, because of a handful of bad apples of men from previous generations, why are you surprised men now become radicalized against women and against society demonizing them? If someone would hate you and discriminante you based on an immutable characteristic like gender, wouldn't you be upset and vocal about it and look to vote for someone who promises to be on your side? How can we punish a group of people today for the original sin?
>Because healthcare is only effective when men are willing to accept it
Most men aren't in the luxurious position to be able to refuse care that's not even offered to them in the first place. Hence the 10x more homelessness and suicide than women. If you're a woman in risk of unemployment, homelessness or suicide, you have dozens of decent options of help available for you both public and private. If you're a man in the same situation, you have much fewer and of lower quality options or even none at all, or worse, a lot of "help" available for men is just telling them how they're priviledged and they need to shut up and man up and stop bitching about it.
You can't tell me with a straight face there is no gender discrimination and anti-male bias here.
>And the manosphere and machismo culture are part of the problem, not innocent symptoms.
No. The core problem is societal anti male bias and discrimination which you pointed out yourself in the first phrase. The manosphere is not the cause, it's the release valve of the pent up frustrations of an entire generation.
Since when do women have more job opportunities than men? Certainly not true in most of the US and certainly not for the same pay.
Society isn't anti-men. Society very clearly fears men, as both males and females should. Because men are -- as a group -- far more dangerous than females. There are many societal controls to counter act that danger. Until the rich no longer exploit the weak, and leave them powerless and without adequate healthcare, AND male culture becomes more pro-social and willing to accept help, things won't improve.
It's not about raw absolute numbers but DEI policies in companies and some gov jobs, have made plenty of good white collar jobs restricted to only women or giving priority to female candidates at the expense of competence, which is legally speaking just gender discriminations with a PR spin on top. You are not allowed by law to discriminate job candidates by immutable characteristics like gender.
>Because men are -- as a group-- far more dangerous than females
Treating men, and individuals generally, as a group based on statistics is just discrimination legally speaking. Imagine saying that society should fear black people because they are more dangerous because statistically speaking they're more likely commit more crimes than whites. That's the same kind of discrimination. Are you ok with this?
>Until the rich no longer exploit the weak
What does this have to do with the life of average men? 99,99% of men individually, are not rich and powerful enough to cause oppressions at societal level. Lots of global oppression is happening due to capitalist corporate greed which are a collective hive mind, at which many women are also at the helm on boards and help enable this oppression. It has nothing to do with gender.
>AND male culture becomes more pro-social and willing to accept help
Please share what help are men getting and refusing. You're creating this narrative around "male culture this" and "male culture that" not backed by any facts.
Let’s take this to an extreme. Is there any point at which such discrimination becomes acceptable?
Hypothetically, if it was known that 99 out of every 100 people who have a specific tattoo are predatory, violent muggers, should people not fear and be particularly cautious around that entire group?
Assuming, solely for the sake of argument, that instead of a tattoo the indicator is a particular race, but the numbers are the same, does that change anything?
These kind of extreme statements just help to feed the divide. Sure in one sense it's a true statement, but it is a very small minority of men that actually have any of this power or wealth you speak of. Why should the rest, including the marginalized men who are worse of than many women (in terms of suicide, working dangerous jobs), not be defensive as a response to such claims? It is completely irrelevant to them that Mansa Musa was the richest person in the world and a man long before they were born. It is completely irrelevant to them that the president of the united states is a man. They don't stand to gain anything from that.
Focusing on class is a much more fruitful endeavor because it unites the groups that are actually harmed instead of dividing them. Anything else plays into the hand of the elite, and if I was them I would be laughing at you for taking the bait of continuing this culture war.
Also, incels don't need a manifesto to learn how to hate women. The reason they were looking for the manifesto is because they hate women.
I can see how a manifesto saying "the truth is, women are [bla bla bla], therefore [bla bla]" can make sense in a superficial level (and gives twats like Jordan Peterson an air of intelligence), and can be persuasive to incels.
Of course suppression isn't the answer either.
Even if media (social or otherwise) can influence people to commit violence, does that justify censorship?
Can you say that, had Natural Born Killers not been made, there would have been no Columbine? I contend that it would have happened anyway. If that movie didn't exist, they would have found another movie to imitate, or even one of the other things they were interested in, such as DOOM or whatever. Correlation not causation.
Sure, you could remove both Natural Born Killers and DOOM and KMFDM and whatever else, but then they would have moved to something else. You can't ban everything just because some sick people might enjoy it.
How many mass shootings have been inspired by the bible or the quran, or The Catcher in the Rye?
Not making it public in the first place. Why do i (in EU) need to know that a child killed its schoolmates in US ?
To remind yourself why it's such a good idea to keep voting in politicians in favour of strict gun controls?
I guess. That would be really stupid though. This isn't a burner account. You get to do this maybe once, and it doesn't always work (some user upstream has 2 ex-coworkers on SO to no fame. Accounts still up).
Alternatively, there's 2 situation in which this can be gamed against other users
1. Your name is common and now all John doe's in X sector are accused of being murderers.
2. A non-obvious account has a sabetour try to associate the account with a murderer. You can't do much to disprove it outside if doxx yourself. Lies pile on and you're banned wrongfully.
The internet is still semi-anonymous. We literally cannot be a judge of stuff like this.
>So now we're somewhere pretty uncomfortable. I think it wrong to suppress Osama Bin Laden's screeds recently removed from the Guardian online, however much I loathe him and everything he stood for.
I think that's where the subtetly of this situation kicks in. This isn't about banning people, and honestly banning Luigi would have gotten less attention on this story (but still some). This is ultimately a private server and they can ban you for whatever they want.
But this was So having their cake and eating it too. They simply erased the name. To use The guardian example, this is like remove Bin Laden from the site, but his comments about whatever (be it trivial opinions on economics or threats of terror) stay there just fine on the site. I Don't see who wins here. The actual ideas are on your site, but you just swept the name under the rug.
On top of this, this goes agiandt the CC license of comments. You can remove a comment, but you can't unattributte an existing comment.
That's a bit hard to prove, no? How often does anyone look at the names of who posts what?
And you missed my main point. There will always be trolls. Now think about how many people just stumble on SO, find a good answer, and up vote it without realizing that person is a murderer. They may not even recall a name of whom they upvoted.
Don't miss the forest of the trees if you don't wanna normalize social media taking action the law should (and is) doing.
Reading before commenting saves everyone time, not only mine and yours, but everyone else’s that might stumble upon this thread.
With that said: his content is on there under the presumption of CC, it should remain.
The new username: "user4616250" is ringing a bell... Didn't 4chan used to give everyone names like anon4616250? It's got real V-for-vendetta vibes.
Edit: I mean on purpose, obviously. Drunk driving hardly counts. (Nobody gets in a car drunk with the intention of hurting anyone, they are usually just trying to get from A to B.) Accidents don't count. We're talking about a comparable action here, something that meets the legal definition of murder and which was also not prosecuted. Deeds from war probably don't count because it doesn't meet the definition of murder under law (although, many war crimes and misdeeds abroad are punished) and soldiers are peons. Cops killing people on duty don't count because they aren't doing it unprovoked (when they do, it is usually prosecuted as murder), and they too are peons.
Also, to the people complaining about the edits, sorry I can't reply to 50 comments all saying about the same kind of stuff. I keep hitting the rate limit.
But yeah, people in these positions rarely need or want to directly kill someone, they have other means to achieve their goals.
Yet many financial or other white collar crimes are usually never prosecuted or result in a slap on the wrist.
