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.
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.
- The difference is Brian Thompson deserved it. Brain Thompson was a legitimately evil person who - in a system where consequences can happen to the rich - would have been severely punished and/or executed for the harm he has done.
And therein lies the problem. We are not in a system where consequences can happen to the rich. People like Brian Thompson can abuse the public at large for his own gain. They’ve purchased congress, they have purchased the white house, they have purchased the courts, they have purchased the police.
All legal recourse has been denied to the average citizen. Voting, writing congressmen, petitioning, picketing, protesting…these things have no effect on public policy or corporate behavior. The rich own the government, the government will do what the rich people want it to do. They’ll never arrest a rich person for, say, torturing millions of people.
The soap box fails, the ballot box fails, what’s left is the ammo box. The men who wrote our founding documents fought a grape shot, musket ball and bayonet war for the chance to write them; the idea that - when all else fails - things sometimes have to get fucking ugly was on their minds. Hence the constitutional right to bear arms in this country, with the implication being sometimes you’ve got to walk up to a rich and powerful person who is doing a lot of harm and catastrophically damage his vital organs.
I’ll leave this topic with this: I’ve seen topics of discussion here on Lemmy that read something like “You say marriages used to last before no-fault divorce? Naw, it’s just women used to murder their husbands a lot more.” And the comments section of these were nothing but cheers and applause. The overall Lemmy community is perfectly fine with that. A person in a lower position of power and an intolerable position takes the opportunity to end the life of a person in higher power over them to escape that intolerable position. It’s okay when a wife kills her husband because he’s beating her, right Lemmy? So it must also be okay when an ordinary citizen kills an oligarch because the oligarch has been denying them necessary healthcare. “He was beating me so I killed him.” “He was keeping me from getting treatment, so I killed him.” The difference I see is there are people who aren’t saying “You go girl” to the second one.
- Probably but whatever.
Hear hear!
“[A]ll experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
As for your family discussion, generally it’s advised to avoid bringing up controversial topics because it almost never ends well.
That being said, I’ve found that the following statement is pretty universally agreeable:
Thompson led a company that was number one in the industry in denying coverage for routine and life-saving healthcare to people who had paid good money for and were legally entitled to coverage, meaning it’s almost certain that multiple people have died as a result of the policies he oversaw the execution of in the name of profit. So while I don’t condone murder as a method to solve problems with the healthcare system, it’s difficult for me to feel any sympathy for the victim.
Thanks, yes generally zero political or hot topics are brought up by me. However this one was thrown in my face randomly by my parent hoping to pick a fight.
Only response was “how is it any different than any other murder ?”
Not in the real hopes we have a conversation but to highlight its not just a black and white topic… And it effectively shut the convo down because this person wasn’t in their echo chamber and those type of people don’t really like a healthy real conversation :)
!actual_discussion@lemmy.ca Let’s get that community back up and running
i would also like to know a place to chat on this
Hello folks! Thank you for your responses! Sorry for delay I was very overwhelmed by the holidays and didn’t see how many people contributed until now.
Hope you are all doing well and taking the time to read it all now.
