I'm not really all that clued up on all of this, but overall seems like a Shinzo Abe-type situation: no, we shouldn't be assassinating people. But also: you can't just wreck people's lives for a living and expect no consequences. This seems just as much of a failure of society in dealing with these kind of nihilistic parasites sucking our society dry as anything else.
> you can't just wreck people's lives for a living and expect no consequences
The problematic aspect of this argument is that if expanded to the whole society, it can lead to a very dark place.
I come from a place that has 40K+ murders per year [1]. People literally dies all the time there, and as much everyone is so fed up with corruption and inequality, I strongly
believe that institutions, law, and order are the best solution once I experimented it in another place.
People all over the internet are using the narrative related to the insurance industry that let people die, and this CEO was the sacrificial lamb of this narrative. Its an easy thing to do since it's a direct cause and consequence thing.
But expanding the same logic, should politicians have the same treatment since their decisions have way more consequences [2]? Of course not.
As someone who saw civilization and savagery, I would choose the first in a heartbeat, and the main issue here is the incentive structure that rounds the health system in USA and why the political class does not take action to change it.
While I'm not defending the CEO in any capacity, there are many places on the internet simply gleeful to watch this man die. These people feel that way because his company killed their loved ones and harmed them directly.
I think a lot of the terror and push back were seeing in these comments and discussions is just how completely detached rich and privileged people are from the lived experience of the majority of the country, and a corresponding lack of empathy that comes with simply not being aware of the class war that's being fought. I think these privileges people did not understand how much of the populace actively despises them for being so privileged and umempathetic. Most people working at wendys or target simply can't understand how this ceo could've lived knowing he was destroying people's lives. And now rich tech workers are looking at their own track records, seeing a few unsavory things, and terrifying themselves over a slippery slope that makes them the victim, when the real ground truth of what's actually happening is that poor people are victims every single day, they're being walked on by huge corporations and abused to feed corporate compensation packages for executives that were fired for embezzlement.
It's easy to try to make the story about ourselves and make up something that makes us feel scared and vulnerable, like we're next. But that's theoretical, and imaginary. There's real harm being done to thousands of people every day, done by massive corporations. If you're willing to attempt to turn the conversion to suit your imaginary persecution scenario, why aren't you willing to shift the conversation to the real death and depravity that real people face every day? If you're so scared, why haven't you done anything yet? Don't wanna be one of the targets? The fix your shit and start working to better the world instead of extracting from it. That's the power of this assassination. The legal system is only scary to the poors, Healthcare is only fucked for the poors, job security and stable income and housing and for prices are only fucked for the poors. Everyone is scared to die. Don't wanna be, better start giving the poors other ways to communicate, cause they're gonna get their message across one way or another.
>But expanding the same logic, should politicians have the same treatment since their decisions have way more consequences [2]?
Yes? Like not even a little bit?
The liberal ideal of Democracy is as an alternative to violence. When Democracy fails, you are expected to correct it with violence. The system doesnt work without this failsafe.
I really dont understand where this civility at all costs idea came from.
Shit yankistan was literally founded on this ideal. They venerate people like John Brown who got to the wetwork of abolition years before there was a civil war.
> This seems just as much of a failure of society in dealing with these kind of nihilistic parasites sucking our society dry as anything else.
While nobody's shedding a tear here, we should be cautious about even softly embracing or downplaying vigilantism.
Worth remembering, and we've already seen it happen frequently: Vigilante justice can be wielded against controversial personas you support, and there will be just as much applause from the sidelines (from the other side).
That feeling can even extend to people you might consider innocent: See one of the other comments where someone is noting they wouldn't shed a tear over a particular company's *employees* being murdered.
Fully agree with you, vigilante justice should not happen because we have a system protecting the citizens and doing them justice. Wait, do we actually have such a workable system? Because if not, vigilante justice is just around the corner.
its the usual 'problem' in this country - all of these reprehensible actions by these corporations are, by and large, legal.
being legal doesn't make it right or ethical though.
the legislators clearly think the system is fine and workable as evidenced by the legislature passed to allow profits over, quite literally, anything else in this country.
whilst i don't condone murder or vigilantism, i fully expect more of this because this is exactly what the 'system' has wrought. when you have nothing to lose, all options are on the table.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole France
> the legislators clearly think the system is fine and workable as evidenced by the legislature passed to allow profits over, quite literally, anything else in this country.
But don't you think that a more civilized way to solve it is by voting and changing the legislators who think this is right?
I mean, the issue is when it goes from a sacrificed lamb CEO from a very disgraceful industry and replicates to the rest of society.
The 2024 presidential election was won by the candidate who spent about 1/3rd less than their opponent, and we’ve seen many successful campaigns in the past decade funded by small donations beat corporate backed candidates. Funding isn’t everything, and it’s a cop out to co-sign vigilantism on such a glib basis: https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race
Rule of law is a precious thing, even if it’s imperfect, as all human systems will inevitably be. We shouldn’t be cavalier about discarding it. The alternatives are much worse.
