Evan drowns a good point in his own drama. I've moderated against him on a Stack Exchange site before and it's tedious how far he can push the limits. He knows the rules, the process, what's expected, and he knows how lowly moderators react when they the system alerts them to infractions. It's no surprise he's earned himself [another] suspension here.
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.
I kind of gave up interacting with StackExchange in a moderation/power user role after the repeated drama episodes where they kept disrespecting the community's input. I don't even remember what the individual drama cases were, I just got tired of feeling slighted. Your point about the willful license violation seems like it's along the same lines.
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.
The straw that broke this camel's back was they edited and rewrote an answer I had posted, but left my name/avatar beside what was no longer my words. That was too much for me. I wouldn't mind if they did something like "(MOD EDIT: alternate info)" or removed it if they thought it was incorrect, but I can't be having my face and name next to words I never uttered. I've never experienced that type of mod behaviour anywhere since.
Completely rewriting it is against the rules, you should have reverted that or taken it to meta. They're supposed to post a new answer instead, if they think it deserved that much of a change.
You make it sound like "they" is stackexchange inc. Don't you just mean another user of the site, just like you can edit other posts? The feature that always shows who last edited a post and what changes (byte for byte diff) were made if you click on it?
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)
> 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.
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.
Can you link to the post in question? An edit is credited to the person doing the edit. You can inspect it. Do you claim it was done differently and there's no evidence to that in the revision history of the post?
TBF having others edit posts is pretty key to SO. It's how, for instance, the site handles those still learning English - editors try to parse what the person meant and reframe the question or answer accordingly.
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?
> TBF having others edit posts is pretty key to SO. It's how, for instance, the site handles those still learning English - editors try to parse what the person meant and reframe the question or answer accordingly.
Right. Editing a message should be for stuff like typos, markup, bugs in example code, etc.
Yes, instead of removing attribution and keeping the content, if Stack Overflow doesn't want to be associated with the user they should just delete all of it.
And pray Jon Skeet stays on the straight and narrow.
I know my fame and legendary repute may lead one to believe otherwise, but I hate drama. I probably hate drama more than anyone else on the planet. We should _just_ focus on the facts when I post. And on the facts, I know for certain that we're always on the same page and in agreement, so long as you're right. And you're normally right.
IMHO you are absolutely in the right here but yearly ban might do you good. This level of engagement with a single corporate site is not healthy for anybody. I know it's unjust (all life is), hurtful and evokes all negative emotions but sometimes you need to be hurting a bit to get out of local minimum in your life that sucks your time and resources by just being not terrible enough to leave.
Besides SO viewership drops like a stone since LLMs became a thing. Soon it'll be an open-air museum rather than a staple.
It's the implicit tyranny of building or contributing to public commons owned by corporations beholden to ideological individuals, investors, or advertisers, or to government jurisdictions with particular intrusive laws and policies. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to force a company to maintain publication of content it doesn't want to host... it can simply delete users and content whenever it chooses, but typically doesn't for reasons of goodwill and/or reputation. Youtube deletes millions of people's comments and videos daily because an AI algorithm disagreed with them by virtue of sentiment analysis and decided their combination of words was not allowed. At some point though, people around the world will demand a digital "Bill of Rights", even if the content, processing, and/or publication is happening on the systems of for-profit corporations... it's either that, or enough people must leave forums that have a history of one-sided, unfair, and/or unethical (while maybe legal) practices.
>enough people must leave forums that have a history of one-sided, unfair, and/or unethical (while maybe legal) practices
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.
Because if enough of the powerless people agree on what is right, then they may act on that collectively. That could threaten the rich's hold on power.
What cost? Moderators are volunteers, not employees. The closest thing to paid moderators are the Community Management team but they only step in occasionally.
Of course, people, whether criminals or not, should be attributed for their intellectual contributions but there is a bigger point here which people do not say enough:
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.
I would like to piggyback on this sentiment to call out a common feeling in the US (and probably elsewhere).
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.
>When people are facing jail time
Actually, it's when _men_ are facing jail time, that people make rape jokes. I've never really heard people do it for women at all.
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
This is not mentioned nearly enough. I think it’s rooted in the idea that people must be either great or awful when being both is a very real possibility.
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 [...]
This view too, is naive. There absolutely are bad guys. There absolutely are good guys. Bad people still occasionally do good things; Good people occasionally do bad things.
