Hello! So two things:
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I would like to have a discussion about the UHC CEO killing and if it is at all any different than the ~45 murders a day in the USA…(other than the obvious “he was rich” one). -Typical Christmas family get together brought this up as a topic and was curious about the different perspectives. Argument made by others was “this sets a bad precedent”, and the response was “how is this any different than someone getting murdered for literally any reason”. Hate, lust, money, your car…whatever the motivation, how is this any different?
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Is there a better location to post said discussion topic?
I mostly lurk Lemmy, so not really sure how to find the correct communities for said topic.
Thanks!
For the first….
Honestly, it’s probably less offensive and more justifiable than most shootings.
Is it still murder? Yes, imo.
Vigilantism is bad. It’s horrible. If you add up all the Brian Thompsons that get taken out, vs, all the others who didn’t actually do anything- Ahmaud Arbery, comes to mind…
Guess what I’m saying is that Luigi did something awful, but his target selection was most appreciated.
The way I see it, this was just another shooting. Except, instead of targeting innocents or literal children, it was someone who actually played some part in making them so desperate
And in the first 48 hours, the adjuster did more to shake the health insurance racket than decades of the public demanding change.
They say we need the rule of law, otherwise we just have mob rule… But maybe it’s worth wondering if mob rule isn’t as bad as it’s cracked up to be
It’s been said that those that make change via peaceful means impossible, invite violence.
I don’t like that someone was shot, but this is the direction we’re heading unless we can get this fixed.
It’s not just health care either, it’s every large corporation trying to get more from their employees and more from their customers without giving back anything in exchange … or realizing that they have enough.
The infinite growth mindset is out of control and ridiculous.
Infinite growth within a finite system is literally cancer.
I’d argue that this wasn’t mob rule. It’s not like a chaotic group that went a too far. This was a targetted attack on an evil aggressor. This was the people getting a little bit of justice.
Fair, but I think our understandings of mob rule differ
To me, mob rule isn’t just mobs with pitchforks, it’s when people get so upset by injustice, they turn to violence. Humans are naturally very averse to killing, even in war, with their lives on the line, most people struggle to kill (hence the psychological techniques like dehumanization and tearing people down until they can follow orders without thinking much)
Imagine a feudal lord who works his people to death. To me, a knife in the back or poison in the wine is mob rule, assuming it’s organic and/or the people tacitly support it by closing ranks around the assassin
It’s anarchy, which is not the absence of rules, but the absence of explicit laws. Is the natural human state - we don’t need laws from the state or from sky daddy to get along.
Laws create clear lines (theoretically), which say “if you’re on this side you’re safe”
Mob rule means “if you piss people off so bad they turn on you, you suffer the consequences”. You don’t get clear lines to exploit, you don’t get to hide behind bureaucracy…you’re just responsible for your actions in a very organic way
You want to bring back “mob rule” such as allowing people to gang up and lynch people they don’t like? That’s disgusting.
Vigilantism is horrible, and it’s it’s a symptom of a system that is failing. It means people feel that other non-violent options don’t work.
I’ll go a step further and say that, while I agree that vigilantism in general is bad for society, I don’t think that’s a universal truth. Targets and motives and effects matter. Sometimes vigilantism is both necessary and good. And that happens when the system itself becomes badly biased against true justice - where things are so bad that the people perpetrating the mass injustices aren’t even considered to be breaking the law, let alone just not being prosecuted for it. Not to Godwin things so quickly on purpose, but it would have been considered vigilantism to kill nazis as a German citizen in the 30’s and 40’s. I think most people today would agree that it would nonetheless have been completely justified. I’m not saying we’re that far gone just yet - but I’m saying when things get to the point where vigilante justice is the only justice, and when the system itself is structured to support injustice…
I’m also not sure what Luigi did fits a strict definition of 'vigilantism", but that’s kind of irrelevant to the point. In a way he’s kind of an anti-vigilante? Using crime to handle horrible people who technically aren’t legally criminals?
Either way, there are a lot of things deeply wrong with the US currently, on a systematic level, and it’s clear to almost everybody that the justice and healthcare systems are are major parts of that unwellness. The system as a whole has been getting worse and worse for decades. It’s frankly surprising that it took this long for something like this to happen - but I’m sure it won’t be the last time.
It’s clear that a lot of people are feeling the same sort of way - it’s not often that a law-abiding citizen is publicly murdered and the nation, as a whole, celebrates and sends their well-wishes to the shooter. People wouldn’t react that way if they already felt the system was serving justice acceptably.
The US spent trillions to chase one guy who caused less US citizen deaths than this CEO. I think a Bin Laden makes for a much better example of the hypocrisy than Nazis.
It’s very much in the “cool motive, still murder” category. I’m not living in the US but I heard the healthcare horror stories and I can relate to someone just snapping. He who sows wind, reaps the whirlwind.
Its more in the catagory of “killing the murderer of my child”, but replace child with millions of US residents who couldn’t afford treatments due to arbitrary denial of coverage
It may be murder, but this then brings the question: “Should a jury be allowed to be instructed to, not only being the judge of facts, but also the judge of law?” (aka: should a jury receive the instruction that they are allowed to acquit even if they technically committed a crime, but the jury feels the law should not be applied in this circumstance? They are technically always able to to that via Jury Nullification, but they never are allowed to receive that instruction that they are allowed to.)