Nobody is claiming that outspending your rivals is some kind of automatic electoral win but nice job, uh, over there. (gestures at the remains of the strawman you tore apart)
Back on topic...
The relevant campaign spending figures here would be "minimum amounts of funding to run a viable campaign" and not "how much did the winner spend."
What I, unlike our recently deceased strawman, was pointing out is that without backing from corporations and the people who own them, your chances of winning elections to higher offices (congress, presidency) are close to zero. And the odds of enough similarly-untainted, like-minded people getting elected concurrently (or at least running campaigns popular enough to pressure those in office) is even more astronomically low.
But....
Campaign funding issues only scratch the surface of what it would take to achieve any kind of real reform re: freeing the government from corporate influence.
Because even if you, say, pull off some kind of underdog miracle and get elected to Congress without completely selling out... you're not going to accomplish shit without political capital, somehow bucking the other 534 members of Congress who have sold out.
> was won by the candidate who spent about 1/3rd less than their opponent
I guess the truth of that statement depends on whether or not you consider the $36 billion dollars that Musk has lost on Twitter to have been "spent" or not.
Is that the case if you include the fact that Fox News is effectively a wing of the Republican party? It seems to me that Republicans don't need to spend more since they have an entire outside propaganda apparatus.
It's also not just funding. It's funding, gerrymandering, the electoral college, lobbying, the Supreme Court, voter suppression, etc.
When democracy doesn't work, the citizens have a duty to turn to violence against their government. They not only SHOULD do it, they MUST. That is the fundamental principle this country was founded upon.
I wish those working laws and law system, can I get them pretty please? No? Which party in power does something for it? Instead of trying to scare people with the threat of vigilante, I'd rather appease them with the lure of a healthy system.
The only problem I can actually name with vigilante justice is that it can be error-prone. Otherwise it's only an encroachment upon the state's monopoly on the dispensation of justice, and I'm not seeing a moral objection to that. And the state's approach to justice is also quite error-prone.
>we should be cautious about even softly embracing or downplaying vigilantism.
Agreed. However, there's been kind of a lot of noise being made the last year or two about "it's time to sharpen the guillotines" WRT the concentration of wealth, and as a society in the US our collective reaction seems to be "let them eat cake".
Yes, it's unfortunate and we very well might be headed towards a French Revolution era.
I hope people on both sides of those phrases remember how many benign people were killed during the French Revolution, to say nothing of how many "true believers" were as well (Robespierre was also executed by guillotine).
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Revolutions are fascinating. The Reign of Terror served as a warning to plenty of non-peasants. But, to get there, the army of the monarchy had to kill thousands of peasants without any warning or recognition of their humanity. So I think people who know the Revolution wonder whether people are reacting like we’re at the beginning, or the middle.
The French Revolution is generally agreed to have started with the third estate forming their own assembly and storming the Bastille a month later to depose the king.
Whatever you think of Jan 6, we clearly haven't deposed the President nor has any vocal section of Congress formed their own legislature so any argument that the revolution has actually begun seems specious or is stretching the definition of the word "revolution" so much as to be meaningless.
Revolutions usually involve going through a door of no-return, and there's little evidence to suggest we've hit that point. Congress could, tomorrow, announce a wealth tax and sweeping reforms and etc and most aggrievances would be resolved.
We don't say a ball is on the ground just because it's in freefall and likely to be on the ground shortly barring any last-second intervention.
Yet the right-wing narrative building since 2016 is that Trump and close legislative allies are counter-revolutionary. “You’re not going to have a country anymore” is not suggesting a return to a 1950s tax regimen.
Oh here’s my other favorite part of this discussion: Which revolution are we talking about? Left vs right? Wealthy vs poor? Capitalism vs Socialism (yes, that is very different from the previous one)? All extremely different revolutions even if they’re all bubbling to the surface now!
Hopefully when the glorious revolution comes, it’s the one people are hoping for and not one of the other ones.
There are plenty of people who will find this murder and the reasoning behind it abhorrent but still support violent overthrow of existing power structures.
Hearhear. I suppose the first tenet of conservatism in light of the education of founders of America is that rapid change in social order tends to be a net negative. Other preoccupations have been bolted on, but now we see a Republican Party that itself is changing faster than the Democratic Party.
> Abe and his family were known to have long-standing ties to the Unification Church, dating back to his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi; Abe himself had held speeches in support of the religious movement.
Yes, I worded that incorrectly. What I meant was Abe didn't directly wrong the killer (AFAIK), he just happened to be the most public supporter of the church and paid for it with his life.
Yes, that is correct. It's kind of a similar situation in the sense of "person does bad things with zero consequences and no one seems to care, until someone is fed up and takes action".
The difference is that UH CEO's decisions did have consequences. His policies resulted in people not getting the care they were supposed to get (allegedly as per online media, I do not have any direct information or source for this).
Going after Abe is like going after Tom Cruise if you want to take revenge on the Church of Scientology.
The problem is that it is systemic, the CEO is just part of it, killing the CEO will just cause a new CEO to be appointed, maybe one who is even worse. If it becomes common for unpopular CEOs to get killed, this will select for CEOs who don't mind risking their life if the pay is worth it, essentially the profile of a crime lord.