Obviously they are not the same as murder but still the impact ads up. Defrauding or ruining thousands of people or crashing the global economy is not that far off.
Then you have police officers regularly getting away with outright murder and facing no consequences (of course that’s a different class)
...Doesn't mean they meant to kill someone! Completely different crimes.
Not a conspiracy-theory fan or anything but this basic power distribution is obviously skewed for people who are rich(er) and that's a fact.
What?!
Does this count? Or is the government allowed to indiscriminately kill civilians whenever and wherever they feel like it?
denying healthcare that they already paid for.
This is the reason why Kamala was predicted to win. In reality, the "I don't care which candidate is in the office" was the top choice this recent election.
> More than 155 million Americans voted in 2024: 156,302,318 to be exact. That’s the second largest total voter turnout in U.S. history in absolute terms. It is also just the second time that more than 140 million people voted in a presidential election.
> In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900. Nonetheless, turnout in 2024 was still high by modern standards. The 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon (63.8 percent) is the only other election in the last 112 years to exceed 63 percent voter turnout. If you are wondering, the election of 1876 holds the record for the highest percentage voter turnout: 82.6 percent. That was one of America’s most controversial and consequential elections—and not in a good way. It was also an election in which more than half the adult-age population was ineligible to vote.
The correct metric would be relative turnout and that doesn't support your claim:
> In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900
This is especially telling in the light of the numbers you just gave on voter turnout.
> Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president. That is the second highest vote total in U.S. history, trailing only the 81,284,666 votes that Joe Biden won in 2020. Trump won 3,059,799 more popular votes in 2024 than he won in 2020 and 14,299,293 more than he won in 2016. He now holds the record for the most cumulative popular votes won by any presidential candidate in U.S. history, surpassing Barack Obama. Running three times for the White House obviously helps.
They may also live in an area where their preferred candidate has no chance of winning, making their vote a waste of time.
This is all worthless anyway. We don't use the popular vote to determine presidency. Reports show That turnout among youth was lower than 2020, but still really high in battleground states. That tells me the youth already lost faith of their vote counting.
31% positive for those under 45, 8% positive for those above 45.
41% negative for those under 45, 77% negative for those above 45.
Not the majority, even for younger people. And remember, this is just U.S. opinion; people in other countries might view this differently (likely even more negatively).
Edit: look at the photos of the people… AI generated perhaps?
I get your point. But the key difference is that "giving support" is a lot different than getting out to vote (which pains me to say). Statistically, 58% of those young people voting for Kamala didn't even bother going to the polls.
The worst spreader of this was the justice system though. You escalate crimes so high in a hug profile case, of course it will spread like wildfire.
"Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself." -Hermione Granger
I'll add that it has happened more than a few times.
Past response was to shut down inappropriate behavior in the now (folks rambling on about the person in comments under some programming question, etc.) and let the temporary interest die out on its own.
This time... The response seems to be inviting the Streisand Effect.
boldmovecotton.gif
NOTE TO ALL PERSPECTIVE WHISTLE BLOWERS
EVEN THE ANNOYING ONES THAT HAVE A LONG
ESTABLISHED HISTORY OF BEING JERKS:
YOU CAN REACH EVAN VIA SIGNAL
281.901.0011.
OLIVE BRANCH, ETC.So what. He gets a few upvotes. What's the harm for the users, or the platform?
If you're gonna expunge someone, don't half-ass it.
Albums Dumbledore says this in the books. Hermione only has this quote in the movie adaptations.
https://deadline.com/2023/08/jk-rowling-airbrushed-from-pop-...
>The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions through which the physical remnants and memories of a deceased individual are destroyed.
Certainly not exclusively from official accounts. Not sure what your point here is?
Guess it just shows retention of books overrides movies, given that I've consumed both.
We've been living with that now for a few decades. It's still a problem.
Of course, I can be totally wrong but I've seen these things happen (I've been both a mod and a core dev at Stack closely working with the community team 8 years ago)
> I can confirm SE, Inc. were the ones to clear his name. A reason was not specified anywhere obvious. Mods have been given explicit instructions not to touch that profile. While this particular incident may be limited to SO, the implications of this affect the entire network
The tools for doing the moderation of personal votes and reversals and whatnot are blunt and clumsy and time consuming.
The tools for doing the "change the account name" is similarly blunt and clumsy, but much less time consuming.
From a mod perspective, it isn't necessarily "what is right or wrong" but rather "what do I have time to do? ... and if I don't have time to do this, what are the outcomes?"
There is a lot of "the tools for doing (diamond) moderation haven't been built out well" combined with "the stance of Stack Exchange Inc (I specify it this way to distinguish between Stack Exchange the community) has been inconsistent on social issues in the past." Running a social network (but not wanting to admit its a social network, and sometimes denying that it is, but having engagement metrics like a social network) with a diminishing paid moderation team combined with taking stances that haven't been run past a lawyer before a proclamation or actions being taken... and then as often as not going back on (or not following through with) those actions or proclamations...
And we've got problems. The actions themselves may not be of Stack Exchange Inc's direction actions this time, but the underlying confusion and lack of communication of clear policies (and lack of enforcement of the clear policies), or the tools to allow for less blunt actions... well... we've got problems.
I don't see this getting better as Stack Exchange Inc has taken very little action to increase the paid moderation team or take responsibility for the content that is published on their sites.
Personally I didn't know he was on Stack Overflow until I saw this. Had the mods left it alone I suspect it wouldn't have become more than some minor news or comment.
I don’t know what SO should have done (well, probably not ban someone for asking questions, assuming we have the full story). But it’s so fascinating to see how companies have no playbook to work off of.
What are you talking about? What "vigilante justice"? The innocent victim, Brian Thompson, was murdered by a lunatic. He was not an offender. It was no justice.
I think that Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. His actions as CEO put profit before people and caused many people’s lives to be lost.
Buck stop with him; between 2021 and 2022 he did that. Being the CEO and all.
Here, for example, the parent poster brings up some statistic that some very specific category of insurance claim denial went up in some period. The allusion is that this is nefarious, and is a result of some specific action by the murder victim. The reader is supposed to interpret it this way. Of course, there's absolutely zero evidence for any of these claims, and when you lay it down like that, it sounds pretty stupid without anything backing this up.
Perhaps you're not well equipped to evaluate moral errors in the first place.
Your comment is pretty clear example of the attitude around the case. People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision, and so when they are murdered, they will twist themselves into pretzels to somehow justify that they had it coming.
That something harmful is legal or effectively legal is a necessary requirement for a vigilante action to morally acceptable.
And if people in their majority, in their stupidity or cleverness, reject your argument, isn't then vigilante action deeply anti-democratic?
I have a very old-style view, where courts provide systems that substitute for private vengeance and thus become legitimate by being willing to hear complaints of harm, so from my point of view, if a court hear the matter, the affected person can take whatever measures they wish, which of course has important consequences in cases of legal immunity-- when my view is taken, legal immunity is something one desperately wants to avoid having, because whoever has it must contend with private vengeance.
No, People hate CEO's making greedy, selfish, unnecessary decisions that cost lives and cause suffering.
Be honest.
That's fine. I think you exemplify the attitude that lead to Thompson's murder and will lead to many more similar incidents.
> Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some,
If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.
> because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty
The most basic of reasoning shows he has some moral guilt, just not legal guilt.
P1 - He was the head decision maker
P2 - Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
C - He ultimately approved of that decision
You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place. Let me repeat: any system will deny some claims, so denied claims are not prima facie evidence of anything wrong.
Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened. Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong, but also changes in denial rate do not even need to correspond to any decision or change in policy, but may instead result from changes of external factors.
He ultimately approved of that decision
What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious. There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation. Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
Honestly this is a pretty bad faith argument. They are denying at a significantly higher rate than their competitors, their internal policy focused around denying, and enough people are getting screwed over that a murder was committed.
But yeah, sure, assume this is all business as normal and not at all morally wrong to make your argument if you must.
> Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened.
Basic. Reasoning.
If claim denials triple during a time when a particular CEO is in place, that CEO would have had to have something to do with that.
> Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong,
They are on this scale and when the denials are bad faith. I can't prove that to you unless their documents get leaked, but that's for legal matters. For moral matters, the evidence supports that the difference from the drastic increase were indeed bad faith denials.
> What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious.
Exactly, because he was CEO.
> There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation.
He was CEO.
> Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
He was CEO. He oversaw a company going out of their way to deny claims even if you want to play devils advocate and pretend to be ignorant and deny that.
What he did was far more evil than a single murder, and what you are doing in defending the system that caused someone to feel that they had to murder it also more evil, the system that allows for shitty health insurance companies to cause so much pain and suffering. THAT, is evil.
But since you've invited me to name the moral error, sure. Accepting a fiduciary responsibility to chase after profits in a context where that very clearly means finding ways to deny people access to healthcare is a moral error. If you can't ethically do a job you shouldn't take that job. At best you're lying to shareholders, at worst you're killing people. The only ethical path is to go find a different job.
It seems pretty obvious that opting into a position where you'll have to do that might make you unpopular with the humans.
I strongly encourage you to think very carefully about this. Once you do, you'll find that there are no simple answers: you'll always have limited resources, and you'll always have to deny care to some people, and in fact it will always include some people personally making the call to deny care to some people. Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
You would generally count them. Like, if you have three people in need of a ventilator and you only have two ventilators, then one person is getting denied a ventilator today.
> Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
That's true, and I don't have a problem with it. Tradeoffs have to happen. What I have a problem with is incentive structures that attribute greater success for the people at the top when they create outcomes that involve more death for the people at the bottom.
Plenty of systems which actually exist don't congratulate leadership for reducing quality of care.
There's no fundamental reason why they have to be in a position where screwing the people who receive the care would ever be considered the ideal option. But that's how it is when you have a group of shareholders who have no stake in the quality of care. Thompson opted into a conflict of interest which need not exist in order to provide insurance.
Government-organized resource allocation is, more likely than not, bad to very bad.
The same problem does not apply to our social services (including health insurance) as they dont have to make profits at all costs.
In most insurance fields, it would be possible to only deny false claims. Take insurance of your house. The rates could be calculated that they can pay out all real damages to the full amount. Because the maximum damage amount is limited.
That's not true for health insurance, because the total possible damage (cost of treatments) is almost arbitrarily high, so that you cannot pay everything for everyone.
I don't want to defend the US system here. But it's not a problem that any country really solved, and one could argue about advantages and disadvantages of the different systems all day long.
The moral error is by refining and endorsing a company policy that went out of it's way to cheat people out of their due insurance, killing significant amounts of people as a result and ensuring suffering for even more.
Our legal system can't really address this, not until the electoral college gets disbarred or red state voters realize rejecting socialized health care hurts more than it helps.
Until that happens. things are going to get worse and people are going to get frustrated and start acting out. It's what happens when you have such a broken system.
Talking about "we don't do that in society" is ignoring the problem at it's core. You can't expect people to just obey the rules and respect law and order when it clearly isn't working for them or people they care about.
is it non-violent when they wield the system in a way to cause immense harm to the point where they are prolific killers indirectly and maybe even straight up directly? 90+ percent error rates in the AI that united used to deny claims is a violence. they denied 30+ percent of all claims.
Bravo!
Basically, it is your moral obligation to donate everything you have, except for what little you need to survive. If we put that essay into this context, then not donating would indeed be violence, such as not saving a drowning child just because you don't want to.
Exactly this. That was a watershed moment, I think.
In a just world, hundreds would have been executed for the financial crimes of 2008.
"Justice" only exists when there's threat of punishment. It isn't enough to have the moral high ground; you have to have the might and the will to enforce the moral ground on others.
Humanity will always live under systems of "oppression", but it's what that oppression looks like that matters, because there'll always be someone who takes advantage of a system's goodwill, and that must be punished swiftly and brutally, to deter anyone from abusing the system's goodwill.
Following the murder, I was thinking about how much non physical violence there is, that isn’t usually seen and judged as violence. Things like denying healthcare, shutting down companies and laying off people to benefit private equity investors, forcing people into bankruptcy, losing their homes, charging overdraft fees, etc.
The people behind that kind of violence can hide behind the layers of indirection.
In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive. "I only want ever nice things to happen, and bad things happening to people are violence". I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
It is when the care is necessary; when the denial is part of a strategy to goose profits.
There are similar issues with the other statements you made.
> Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive.
Frankly, your comment strikes me as willfully blind.
So when the insurance denies coverage, and so the doctors don't work for free on the case, and the patient dies, are the doctors perpetrating violence too?
I suggest you read up on this. IIRC, it was UHG's practice to deny claims indiscriminately to increase the personal burden of accessing medical care. Because, you know, if people pay their premiums to the company but it doesn't pay out, it makes lots more money for the shareholders.
It's weird how you seem to consistently elide motivations even when extremely relevant.
The ACA's public option was killed by a Senator who had a lot Health Insurance industry backing and support.
No, the politicians who insist on keeping this medieval practice in place are.
Denying claims does NOT increases profits, in the US it actually decreases them. Read more here if you like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642405
Nobody argues against that, but United Healthcare had a denial rate of more than 30%, which is the highest among the major health insurance companies in the US. Coupled with the fact that they make profits off of those denials, it's hard not to call this non physical violence with the aim to generate more capital for share holders and executives.
> In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
Again, absolutely agree. But it can be argued that doing so without any regard for individuals, their history with the economic unit and personal circumstances, is non-physical violence. Look at e.g. European employment laws for how this can be mitigated (not without some drawbacks ofc).
> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.
> I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
You put up with these because the US is a violent society with little regards for individual lives. Great for entrepreneurs and people with access to capital, not so great for much of the rest.
The alternatives have of course their own share of problems, but don't act as if the system is the only reasonable one.
As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies. That's a simple mathematical fact: a finite set of numbers has a maximum number. You need to do more legwork to show any actual wrongdoing on anyone's part here.
> In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.
This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
This isn't correct. Mathematically (as you say), you can have all health companies have a denial rate of 0%.
Realistically it's impossible, but you did say mathematically.
> As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies
If OP was going to start leaning onto "mathematical fact[s]" to support their argument, they should probably be accurate as well. Specifically there will be "multiple" health insurance companies with the highest denial rate (0), not "a" company.
Weren't you just calling someone's comment "exceedingly naive"?
The poor and financially vulnerable (ie, most Americans) are at a systemic disadvantage when dealing with debt, bankruptcy laws, and the justice system. They are preyed upon by all sorts of people offering debt, at a higher rate than ever before, anywhere.
Not to mention government bailouts, which really changed the game with regard to balancing risk.
That depends, amongst other things, on how much interest you charge in the interim. Payday lenders makes lots of money off of people who a) cannot afford their loans by any reasonable metric and b) default on those loans.
And a healthcare system enabled by UHC will deny healthcare at a rate 3 times that of the rest of the industry.
So is every other insurer "under-denying" healthcare?