Killing the system is much harder. If you want to go the murderous route, the idea would be to murder random shareholders, not necessarily the CEO, based on how much share they have. It may include the CEO, directors, or maybe you if that company is part of of your portfolio, directly or not.
The most effective way may actually be the most boring and frustrating: financial sanctions or outcompetition by a government elected by people who actually care. A systemic solution for a systemic problem.
Society has no shortage of nihilistic parasites, in fact normal people can act like this in the right circumstances. And by normal people I literally mean you and me. The problem is addressed by avoiding such circumstances.
Yes there will, and i think it will be a terrible thing, helped by a terrible precedent we're setting now. If you don't want death to be the precedent, give people another option. He needed to be punished for what he did. None of us can put him in jail, he has too much money for that. Violence is the only recourse we're allowed, that's a terrible thing but it's true. I wish it wasn't like this
Well, the tax rate for people making (say) more than 2 million / year could just be 50%, and then increase by 10% for every 0 added.
$20 million -> 60%
$200 million -> 70%
$2 billion -> 80%
I think that would bring things under control without resorting to extrajudicial means. But apparently, that's completely impossible to achieve in the US, so here we are...
Are you aware that wealthy people sometimes employ the act of a “modest” salary and live off collateral loans from their 100s of millions to billions in stock, so as to not pay taxes?
> "...you can't just wreck people's lives for a living and expect no consequences..."
Considering how many people have had their identities stolen and suffered considerable financial damage thanks to sloppy programming and IT practices, I really would not cheer on the pursuit of that line of thought if I were you. The software industry is not exactly loved by the public right now.
Theoretically and philosophically speaking, why shouldn't we? The American Government thought it was okay to assassinate Saddam Hussein. A lot of people talk about some "ensuing chaos" if we let vigilantism get out of hand, but there are plenty of cases where people break the law in a socially regulated way and society doesn't enter into some sort of chaos.
Or terrorists who kill people. I bet not many Americans would object to taking out terrorists, especially some who have caused a lot of damage like 9/11. Some people can be quite dangerous to society, and especially those with money and power who deal out a lot of damage themselves, they often get off scot free because they have money. What about Timothy McVeigh? The U.S. assassinated him basically (how is lethal injection different than assassination? I think it's basically the same).
And what about this? Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated. Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?
Just asking questions here, but I wonder why it's morally acceptable for a country to send an army to assassinate some guy causing trouble or for the police to kill a terrorist holding hostages, but when another rich guy takes charge of a machine killing many more people than the average terrorist, assassinating them is taboo?
I'm not claiming that the trial / execution adhered to any particular standards, just that as an example of an extrajudicial killing the story's a bit shaky.
There are other examples to choose from, including the utterly nonjudicial killings of Osama bin Laden (by US forces) or Muammar Gaddafi (by Libyan rebels with at least notional US support). There's a long list of US targeted assassinations as well, from Anwar al-Awlaki (2010), with another 35 intended targets and 200 killed, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing#Use_by_United...>.
(I'm also not litigating the appropriateness of those actions, rather they're offered as instances where the US government has acted within recent memory to kill designated enemies without judicial process.)
>blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated. Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?
I get the point you're making. But I suspect it might just as easily go the other way: the 10% chance of assassination would justify having your security detail, probably paid for on the company dime, but affordable even if you're "only" making $10M/year. And once you have that candy shell and the "me against them" mentality, you might just go further with the bloodsucking.
IOW: Maybe the current situation IS tempered already. :-(
Well personal security isn't a stopgap for healthcare execs, because the personal security staff, and/or their extended families, will be using the healthcare that they provide. the risk of an insider job is high
Your post is ironically just a pro-terrorism argument. You want terrorism targeted at CEOs to change their behavior.
There are a million different viewpoints on what acts are harmful and how to minimize or prevent those harms. It's better that we use things like voting and laws and courts to collectively reach consensus on when to use violence, rather than individuals killing people who disagree with them.
You can argue that this CEO should have been arrested for some crime and you can argue that said crime should carry the death penalty upon conviction. But that doesn't mean it's valid for a random person to be judge, jury and executioner based on their own personal concept of justice.
Sorry to be pedantic here, but terrorism has multiple definitions, all of which include the keywords 'for political goals'. This doesn't seem political to kill the person responsible for the death of one of your loved one. Sure the event itself is politic, sure it breaks the social contract, but this isn't political by itself,so it isn't terrorism.
I suppose the way to ascertain whether this incident was terrorism is the ask the person whether it was revenge or to effect structural change in healthcare.
You are literally making the case that if CEOs are scared they will change their behavior. You shouldn’t even have to squint to see how that’s terrorosm.
How about 14 random people, randomly selected? That's a full Jury, a Judge, and an Executioner, worth of people.
Not endorsing the practice, merely pointing out that to put someone to death in the U.S. defined notion of due process, no more than about 2 dozen key people's assent/cooperation need be attained.
> Not endorsing the practice, merely pointing out that to put someone to death in the U.S. defined notion of due process, no more than about 2 dozen key people's assent/cooperation need be attained.
Terrorism is political policy designed to make everyone terrified "they could be next". If a random person on the street gets shot that's terrorism, but if Adolf Hitler gets shot that isn't terrorism since most people aren't Adolf Hitler and don't have to worry about being treated the same way. Somewhere between these two points is a dividing line.
Yeah, if we extend this into a gotham esque deterioration of society and slippery slope ourselves into gibberimg carnal terror that they might come for us next. But for this case, who exactly disagrees that this man was leading a harmful and terrible system? It seems to me like every single person who's ever had insurance difficulties (98%) is very much in complete agreement about the crimes of this man. And the rest are simply inempathetic, privileged people who've been lucky enough to not encounter the real insurance industry. This isn't about Healthcare, this is about insurance.
Some live who deserve to die. And many that deserve to live lose their life. Can you give it back to them? If not, don't be so hasty to take it away from others.
Using lethal force to defend yourself from lethal force is not, in my opinion, "acting hastily". If you're talking about using lethal force as a reaction to just property crime, though, I think that is morally indefensible.
Are you replying to the correct thread? It’s “just” as in “only” not “just” as in “justice”.
Regardless of your personal feelings if you kill someone in defense of yourself or your property it’s going to matter a lot what state you did that in.
If you can fairly and correctly evaluate which CEOs are especially blood sucking, simply taking their money and sending them to prison for a while will have the same effect and be far less ethically dubious.
If the evaluation is flawed... do you see why it's not a good idea?
What US executives have been so prosecuted in recent memory? And specifically for abuses of the public, not of financial frauds affecting shareholders or lenders.
Examples from the healthcare, banking, pharmaceutical (notably Purdue) or petrochemical industries might be particularly appropriate.
My read of the street is that the institution of law and courts has been assessed as insufficient and/or terminally dysfunctional.
I thought the original argument was that they should be prosecuted and condemned to death. And against this, I say if you are able to prosecute and condemn the right people, sending them to jail is enough to get a useful result.
What's the view you're defending? That CEOs should be murdered when some arbitrary citizen ready to do murder thinks the CEO is guilty enough?
I totally think law and order is dysfunctional. I don't know if people will actually resort to murder, but I could understand why they would do it. (It's far easier to talk about it than to do it.)
But it is not a good solution to the problem. The system of "murder people when we are upset" will certainly be at least as dysfunctional as the current one, if not more. Law being taken into the hands of whoever has weapons and the will to do it is what happens in narco states. Who prefers that?
I was directly addressing your statement "simply taking their money and sending them to prison for a while will have the same effect", and asking for examples of where that's happened, again, specifically for abuses against the public at large rather than for investor or creditor classes for whom justice seems far more often and readily served.
One would think that this is a target-rich environment, and yet there don't seem to be many cases of that occurring. You've not answered my own question (choosing to rather spectacularly misinterpret and misstate my comment instead). I've put the question (phrased several ways) to an LLM which first responded with a set of decades-old fraud (e.g., creditor/shareholder victims) cases, and then point blank refused to suggest who might be prosecuted, or even who has been discussed as being plausibly prosecuted (interesting set of guardrails).
The law for whatever reasons --- I can think of several and there are many which have been expressed both recently and going back through time, Anatole France's observation of the law and its majestic equality would be among the classic and better known --- seems not to take an interest into affronts against the public at large.
I think my point was clearly expressed as originally put, if you've any difficulties in interpreting this, please say how and where: My read of the street is that the institution of law and courts has been assessed as insufficient and/or terminally dysfunctional.
The alternatives are not good, a point on which I suspect we're agreed. But they'll be reached for where institutions consistently fail, if I read history correctly.
And to draw on another recent HN thread, if the purpose of a system is what it does, then the system isn't broken but is performing as intended. Which would itself be a problem.
Oh of course! I'm sure everyone here would love if that was an option. My gosh if rich people were effectively punished for their crimes we'd be living in a completely different society right now! But they aren't, and so we have this
>> And what about this? Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated. Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?
> If you can fairly and correctly evaluate which CEOs are especially blood sucking, simply taking their money and sending them to prison for a while will have the same effect and be far less ethically dubious.
But that would require the buy in and cooperation of the state, which probably wouldn't work any better than the current political/judicial system, because elites like CEOs have disproportionate influence in controlling state behavior. The system is setup to primarily protect and serve people like them.
I think the GP's idea was to add an extra-judicial check on CEO behavior that could be implemented by a motivated individual, and thus would be much harder for CEOs to subvert. Even the threat of assassination could have a restraining effect, because who wants to live in a bunker surrounded by guards? The blood-sucking CEO wouldn't be able to enjoy his ill-gotten gains.
One (somewhat small) problem with the GP's idea is its focus on CEOs. One feature of capitalism is how it can obscure culpability and create scapegoats to misdirect anger and protect the principles. A CEO definitely has fault and responsibility for the company's actions, but he's ultimately a minion of the company's owners. Above the CEO things often get shadowy.