Or is UHC choosing to deny healthcare more than it needs to?
> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
Insurance is the reason that these debts are so exorbitant in the first place.
Do you really think the ER trip and a few tests cost the hospital eighty thousand dollars, and UHC, magician negotiators that they are, managed to talk the bill down to $4,000?
And yet the hospital will charge you, the uninsured, $80K. Yeah, you might be able to negotiate it down some, but not like that.
The US is the only country in the world where deathbed divorce is a thing, so families won't be burdened with medical bills[1].
But I feel like you'd find that immoral, too.
[1] Lack of legal obligation to the debt (even beyond this, to family members in general) won't stop the hospital calling your family and heavily beating on you to pay the bill of your recently departed, even if you had no financial responsibility, using everything from appealing to a sense of pride, to outright deception and claims that they can sue for the unpaid bill.
We allow this because we let them scare us into voting for strict education.
But the reality is education could be fixed to cut the price by probably 80% - making the much smaller insurance amount negligible.
I hate to say it but pinning it on a ceo doesn’t seem right. His job was to ration a scarce resource. But why is it scare? Because the authorities thru the police force puts an end to unlicensed people regardless of their skills.
I was talking to a friend/acquaintance. Her dad was a doctor did all kinds of innovative surgeries on animals. But wasn’t licensed. She said he’d be called in by doctors to do surgeries all the time because he was the best.
But he wasn’t licensed. So California shut it all down.
The price of healthcare is 5x because we let people go to jail without a crime. If they went to jail for reckless I e untrained practice of medicine i understand. But seriously right now the problem is lack of supply that has to be rationed.
Dude, plenty of people understand that. However, it's no good playing the circular pass-the-buck game, where the insurance apologists blame the doctors for everything, then the doctor-apologists blame the insurers for everything, everyone blaming someone else for everything, ad nauseam; with the end-result of the status-quo being defended by mentally exhausting everyone.
Insurance makes 20%. Doctors and suppliers make 5x what normal people make.
So the problem is with the laws preventing folks from becoming doctors.
I’m gonna fix this, it’s actually so easy, just need people to trust me.
I’m really good at this kind of stuff I just hate dealing with people because the average person is so certain the world can’t get better.
btw is that doctors or hospital administrators?
It’s facetious to compare those to a system where 30 million have zero coverage and the rest are systematically denied life saving care as a profit making mechanism.
And yeah letting someone die when you could help them live is violence. When it’s baked into the rules it’s called systemic violence.
Again, my point is that denying healthcare is not automatically something wrong or evil. This is something that must necessarily happen, and so the details as to why some healthcare was denied are very important. You can’t just say that someone being denied care is basically murder, like some people here, or point to some percentage of denied claims and pretend that this is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. No, you need to actually do some legwork, and the haters of murder victim are not interested in that, they just want some release by dunking on a literal scapegoat.
I live in a European country with public free healthcare. Sure, you pay a portion of your income towards healthcare, so it's not really free etc. etc. If you don't have income, the state pays it for you.
There isn't any denial of healthcare. I never heard about anything like that. Sure, there are limits on availability of healthcare, particularly if it's some advanced or expensive procedure. For example, there is a place where they do radio surgery on the brain. There may only be one such place in the country (it's a small country). If you need that kind of procedure done, obviously there is a waiting list. And certainly some of those on a waiting list must have died.
But there is no denial of healthcare per se with someone making a decision to deny healthcare.
Accepted but didn't happen in time doesn't equal denial.
Whether they denied that care by not paying for it (which means people could have gotten that care if they would have had the means), or by limiting the amount of care in a period of time, doesn't really matters for the person who didn't get it.
Why do you think the healthcare resources (number of beds, hospitals etc) are limited? Why isn't there a second hospital?
By the way, would they have paid for an operation in a different country if space would be available there? No? So they denied that healthcare.
I'm sure there's plenty of cases where United health approved the claim and the patient also didn't get treated in time, it doesn't count as a denied claim.
in germany (and probably most other european countries) you can be denied treatment if it is deemed unimportant and it is known that insurance does not cover it. you will never be put in a situation where treatment is applied but then the insurance doesn't pay leaving you with the bill unless you were made aware that the treatment is optional or you specifically chose a treatment that you could not be sure would be paid. payment for any treatment that is not optional can not be denied. if there is uncertainty you can also ask your insurer in advance, and they must give you a binding response whether the proposed treatment will be paid or not.
most importantly the doctors must inform the patient in advance if the treatment is insured or not. if they don't tell them that something is not insured then they can't demand payment from the patient.
you will never face a surprise bill.
My partner suffered a medical episode while we were traveling in Germany. Bystanders called an ambulance which turned up and checked her out and asked her to be taken to hospital for more tests.
She/we elected to not go with them.
To our surprise, about 6 months later after we returned home (to Australia), we received a letter in the mail (in German) that said we owed something like $500 for the ambulance, I forget the exact number.
How does that line up with "you will never face a surprise bill" in Germany? Or is it because we are foreigners?
We never paid but I sometimes wonder if something would happen should we return to Germany.
if you don't have insurance you have to pay for everything of course. the surprise in your case comes from the unusual situation that the people who called the ambulance didn't know that you had no insurance, or more likely and you weren't even aware of how your situation is going to be handled.
it's unlikely that anything will happen if you return since the ones issuing the bill would not be notified in any way that you entered the country.
it is also possible that you could have disputed the payment since you didn't call the ambulance yourself (and i assume didn't ask anyone to call them). on the other hand if you had insurance you should have gone to the hospital because apparently insurance doesn't pay if an ambulance is called but not used. so actually, you didn't receive a surprise medical bill, but a bill for calling a service that was not needed (and potentially inconveniencing someone else who might have needed the ambulance, but now had to wait).
however, if you didn't ask anyone to call the ambulance then the bill is inappropriate because the law here is that if you call an ambulance but you don't need it, you pay, but if someone else calls the ambulance without you asking them, and it turns out to be unnecessary, then nobody pays.
since i lived in china i also don't have insurance in europe, so when we were visiting and needed treatment for a burn we had to shop around different hospitals to find out which one charged the least. costs for an ER visit ranged from 80€ to 250€ if i remember, and later we found a special hospital that was funded by a charity for the uninsured were we could go for after care for free. that works because the number of people without insurance is extremely small. mostly foreigners who somehow fell through the gap.
We didn't ask for anyone to call the ambulance, although personally I am happy that it was called and she was checked out.
No idea how useful it'd be for non-covid calls though. Probably not very.
Denying healthcare doesn't necessarily mean "leaving someone bleeding to death on the street" but rather refusing to provide certain treatments or medications. This issue isn't unique to the US. Granted, the healthcare system in the US is, in my opinion, significantly worse but claiming that healthcare denial doesn't happen elsewhere is simply incorrect.
You know, it just hit me: the issue here might just be a semantic one, where people feel the need to lump very unacceptable and wrong actions into the category of "violence," because of the consensus belief that violence is almost always wrong.
There are things that are as unacceptable and wrong as violence but are not violence.
For example, if a slumlord wants to evict me, even though I'm still paying the rent, the eviction is violence. It can either go two ways: either armed thugs will come to the building and physically grab me, rough me up and throw me on the street (at best) or in jail (at worst). Or I'll anticipate that happening, and lock myself out of the building in advance. In the latter case, is it still violence? Many people say yes, a shortcut around violence, coerced by the certainty that violence will happen otherwise, is still violence.
Or consider an abusive relationship: she knows he will beat her if she doesn't obey, so she obeys. No beating actually happens. A lot of people consider this violence too.