Motivated individuals will make for an even less fair system. Current CEOs and politicians and rich businessmen are by far the most motivated individuals, with lots of resources at their disposal.
Courts and laws have become corrupted, but you tink letting people at random make their own justice will not be corrupted?
One of the reasons this even sounds remotely possible to you is we have not abandoned the idea of the rule of law. If it were abandoned outright, the CEOs (or whatever) would never be outside of protected areas and without guards and such. Ordinary citizens however, would not afford protection.
If it were possible to easily do so in today's society, I would agree with you. The entire point is that it is not easy, especially since "taking their money and sending them to prison" often involves a sentence not commensurate with the crime, and ditto for the fine.
How do you imagine murdering the guilty would be possible when sending them to jail is not? Do you think courts are corrupted, but if random people just took justice into their own hands that would work out to be fair and just?
I know nothing, but reading the news "CEO assasinated" my first thought is he was murdered by a rival organisation.
CEOs are not martians. They're some of "the people" we are talking about. They rose to the top through ruthlessness and disregard for laws and such. You think giving up on laws will make them less powerful?
The problem with analyses like these is that every CEO is protected by state limitation of liability. These people are shielded from legalism. They can lose their business potentially but their personal status (other than that tied into equity in the business) is pretty much 100% shielded.
If we assume a fantastical world without political lobbying that’s only limited by the depths of one’s pockets then it makes sense to talk about prosecuting wealthy corporate executives.
If we’re in a world with such lobbying... do you see why prosecution might fail despite its merits?
I thought the point was to prosecute them and condemn them to death. Do you think random murder by whoever is upset enough will work out to be fair in the real world, not a fantastical one?
> Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated.
Assassination isn’t prosecution.
My point is, it’s the fantastical world that actually prosecutes corporate managers for their criminal decisions. Shit, it’s the fantastical world that has American laws which make it illegal for UHC to have the business practice of denying claims by default unless/until they’re positively proven necessary beyond any sliver of doubt.
I am not trying to say murder will work to correct corporate behavior, I’m saying that it’s the thing we can see actually happens as an attempt to correct the behavior. It’s not hard to find many examples in this thread of people who think corps get away with too much. That is how one can tell there is a lack of prosecution and/or protection laws.
The real world has unfortunate circumstances that encourage this kind of crime because America does not have effective laws/enforcement which curtail the power of the corporations who write said laws. That’s the fantasy. We don’t live in a world where execs can be prosecuted for most of their anti-social decisions, let alone are.
I never made a value call about what’s fair, I only pointed out that the idea of prosecution in this context is a fantasy.
Isn't that the whole point of the social contract? People agree not to take the law into their own hands in exchange for the guarantee that society will protect and benefit them. If society is failing to protect and benefit people then the social contract has already been broken.
Stated another way, society's end of the social contract is to make sure that people generally aren't upset enough to commit murder.
> there are plenty of cases where people break the law in a socially regulated way and society doesn't enter into some sort of chaos.
You're talking about civil disobedience here, which typically doesn't involve murder.
> (how is lethal injection different than assassination? I think it's basically the same)
I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I see a huge difference between the two even though they both involve killing someone. The death penalty only comes after a legal process and court deliberation. Assassination is unregulated. That's a pretty large distinction.
> Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?
No, I don't. It would make them do their bloodsucking differently in order to minimize their risk, but I don't think it would make them cut back.
> I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I see a huge difference between the two even though they both involve killing someone. The death penalty only comes after a legal process and court deliberation. Assassination is unregulated. That's a pretty large distinction.'
True, there is a distinction but in some cases since there is no alternative, it might be the next best thing.
Holding such opinion is fine in my eyes, as long as you’ll be the one enforcing those measures. If you wish to be the one pointing the finger to have people assassinated or worse, I have no sympathy for you and would fight your ideology until the end.
> Theoretically and philosophically speaking, why shouldn't we?
Because what you are describing is literally anarchy. It’s antithetical to our foundational principles as a society.
> I bet not many Americans would object to taking out terrorists, especially some who have caused a lot of damage like 9/11.
Opposition to the war on terror is not a fringe position in the United States.
> What about Timothy McVeigh? The U.S. assassinated him basically (how is lethal injection different than assassination? I think it's basically the same).
Well you’re wrong. Timothy McVeigh was tried and convicted. That’s literally the difference between assasination and the death penalty. Opposition to the death penalty is also not a fringe position and many states no longer practice capital punishment.
> And what about this? Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated.
How do you identify the 1/10?
> Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?
I don’t know what the effect would be, why are you so confident you do?
> I wonder why it's morally acceptable for a country to send an army to assassinate some guy causing trouble or for the police to kill a terrorist holding hostages, but when another rich guy takes charge of a machine killing many more people than the average terrorist, assassinating them is taboo?
Do you really wonder? Do you really, honestly not know the difference? I find that very hard to believe.
> It’s antithetical to our foundational principles as a society.
I'm not sure it actually is. The foundational principle of society is basically the social contract "Individuals give up the right to exert violence in exchange for society providing safety and benefit."