And consider a siege on a city (there's at least one happening right now). The people try to grow their own food in city parks, but whenever they do they, the parks are hit with big bombs dropped from planes. So they call on their allies to deliver food in. The first food trucks are also bombed. The second food trucks don't go in, they try to negotiate safe passage first. Is it violence against the people in the city (who have never been hit by a bomb)? Many people say yes.
In the narrow definition, violence is only when my fist hits your face, but in the broader definition, violence is whenever I use the laws of physics to force something to happen to you - whenever I take away your agency.
These things are objectively not violence. Violence isn't a word for "things that harm people", it very specifically means direct, purposeful physical harm. Don't distort the meaning of words for rhetorical flair.
The WHO defines four types of violence: a) physical, b) sexual, c) psychological, and d) deprivation. Denying healthcare feels incredibly close to d) and — semi-indirectly — involves a bit of c) and a) too.
> These things are objectively not violence.
Semantics cannot possibly be 'objective'.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence
By your strict definition of violence (direct harm) Hitler would walk free because he didn't personally gass the jews. Luckily we had trials[2] to determine that we still hold indirect perpetrators responsible.
>[B]ureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. *We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions.*
Neil Postman, Technopoly (Emphasis mine)
In our society we don’t objectively consider it wrong, otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular.
Batman is the absolute opposite because he goes out of his way to avoid killing villains, even incredibly evil ones like the Joker.
Let's be real: the original super heroes avoided killing because children were their target market, and unlike with cowboys and outlaws or indians, it would have been unseemly by the standards of the time. Not because of some kind of big point about "just vigilantism."
"Law" is just another way of saying, "The bare minimum standard that we as a society will accept."
So when we have a society that sends a drunk driver to prison for 70 years for killing a family of four in a head-on collision, but we don't send people to prison for their lives for gambling with the pensions of teachers, firefighters, etc., for polluting the waterways and the earth itself, of course this is the ultimate, eventual outcome.
The only shocking thing to me about Luigi's case is that it didn't happen sooner.
Yeah I listed all of those because it’s funnier when people mistake the vigilante justice’ thing for a ‘not killing people’ thing and then I can trot out Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, which was so popular it gets quoted regularly and had four sequels.
So yes, batman in particular would be considered bad by most people. He is just another gangster cause quite a lot of damage to the city on the regular. We do not care, because it is made up movie city.
Superman and Spider man afaik do not go around randomly assassinating people, but it is a long time since I watched that.
Sorry about the rather extreme example and inviting Godwin. But consider for example Krupp (CEO) and Ribbentrop (Diplomat) who were both entirely ”non-violent” people, they personally did not draw a single drop of blod as far as I know. And the holocaust were perfectly legal according to the law at the time.
Violence with the stroke of a pen, killing via a rubber stamp, violence through withholding safety.
It’s actually really interesting to see when people think his support isn’t even a debated topic, when the numbers show most people, especially adults, don’t support his actions.
I’m unsure how that shows with polling, tbh, but it certainly shows up in the discourse.
...then it follows HN isn't. I happen to know they are both real for the purposes of existing and as a meta commentary on topics, since I participate in both. I also don't know anyone who wouldn't give Luigi a pass on a Jury, and these people don't vote the same.
Disregarding the existence of the sentiment, is the kneejerk noise of people thinking they are uber-rational thinkers or arbiters of reality.
I'll assume, in good faith, what your wrote was simply not what you meant.
It's worth noting that in our society lots of other things are also considered to be wrong, things which are done openly every day by some of the richest and most powerful people and organizations in the country.
That's why he has "insane support": the system is broken and has proven itself incapable of policing that other bad behavior.
That said, we consider vigilante justice wrong because we believe there is supposed to be actual justice from a functional system. When the system does not function, extrajudicial attempts at justice will become more common. Just like people will poach more in a famine.
If the justice system won't take care of it, there has to come a tipping point, IMO.
Well, nothing.
Unless they have a general policy of scrubbing records of everybody indicted for (but not yet proven guilty of) violent crimes, why do anything at all?
I guess hiding behind the veil of legality and murdering thousands if not hundreds of thousands if considered worse. Rightfully IMO.
All of StackOverflow is already scraped and archived, so this is not a good argument, as you are actually just hurting StackOverflow while helping AI companies
Just like those who edited every Reddit comment to a blank string before deleting them all.
Why? You can still get information from there, they're stopping you from working for free for them for some time.
After the fourth or fifth time I just gave up. It seems like a miserable experience; I can't imagine why anyone would spend time on SE.
The *erasure* of Luigi Mangione
The saga on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, *and how tech always serves the ruling class.*
It’s important to *grasp the severity* of my suspension: suspending a professional resource for one year will create a hardship for me. And, I’m one of the largest producers of content on the network
https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=answ...
Evan is only suspended on Stack Overflow. Compare https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll and https://dba.stackexchange.com/users/2639/evan-carroll ... or for that matter any of the other parts: https://stackexchange.com/users/42701/evan-carroll?tab=accou...
Likewise, the "largest producers" ... https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=answ... and https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=ques... would bring that into question.
Even on the site with the highest rep... https://dba.stackexchange.com/users/2639/evan-carroll?tab=an... the most recent answer was August 12th. The next most recent answer was October 1st (of 2023).
The self-aggrandizement and over the top tone does not do any favors for taking the content seriously.
The slow walk on the pier is an example of the upcoming ?revenge? by the ?establishment?
Now you can Fahrenheit 451 everyone if they go against the established order.
Is it feasible to build a community that will contribute, and also get the search traffic[1], and be economically viable, particularly in the post LLM world? I don't think so.
In today's world with gen AI, the drive to contribute and maintain suck knowledge stores is simply not there, SO itself is facing a > 60% drop in new questions even as far as 2 years back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984742 (2023).
The tech itself is pretty trivial, even distributed and truly community operated like Wikis are, content creation will be the biggest challenge and i don't see the strong community motivation to maintain knowledge bases like this anymore.
[1] Search engines will negatively penalize the domain for just hosting duplicated content without any extra intent to stifle a new player etc.
To be honest, it's more feasible than ever because of LLMs. I imagine more and more grassroots for "human communities" will be advertised as those weary of LLMs tire and migrate. Having systems guaranteed to be humans will be a selling point. Not guaranteed to surpass SO, I imagine it will get a sizeable community.
The downside is that, short of a very fast updating anti-bot captcha, users will more or less need strict identification to enter. Either via a premium payment or showing real life ID. Very unpopular models in the US. we'll have to see if the hate for AI overrides the will to give up anonymity (at least on the backend) or putting their wallets where their mouths are.
(DNA Pizza was one of my favorite things about living in SOMA in the before days)
Polling numbers (actual gauge of public sentiment) show a net disapproval for Mangione: https://stratpolitics.org/2024/12/unitedhealthcare-poll/
If anything, the news media has been trying to push the Mangione debate and controversy at every chance, like the above article that was selectively written to highlight demographic groups that showed higher approval of Mangione first.
Thinking that “the establishment” is a collective of all major companies that act in unison is conspiratorial thinking. Don’t think for a second that the news media wouldn’t hesitate to push and profit from the controversy.
Many people will want to avoid being on record as supporting a murderer, for fear of any consequences down the line. I know polls are almost certainly anonymous, but you need to trust the pollster to actually abide by that. If you have even an inch of worry, it's easier to just not answer (or answer insincerely) and move on.
Do you trust those polls?
Polls have never been faithful of actual public sentiment on any political subject since the end of times. People will not give their true opinions in polls on any subject that could be perceived as complex. Also it is actually very hard to have a good representation of the entire population of your country.
Just take the crosstabs of the survey you linked: about the 2024 election vote, in this survey, 70% of people polled are negative toward trump. The 2024 election results gave almost 50% of the popular vote to trump.
My point is only that this poll do not bring any valuable information here, just like any poll. The public sentiment toward Luigi Mangione seems favorable in appearance, but twitter is not representative of the US population either. So, who knows?
This isn't surprising, as you don't have to like someone to vote for them. Especially in a two-party system. Trump is uniquely disliked by many Republicans, but those voters still prefer to have a Republican in office rather than a Democrat. It's "hold your nose and vote". The (center-)left even developed a slogan for it: "vote blue no matter who".
It's been widely discredited as the company that released it seems to have come out of thin air with no history and has a patron account:
I am wary of the accuracy of the poll because it was an online one, but it does generally agree with a similar Economist/YouGov poll.
Most people (including rich boomers) I know are at minimum ambivalent to Luigi with many actively supporting him. But if asked on record they would deny it.
Eyeballing https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/ it looks to be in 1-sigma territory or maybe just venturing in to 2-sigmas.
Leaks of the Biden polling had trump getting 400 EC votes. Public polling is a PR exercise to convince you how to vote, the intention is to deceive.
One notable exception was The Des Moines Register poll the day before the election.
At the same time, I can't disagree with the fact that at this point I'm not sure what else will force a change to our absolutely depraved health care system. Every time I think it's as bad as it can possibly be it gets worse.
I also hope Mangione gets at least one mistrial due to jury nullification.
Not the case. The "neutrals" were only a few %, while 68% said "somewhat unacceptable" or "unacceptable".
The Emerson poll quite disingenuously chose to frame the typical "don't know" as "neutral", which is going to be interpreted as a value position - not the lack of a formed position, which their poll completely lacked. Their questions and answers were poorly framed if the goal was to actually query public sentiment and not just get a desired response.
[1] - https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-pol...
[2] - https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51189-presidentia...
The "enemy" combatants are of course just operating within the parameters of their laws. Nevertheless, war is seen as a battle between two competing powers which discard human lives in their struggle.
This is a different type of war being fought now. Brian Thompson didn't create the system, he was just a high-ranking agent.
Luigi declared war against the system, and people feel so strongly about the necessity for that system to be defeated that they can simultaneously support the resistance (even if the resistance had no choice but to play by its own rules) and recognize the tragedy in a death and the associated impact of that.
It's similar to how a lot of people feel about the Palestinian resistance in their struggle for liberation from the profoundly evil system of violence which has been victimizing them for years and killing them with impunity.
"Somewhat unacceptable" is logically equivalent to saying "Somewhat acceptable".
Consider these facts:
• A significant majority of Americans are medically satisfied with their health insurance provider.
This should not be surprising because a large majority of Americans have only ever used their health insurance for things routine checkups, routine lab tests, common infectious illnesses like colds and flus, minor burns and cuts and other physical injuries, routine diabetes care, routine high blood pressure care, and vaccinations.
Those are all things where almost all of the time any insurance company will cover without any hassle or pushback.
• Older people are generally more likely to have medical problems beyond the kind described above, medical problems where insurance companies do start pushing back on coverage and treatments.
• The older you get the more likely that becomes.
What I'd expect then is that sentiment in favor of killing insurance company officers over the medical decisions of that insurance company to be higher in older people and lower in younger people. But it appears that reality is opposite of that.
Before some life changes that mooted the point, I lived in fear of needing serious medical care, and as far as things go I'm more privileged than most.
> What I'd expect then is that sentiment in favor of killing insurance company officers over the medical decisions of that insurance company to be higher in older people and lower in younger people.
I don't know man, having the loved ones around you get literally killed by the dollar the insurance companies took from them and wouldn't give back sounds like something somebody too young to be beaten down by reality would feel enraged by. The loving heart can only take so much damage before it starts to break.
I just think that it's a bunch of people who developed with their empathy under attack before their emotional armor fully formed. Abuse begets abuse and we see an abused public lashing out. Extremely tragic, but nothing especially mysterious about it.
"The erasure of Luigi Mangione" is a linkbait headline because it drastically inflates the scope of the article. Therefore we changed it, in accordance with the guidelines, using a representative phrase from the article body.
They seem to have a high desire to place any disrespect they can on what seems to be an otherwise revered political activist in recent times; and it's only further fueling the discussion, and in all likelihood - probability for successors.
They would have been smart to play a leveling field, to treat Luigi's act with an element of absurdity, which would cause everyday people to question if their relatability towards Luigi was warranted or even made sense. Instead, they played a hand that the fearful would - because they are, and only validated the vigilante's narrative - because it is.
An obvious worldwide trend of complete speech control, right in the open for all of us to follow and see. Instead of just waiting a bit longer... until there was no way to stop it (maybe its already too late?) But i feel like this is too soon to pull this trigger, we still have time to stop using all these large platforms that aren't even vital to our lives, to make open and peer to peer alternatives
If all people think violence is wrong and immoral instead of just against the rules they have written ("laws"), then they can keep writing rules that suit them even more and more without any pressure against it.
Plenty of people were still in favor, clearly.
These days more and more discourse is online
- heavily censored by platform rules which are much more strict than laws, partially because it makes the moderator's job easier to err on the side of caution, partially because it teaches people to self censor which then extends into real life
- censorship can be automated and even invisible (shadowbanning, fake degradation of QoL, ...)
- eavesdropping is also automated and omnipresent
The real danger of AI or LLMs these days is not they machines will want to kill us but that powerful people will use them to mass-profile everyone and stop any dissent from spreading.
Do you think China will have a revolution and restore democracy? How? How will people organize?
And every currently democratic state will be the same - democracy only needs to fail once and it will be almost impossible to restore.
---
EDIT: Even word of mouth is in danger, sufficiently powerful organizations are or will be able to access microphones near you. Or cameras for lip reading. Again, en-masse, automated by AI.
https://images.app.goo.gl/dqHBEnQvy2hc6RHD8
This is them blessing the troops to go kill the Austrians a month later.
Though that does sometimes happen, usually leading to/in the middle of a civil war.
How many times do you see the hero having to choose between killing the villain and leaving him to the legal system (not justice system) to give him a lesser punishment?
Was it? the puritanical views in some western social groups is hardly how the whole world saw sex, even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class.
Same with violence! Not too much institutional change made for gang violence between 13-21 year olds in Chicago - as long as they're in the same class.
Democracy should be an alternative to violence: Instead of murdering the next Hitler, you can just vote him out. Unfortunately, this only applies as long as it works. American democracy has not worked for a very long time.
The west is in terminal decline and will be replaced by a cult from the middle east. This is the third time this has happened.
The only annoying thing is that I'll need to learn Arabic. English was bad enough.
The status quo behaviour of Stack Exchange and others is pandering, but it’s just as likely to be pandering to mom and pop as it is to Musk and Murdoch.
* tongue-in-cheek
There is a reason why Bernie is universally despised by all of them, this is the shared ideology, its this unspoken thing that every CNN and FOX news anchor, every nypost and nyt journalist, Obama, Bush, Biden and Trump all have in common. That's why this Luigi situation was so eye-opening to many people, it showed the cracks in the system. None of those people will ever be part of the solution, it's all of them collectively we need to overcome.
I've come to discover that most people really do not understand healthcare insurance at all.