If society fails to uphold its end of the bargain, then it seems logical that the individual is no longer obligated to hold up their end.
You don’t get to kill people when you don’t get your way. I can’t believe I even have to explain that. If assassination is acceptable behavior society is doomed. And the people carrying out those murders aren’t going to build anything better than we have now.
Yes, the healthcare system has flaws. But those flaws are fixable. In living memory we have seen dramatic improvements in the healthcare industry. Murder isn’t the solution here.
Come now, lets not resort to strawman arguments. The injustice and inequality in our current system is clearly dramatically more than "you don't get your way".
>Because what you are describing is literally anarchy. It’s antithetical to our foundational principles as a society.
If the society has failed, people will use violence to build a replacement. This is the system. Its always been the system. What you are saying here, is that stability is more important than fixing a system that is killing people.
>Opposition to the war on terror is not a fringe position in the United States.
And non violent opposition didnt really end it in any reasonable time frame.
>How do you identify the 1/10?
The bullets and blood will be a pretty good indicator.
>Do you really wonder? Do you really, honestly not know the difference? I find that very hard to believe.
The difference is that foreign murder doesn't challenge the stability and comfort that the state provides you, where as local murder might spread to you, and you might need to change your behavior to avoid it. Its just plain old discomfort and hypocrisy. To paraphrase a common internet saying, the f*king around is fine, you simply dont want to find out.
> If the society has failed, people will use violence to build a replacement. This is the system. Its always been the system. What you are saying here, is that stability is more important than fixing a system that is killing people.
Is it fixing the system or replacing it? You can’t have it both ways.
> Because what you are describing is literally anarchy. It’s antithetical to our foundational principles as a society.
A little anarchy now and then may not be a bad thing if it upsets the exisitng power structure. And the founding principles do not imply that the current society is what the founding principles were meant to imply.
> I don’t know what the effect would be, why are you so confident you do?
I am not completely confident but it's a reasonable assumption.
> Do you really wonder? Do you really, honestly not know the difference? I find that very hard to believe.
Of course there is a difference, because they are different situations. But I don't think there is a moral difference.
That is right. Our society is plenty violent, but the violence is only acceptable when it flows from those with greater power to those with lesser power.
I feel a lot of the pacifist 'we are civilised, violence should not be the answer' is a very wishy-washy opinion that comes from a position of privilege. Violence works—or at least, the threat of violence works. This is what keeps many people in line; it's how laws work. Imprisonment is inherently violent; physical force is used to restrain people and curtail their rights. Mutually-assured destruction (it's literally in the name) kept the superpowers from actually lobbing nukes at each other (and they still ended up fighting dozens of proxy wars anyway).
Vietnam recently sentenced someone to death for embezzling ~$12 billion[1].
Pacifism is a lofty ideal but also an ideal co-opted by violent power structures as a tool to reduce cognitive dissonance in those that would and should otherwise fight for their rights.
For example, I believe in peace and wish peace upon the world but I am not a pacifist and believe that a variety of techniques are necessary to prevent the world from becoming a techno-tyranny.
I agree, lots of, "my health insurance is fine! And besides wouldn't they try to kill me since i made insert relatively shitty technology for a decade". Reads like privilege of not having had these difficulties (because money), lack of empathy to read the room and maybe learn that far more people have far more problems than you might experience. And finally a suddenly realized guilty conscious(?) about their own roles in little pains and problems they created for people. Of course the person who built the claim denial system is going to be opposed to this discussion, because they're afraid. But, shouldn't they be? Shouldn't people be afraid to participate in evil systems? Otherwise what stops evil systems from continuously being spread into every aspect of everyone's (poors) lives.
Have a society where people like this can't get a foot-hold in the first place.
And organisations like Uber, Microsoft, etc. flagrantly broke the rules, got hugely rich off that, and all they got was ... a corporate fine. No personal consequences at all. Corporations aren't a force of nature, it's run by people and those people looked at the rules and said "fuck those rules, I'm going to break them for my personal enrichment". Bill Gates and that Uber asshole are still hugely rich.
We're letting the exploitive nihilists run the world, and all the lawmakers do is shrug.
- Don't shoe-horn "free market" into absolutely everything, recognizing that in some areas you need more regulation than in others.
- Reasonable anti-trust with reasonable enforcement.
- Personal responsibility instead of corporate responsibility (which is very rare today except in cases of outright fraught such as Enron, VW Diesel, etc.)
You can argue a bit about the details, but I don't think any of this is hugely controversial and has broad support across the political spectrum.
Remove limited liability to 'all asset paid by undue selling of share and dividend received, pierce the corporate veil _systematically_ in every fraud cases.
Bilzerian have a famous son who squandered the hundred of millions he stole and put in a trust before getting arrested, but I'm pretty sure defrauding people and putting the money in a trust, getting out of low-sec filled with other people like you after 5-10 year then living like a king shouldn't be possible.
Wealth tax. Increasing tax on wealth, capping at a 100% tax for wealth above $10M. Exact numbers negotiable, but that's where I'm starting the bid. When you've hit your wealth cap, it removes the motivation to drive up your bank account's high score (or at least makes it much more difficult) which is what drives most of this evil.
Unemployment. Render the entire concept of being an executive for a for-profit healthcare organization moot.
This can be accomplished with legislation. There's already plenty of established laws that prohibit non-profit organizations from doing (or not-doing) certain things[1], so it's not a stretch to have laws that prohibit for-profit organizations from doing other certain things.
...I'm only saying "legislation" because, by all reasons the free-market cannot support a for-profit health-insurance company: how can they exist at all when they're competing with non-profits for the same customers but who (like BCBS) don't have shareholder dividends to pay; so for UnitedHealthcare to somehow be both more-attractive to customers than BCBS (presumably by being cheaper) and still being able to pay dividends with whatever's left leads me to some very dark conclusions about how they operate internally. There's gotta be something the SEC can find and charge them with?
I guess this is substantially because there are two power structures in China: the capitalist class, and the Communist Party, and the Party periodically finds it necessary to remind the capitalist class under whose sufferance they are being allowed to get rich, and why.
> Should everyone working at meta be killed due to their contribution to social media?
Not one of them - but you might be shocked by the amount of people that would say yes.
> If there’s a problem people should be tried in court, not killed.
Agreed - but what happens when the courts are corrupt? At least the thinking among these types is that the rich are above the law, so the only way to achieve justice, is to take it into your own hands.
Maybe our problems are only perceptive, or maybe there's something to them.
I don't know.
But what I do know is there's a pretty big divide.
After joining hackernews I realized people here are generally open minded and thinkers. If you provide a valid point they will often reflect on their stance.
There are plenty of people who do wrong in society and are not tried in court. They are just killed by the authorities because there is no recourse to try them in court. For example: if some person takes a hostage, the police will kill them if there is no other way. And for some very rich people with a lot of power and causing damage, what is the other way?
Should they? No. Morally (the world of "should"), vigilante justice should not be used in a society with laws and courts.
Is is a different world than should, though. In the world of is, there are a large number of people who feel that the system is rigged against them, that they're never going to get justice, that the courts are bought by the rich and powerful. In the world of is, that creates the grounds where vigilante "justice" will be used.
Whether you agree with it or not, whether you think it's right or not (I don't), we live in a society with a large number of people, with guns, who feel that the legal system has failed them, the political system has failed them, and this is the only course left. That feeling, in enough people, leads to some of them taking action.
So let the rich and powerful beware. I don't agree with it, I don't advocate it, but it is. If you're powerful, and you live in a world with potential vigilantes, you'd better make sure that not very many of them feel like it's time to become a vigilante. The rich have ignored that bit of practical wisdom; yesterday may have been the chickens coming home to roost.
To spell out something I think you're saying: if you want people to use the legislative and judicial systems to deal with abuses by the rich and powerful, you need to make sure that those systems are visibly willing and able to do so.
It's not just that you need a system that adequately prosecutes and punishes crime in order to keep vigilantes in check. Most such systems evolved as an explicit alternative to systems based on vendettas or lynching. These latter modes of prosecution and punishment are always lurking under the surface because they were there first and could only be inhibited by more civilized modes; they were never abolished by them.
Nobody's saying they should be killed. But I can't deny, at least to myself, what emotions might inadvertently well up within my soul (does Meta believe in souls?) if an unthinkable event like that you are hypothesising about were to happen. It's outside of my control.
If those people singlehandedly ran a division which unnecessarily harmed or killed tens of thousands of people all in the name of selfish profit while continuously two facing the entire public claiming to care about the lives of their customers, who are most likely trapped into using the companies services by monopolistic behavior created and continued by the person, then yeah.
Also, why are we so afraid that millionaires and billionaires might be a little afraid of the populace? Shouldn't they be? Shouldn't we live in a world where we care for each other and help to improve the world? Shouldn't the people that abuse that system to kill for profit be scared? I think they should be terrified, it might convince them to treat their fellow man better.
There must be real consequences. There is a group of people in America right now which can simply never face any real consequences for anything they do. They have enough money to survive being fired, they have enough lawyers to never go to jail, and if they do they'll get a cushy cell in a fed block for a year or so, followed by still having millions of dollars when they get out. What can we, as a populace, do to keep these people from destroying our society for their personal gain (deteriorating the conditions of normal life continuously will lead to revolt and unrest and destabilization). All we have is fear. That's the only option they've given us. So we should use it. Don't like it? Maybe start listening when the entire populace of the country is screaming at you every hour of every day that you're actively and intentionally killing them. It doesn't matter if it's just a system that you oversee, it's your responsibility. Your can change it, and you aren't, and we're begging you to. That state can only last so long before something breaks. The millions of furious people will not break first
Everyone? No. Those above a certain level? Who knowingly contributed to the Rohingya genocide? I wouldn't do it, but I would laugh at their obituaries.
I saw discussions about the killer's gears. The shoes cost more than $1K. The backpack $200. The hoodie $200. The silencer $800. And etc. If this were true, it didn't look like a vengeance by someone with nothing to lose, but by some professional.