The true driver of increased costs is Dr's and Hospitals. Not insurance.
Contrast this with a non-profit which has no incentive to increase profits and thus no incentive to increase costs.
I agree that these conversations mainly reveal to me that many people don't understand the economics driving costs in US healthcare, since they are so willing to carry water for private insurers.
And yet, they deny claims, despite that denying a claim reduces their profits.
> to carry water for private insurers.
Because insurance it utterly irrelevant to the issue. The problems in the US lie at the Dr/Hospital level, not the insurance. Procedures simply cost too much, having the government pay for them will just makes things worse because government always overpays for things.
You want to solve things? Make medical tuition free, and remove ALL caps on number of doctors (especially difficult with residency, but it can be done). Then reduce rates for services.
Someone should start a fully integrated company: They educate you, find you a residency, and hire you. In exchange for free tuition you agree to work for lower rates. (There will need to be some details to work out obviously, since you can't force people to work.)
It's actually comical to claim insurance is irrelevant.
Billions of dollars of middlemen creating makework inserted into the process surely adds no costs, and is completely irrelevant to how much it costs. The waste generated in hospital billing departments is free, since people famously love working for billing departments and will do it for free. Commercial real estate for healthcare company buildings is also free, and so are the salaries of all the people that work for them. Not to mention their role in creating price opacity, allowing prices to rise unchecked and having different prices for different payers, also has no effect on prices. The stress that patient dissatisfaction (or outright getting fucked) causes providers is also completely free and causes no waste.
Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.I mean... wow. This is not the point of course, but the point is obvious and public sentiment towards SO seems to be quite unanimous. And, to be fair, I suppose 0.1% of SO is quite a lot of people, but still. I don't think SO will do well behaving like that.
Is there some entity that enforces Creative Commons? That seems a blatant violation of CC-BY-SA by Stack Overflow.
It is certainly remarkable that a murderer has such a high approval rating, but he's still not close to being broadly popular.
> "Americans are twice as likely to view Luigi Mangione — who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — very or somewhat unfavorably (43%) than favorably (23%)."
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51189-presidentia...
You know in the legends of Robin Hood, Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham also downplay the threat Robin poses to their status quo.
37% – Don't Know
43% – Unfavorable/Somewhat Unfavorable
That might as well be broad popularity for murder of all things. That don't know number is wild.
Only 29% of those age 18-29 view a murderer unfavorably, whereas 39% view him favorably and 32% aren't sure. It's break even for 30–44.
The support is heavily skewed by older age ranges (just 5% of >65).
If those age ranges were further broken out by political ideology it seems like it would be overwhelming for young liberals, since the all age "very liberal" has 47% support to 30% disapproval.
If your poll is to be believed, it isn't an online phenomenon at all.
Based on reddit, for example, you'd assume Mangione has more than 50% support when in reality he's not even close.
I really respect YouGov, but I'll play devil's advocate: maybe there is a bias in which members of society are willing to break the taboo. Perhaps older Americans are not less likely to support Mangione, but are just less likely to admit it. On the other hand, it is also consistent with younger people making up a larger proportion of social media users.
I doubt they're influencing this thread though.
Look no further than what Christians did to Jesus' image to see the effect in reverse. Now we're allowing the murder of babies and children in Jesus' hometown, because they don't look like the common Western perception of beauty, an effeminate white guy.
Let's leave physical appearance or other trite observations out of it and have a real conversation about the issue at hand.
Isn't this basically the same thing I wrote?
My claim is that him being handsome only prevents Corpgov from successfully employing their typical associative propaganda. It's still up to the public to judge him as they see fit.
Example: Without googling, do you know who was Thomas Matthew? Why nobody remembers him?
But yeah, this is cheap talk, I don't have any proof obviously.
https://substack.evancarroll.com/p/hacker-news-where-the-bil...
> HN has a an automated simple proxy for flame-war detection. One characteristic of flame-wars is that people get into a to'n'fro over the issue, and the number of comments balloons. However, no one else is really interested, so they don't upvote the submisson, and the participants can only upvote a submission once, so the number of points doesn't increase.
> Result is that a simply proxy for a flame-war is the number of comments on a submission out-stripping the number of votes.
> A side-effect of that is that if there's a mildly interesting submission that lots of people comment on, but very few upvote, then the flame-war penalty will be triggered, and the submission will sink like a stone, never to be seen again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089
> Scott and I get emailed every time that software trips so we can quickly look at which threads are being penalized and reverse the penalty when it isn't helpful. The only time we don't do that is when we're sleeping.
> We tend to call it the 'overheated discussion detector' these days, since it detects more than flamewars. However, that phrase is more awkward to say than 'flamewar detector'. If anyone can come up with a better name I'd love to hear it.
> Turning that software off is not an option, because HN would be overwhelmingly more dominated by flamewars if we did so. It's not primarily the individual threads that I fear, it's the systemic effects of having them be more dominant. HN exists most of all for the quieter, deeper, more out-of-the-way finds that would be the first to get excluded under such a regime. That would really be an existential risk to HN.
> Incidentally, that last point generalizes. When people complain that we don't do X, for some obvious X, it isn't because we don't value X (e.g. free speech or whatnot). It's because we're worried about systemic effects.
---
Quite simply said, the post and comments got overheated and looked like flame wars and so was pushed off the to have it cool down.
Nothing but mostly smiles... except from "dad" who warns police might hassle me.
"I'm forty, pops;" I'm now also old, too.
For context, I have zero dependents, dropped out of medical school pre-ACA, and do not carry health insurance (USA, boo!).
There may be several good reasons (eg to avoid spending time on cleaning up unrelated to SO issues due to the notoriety of the account) but none was communicated to the community.
I wonder if those people also believe this to have been the case before Civil Rights.
Or even in the slavery era. Slaveholders were just law-abiding citizens! Slaves trying to escape were the scoundrels!
If not, then surely you can see how there's no way that "back then, the execution of US law was awful, but now in 2025, it's wonderful and should always be treated as delivering justice". Come on now. It's just as flawed now, just in different ways.
Which means just like in the Jim Crow era, you can't use the US execution of law as an arbiter of justness, ethics, morals, and what will improve society. Absolutely not.
Everyone who has such tendencies certainly has people they look up to who are murderers. They've definitely voted for them.
Lifted from another comment [1]:
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
I'm not from the US so I try to avoid having strong opinions on US issues... But is it really just as flawed now? I mean, there's no slavery anymore, there's women's rights, and all races are legally equal (even if in reality it doesn't work out that way). This seems like an improvement, despite massive flaws still existing.
You cannot really use lawfulness as a measure of morality, and this is true now just as much as it was back then.
Or a different take could be: moral progress happens all the time, but the law often lags behind, so the delta between our moral ideas and the law is just as big as it has been in the past.
But entertaining the question:
Who says there haven't been new flaws introduced since? Note how I mentioned the execution of the laws specifically. There was, for instance, a point in time where anti-trust laws were upheld much more vigilantly, despite the same law being on the books. Laws only matter if the people tasked with upholding them choose to do so. And their effect changes immensely depending on how the people who apply them, interpret them. Both can and do drastically change over time.
But even if you argue that modern laws as executed in practice are "less flawed" than in a certain point in the past, it doesn't really make any difference. Given that reasoning, one would argue that at the time of civil rights it was already less flawed than at the time of slavery. Yet you'd probably agree the civil rights movement was necessary, the laws at the time were flawed, and the vast majority of cases of breaking those laws to further the movement was the right thing to do and positively impacted society.