If you were going to do something like this, you have very very little hope of ever living under your original identity (you'd probably have to be without papers or flee the country), so getting some kind of very high interest loan to buy gear would be rational no matter what you had to lose.
While the weapon itself was certainly expensive, I don't know how anyone can tell the price of the fairly generic clothes from the blurry footage.
Shinzō Abe was an (indirectly) elected politician, though. The consequences for his actions should be people not voting for his party again. Murdering him because you disagree with people who voted for his party is not just an attack on one person, it's an attack on democracy.
What the recourse should be for those at the top of corporations whose decisions negatively impact millions of people is far less clear. "Voting with your wallet" isn't really a thing if you only have bad choices.
sorry for the downvote, but you misunderstand the motive of his asssasin. Abe and his family were directly involved in a church movement that had harmed the assassin's family. Strangely, it had very little do with politics, and so elections could not have righted the perceived wrongs.
Wait so there was near universal outcry on the left about “Jan 6 insurrection” but assassination of public figures is actually fine if they have a low approval rating and allegedly negatively affect people’s lives? Guess what? Congress is lucky if 10% of people across the board think they AREN’T screwing up the country.
Wait so there was near universal outcry on the left about “Jan 6 insurrection” but assassination of public figures is actually fine if they have a low approval rating and allegedly negatively affect people’s lives?
It sounds like you're saying people should have the same attitude towards a mob storming the capital on the claim of a stolen election vs a man who systematically oppressed those who are ill, and arguably stole from them as well?
I don't wish harm on anyone but these are two very morally different situations, which require very different responses.
Also it is not clear to me that those who are outraged at the CEO is on the left. I'd imagine that the right is equally denied of health coverage while ill, and it seems plausible that they would be just as angry as those on the left.
Not to get into political aspects and you putting "quotes" around Jan 6 insurrection (attempt) but this is a big country and there will always be someone who thinks that public figures are screwing them (or not). In Congress however, the people have ability to replace such figures, every two or six years. Those are there are elected by the majority of their constituents and the minority which "lost" will have opportunity to change the direction for their district/state in two or six years.
You cannot compare that to this tragedy in any way/shape/form...
Oh yeah. I agree that all powerful people which most people hate should be scared. What other incentive is there for them to not screw everyone over forever? They're certainly not gonna just decide to care about other people. However, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and fired up his base on the lie that it was stolen from him and they'd need to storm the government to take back power if they didn't want to be completely disenfranchised forever and hunted down like dogs in the street. All of which was obviously a lie. Even funnier how they screamed about being disenfranchised after 2020 and just won the next election, guess that was a lie too?
If Donald Trump really had the 2020 election stolen from him i'd support the jan 6 people because they'd be right. But they're not, they voted and they lost, it was not stolen from them. On the other hand, who exactly is disagreeing that this health insurance company is hurting all of us? What evidence do we have that they're not actually denying necessary care and, in fact, are actually the only person that can save us from the evil other insurance companies that actually provide insurance to their members? I don't see that rhetoric here. The situations are very different.
70%+ of Americans are happy with their healthcare. I have UHC and I'm happy with my coverage. The comments in the article and your post bring to mind nihilism more than some CEO none of us knew.
What's the most serious claim you've had to make with UHC?
I fell prey to their AI that (definitely unintentionally) denied 90% of claims. I required surgery for a repetitive stress injury. I fought it and got the surgery done, but it pushed the surgery into the new plan year which I suppose was the original intention.
If this was a family member with cancer being treated the same way I'd be significantly more sanguine.
Emergency surgery that probably would have invariably killed me since the organ was already gangrenous.
It got called "medically unnecessary" because apparently the person processing the claim couldn't read the fact that the organ was already dead and stopped at the line "stomach pain".
Health care is a good or service that depends on other people's labor. People do not have a right to other people's labor (no matter how much they insist otherwise). It's entirely reasonable to bring up the fact that most Americans are happy with their health care.
I disagree that people don't have the right to other people's labor. Society is effectively a system where people pool their labor, resources, ability, etc. for mutual benefit. If people can't reasonably expect to gain some of the benefits that other people can provide, then why would they enter into the social contract in the first place?
>People do not have a right to other people's labor
Oh god not this nonsense "you're enslaving the doctors" argument.
By the way, insurance companies don't provide health care. They're a financial layer set to extract profit from those who need it, and United Healthcare seems to be the best at it.
Insurance is an attempt at statistical multiplexing of a financial resource whose profit taking mechanism is investment of float, and management of spread, leading to perverse incentives when it comes time to actually pay out.
As statistical multiplexing usually does, it improves things somewhat when you can't grow things larger, but when done for-profit with dividends, often disincents actually solving the capacity problem.
I'm not sure what your second clause means other than "currently, people with more money can buy more health care". Of course it would be nice if the supply matched the demand r.e. health care. But neither single-payer systems nor more radical "restructurings" have solved that problem.
"70% of Americans are happy with their fire insurance. The ones whose homes burn down aren't, and are saying something about their claims being denied, but they are a minority."