Now let's talk about semantics. Is a tshirt dyed in RGB (255,0,0) just as red as one dyed in (254,1,0)? There isn't a correct answer to this. When viewed by a person, without knowing the RGB values, they will say both tshirts are entirely red, without one being redder than the other. If you put a gun to their head asking "which one is redder", they'd pick one at random at best. So are they just as red? To a human they absolutely are, to a computer they aren't, but we're here discussing among humans - hopefully!
I'm absolutely sure there have been new flaws introduced since the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.
My point is that those flaws don't seem, to me, to be just as bad as slavery.
1) That person has respect for justice, not law. These are separate concepts and people need to see them as separate.
2) It reinforces the view that by making yourself a victim (of the state), you are somehow more virtuous than if you avoid punishment. That only works in societies with sufficient inclination towards justice. It will not work under authoritarian rule like Russia or China, you will just end up in a gulag freezing to death or on your town square bleeding out.
Whether an action was just is determines solely by what preceded it, not by what followed. Making yourself a victim is just a practical way to attract more people's attention.
Practicality and morality are as separate as legality and morality.
Willingly accepting the penalty means having respect for the actual law that establishes the penalty.
Allow me to quote from the Wikipedia page of the Arab Spring:
> The catalyst for the escalation of protests was the self-immolation of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi. Unable to find work and selling fruit at a roadside stand, Bouazizi had his wares confiscated by a municipal inspector on 17 December 2010. An hour later he doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire. His death on 4 January 2011 brought together various groups dissatisfied with the existing system, including many unemployed persons, political and human rights activists, labor and trade unionists, students, professors, lawyers, and others to begin the Tunisian Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
Did Bouazizi make himself a victim, or a martyr? The only reason the Arab Spring fizzled out was due to directed intelligence and military operations supported by the US and Western regime, not more authoritarian regimes like Russia or China.
I have the highest possible respect for self-made martyrs around a good cause. Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, etc. all pushed the needle and eventually paved the way for both white and non-white citizens to share in our nation's bounty.
Is the civil rights movement finished? No. We need more martyrs.
Fizzled out due to the same US/Western countries that bombed the pre-existing governments in Libya and Syria?
Solidarity is one of our most important weapons against the degeneration of political systems, and the solidarity of the Arab Spring is what scared multiple governments into suppressing it.
Similarly, Corpgov is not all that scared by the actions of Mangione. What scares them is the public solidarity behind him.
You may not owe schizo psychos better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Sloppy work, terrible writing.
Nobody could spare one minute to write, "Mangione was charged in the case of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson", or something like it? Is it taboo to even use the words murder or assassination in this context?
/s because Poe's Law (Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views)
Profiteering on the lives of other people is morally repugnant so it's very natural for human beings to be angry at people who are directly involved and thus bear some responsibility.
The anger is natural but fundamentally it misses the mark.
Given the mechanism of american healthcare there will be millions of denied claims even if all the profit of the insurance would be reinvested and all employees including the CEO would be volunteering.
While that would absolve the CEO from the moral responsibility of profiteering it wouldn't improve the lives of the many people whose claims must be denied because of the mechanics of the heath insurance system.
Given the current system, the insurances must stay afloat and if the bankrupt that will affect even more lives.
Furthermore, hospitals have a different set of incentives which are not aligned with reducing the pressure on the healthcare insurer.
You could say "but the government should not allow that and it should just bail out the heath care insurers that go bankrupt in order to save lives". Yes you could say that.
Would they? Should somebody try that? Should some CEO of a major healthcare insurer be brave enough and bankrupt the company they're supposed to manage just to force the hand of the government to fundamentally prove that healthcare is a public good?
Should a CEO be shot for not risking everything to force the government hand?
Or should a politician get shot because they didn't improve health care when they could have? Which politician? Every politician? Only the top level ones? How time we would give them to make the change? One term? Two terms? Punish them when they retire after not having fixed the healthcare?
Despite all the power that the people have on paper, democracies are only as good as the public discourse that unfolds in such democracies.
Do we really think that we can solve problems as complex as healthcare by shorting at whoever our ape brain thinks is the most proximal responsible person?
It's not like the world isn't full of examples of countries where healthcare is approached as a public good from the ground up. There are plenty of places where you also have private healthcare on top of that.
Why don't you just take the opportunity to push for actual reform. Siding with a murderer is not going to help your cause.
Irrational is tens of thousands / hundreds of thousands over time of Americans losing the game over health issues. What I am getting at here, is if the model is to "let the unproductive ones die" then say so, and we can accelerate getting rid of insurance.
If you're a turbo capitalist, then the real issue is price discovery, insurance companies create false price signal due to the variance in payouts and hospitals mask their pricing. We can blame both sides maybe, but it is clear insurance has some explaining to do before we completely eliminate them. They do not need a third boat. I need to keep my house.
I will also anecdotally mention that NO ONE that I know is against Luigi. Not even once has someone said "well that guy had a wife and kids". It's not personal, it's not about him. In their view, it is a wakeup call because no amount of protesting, voting, and donating has gotten progress in the direction they want in their life time. Not even a sliver of a debate among about 5 different friend groups, 4 of which are not in tech.
But you're also privileged to not be born and live in a country that has been torn by civil war. You're very lucky to live in a part of the world where however hard it's still possible to enact positive change in a civil and peaceful way. Don't throw that away. A violent society is not one that will bring the social justice that you seek.
The public discourse in your country is highly divided and it's no wonder that yelling harder into each ones echo chamber is not achieving any effect. Adding gasoline and sparks to all that is not going to improve the situation but on the contrary its going to entrench the differences even more.
A lot of progress has been achieved in the 70s via true peaceful movements. I don't know why that spirit no longer seems to resonate with people nowadays who just want to flush the baby with the bathwater.
I have the sense that social media is key ingredient in that. The asymmetry of Brandolini's law makes it easy for trolls to drown any peaceful messages and algorithms amplify people's rage.
I think people in this thread desperately want there to be less support for Luigi's actions than there really is.
It's not a zero sum game. It's not either be with Luigi or be with healthcare CEOs. That's insane. Let's not fall into this trap. This mindset will necessarily reduce the reach and thus the possibilities for fixing the issue that's plaguing so many people.
It is that bad in the USA right now, about half the people I know have had a medical bill issue in the five figures between 20-30yo, which stunted their economic growth aka no house, or kids. At least one with a six figure bill. Rip bro.
There is no yelling, the fact is that a corporation can take my surplus at will if I fall off the tightrope here in the USA. That is an existential threat. The reason is so someone like UHC CEO can buy another car, or another boat. You may disagree, but remember, the people we are talking to live check to check or have less than 10k in the bank, working 40+ hours in a normal human job (aka not software).
The discourse is divided on this in the news, but I assure you from corper to bar back in my town there is a sense of "well he had it coming" when understanding the context. Pretty sad right? A "make me" moment made manifest.
The spirit does not resonate because culturally in USA, the peaceful movement is for suckers. Protesting? Suckers. Donating? Suckers. Voting? Also suckers. The end result is the exploiters win because they do not think they have to play, and nothing meaningful happens in your life time. They do not have to negotiate anything, they win via lobby, laws, money, power.
Rage implies hysteria, righteous indignation is a much sharper description, and many people have this axe to grind either for personal or ethical reasons.
Both things can be true, don't give me the war torn country reason. You're right that the peaceful system is better than the alternative, however when the peaceful system can economically destroy you, what is the difference?
I would bet Ross Ulbricht would be wiped clean if he became anywhere near as notorious by name/username.