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,
People will judge you as good or bad. I think that's the extent of my agreement. I'll use a common joke as my perspective here:
"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.
Interesting perspective, and it's hard to disagree with the idea that there are people who are more outliers than some others on either end, which is just a natural result of any distribution, though I think another angle to this topic is how "good" and "bad" are always relative. Throughout human history, somebody who is regarded as a visionary, saint and savior by their own in-group might well be regarded as the biggest evil by another group of humans. Some simple examples would be somebody like Columbus or Genghis Khan. Those are extreme cases of course, but the same applies on various scales.
Solzhenitsyn had it right that we are all capable of good or bad actions:
"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."
Don't wanna argue too deeply into philosophy. But I definitely think there is a certain moral code embedded in you by your early childhood. That moral compass on how you navigate life.
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.
I don't think he intended Twitter to be a good financial investment. It seems like he bought it for its power in the public discourse. Whether or not that investment paid off is an exercise for the reader.
The failures of other electric car companies; Fisker Arrival, Dyson EV, Nikola, Faraday Future, would seem to indicate that being merely competent is a higher compliment than it feels like it would be.
His biographies go into far more detail than fit here, but even if you only believe half of those stories, he is still way more involved that most investors. At one point he slept in his office at the Fremont plant to get the Model 3 launched. There's more to him than being able to sign a check.
> 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.
Agreed, we kept the Reiser filesystem namesake and attribution in the kernel even after his murder. Didn't adversely affect the project or the views of Reiser himself.
> 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.
Why should the rest of society be forced to continue associating with someone?
How are you “forced to continue associating with someone” who is arrested and cannot use their online accounts? What exactly does that do to you? And how does Stack Overflow keeping all the posts but removing the name protect you in any way?
>how does Stack Overflow keeping all the posts but removing the name protect you in any way?
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.
They shouldn't be "forced" to continue associating with someone; they should not change their position on whether or not they should associate with said person based on this situation.
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.
Maybe people are just very fickle these days, but last I checked: "someone posting on your server" is not association. Site owners put in that one article precisely so that cannot be the case.
But this does break the CC license by unattributing content but not deleting it, so that's bad.
I don't know if people are different these days, but we certainly have taken the concept "all relationships are voluntary" too far. If we had a society where people associated with each other only when there was personal gain to be made, that would not be a very nice society.
> you have entered into a social contract to interact with others.
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.
Please don't post in the flamewar style, and please edit out swipes like "what are you talking about" from your posts here. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I don't really understand the issue. They say that people have a legal system if they're wronged by these companies. And it's clear that the legal system isn't an option for normal people when a company like UHS denies claims. So I want to know what they're talking about and why they think the justice system is sufficient as it is today to help normal people.
Seriously. I want to know what they're talking about. The justice system they're stating exists simply does not.
It has nothing to do with a flame war. That's an unfair characterisation, particularly when people's lives are so deeply affected when they can't get the care they need because of their insurance company.
"What are you talking about?" is a swipe in online English. It insinuates that the other person doesn't know what they're talking about.
That's even more true in a comment like the GP, which starts with 3 tendentious sentences hammering the other person's point and then moves to "What are you talking about". Such a comment pattern-matches to a cross-examination style of conversation, which the HN guidelines ask you to avoid because it's not what we want here.
If you really want to know what someone is talking about, "what are you talking about?" is an ineffective way to say so, since it means the opposite of what it says, with an overlay of insult.
Yet, my ex co-worker who has been convicted of murder and is serving life without possibility of parole has his account untouched [0]. It's surprising because his case was all over the news and tabloids.
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.
But did your co-worker see massive online support for the murder, with loads of people arguing it was justified and good for society? He may have been "all over the news", but was it glowing, positive coverage of the murder?
Be honest, the coverage of your ex co-worker's crime was not comparable to Mangione's murder, was it?
Not just famous, but causing users to publicly support the murder and voice support for future murders too. Again, the central point is that most murder is condemned by the public while this one is enjoyable a disturbing amount of support.
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?
>causing users to publicly support the murder and voice support for future murders too.
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 repeated your statement without answering my question. Where are these CEO murder posts? Do you think Luigi posted a manifesto on SO?
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?
But the point is, removing all those comments is still work. Not too many people are sad that a terrorist isn't getting attribution for his SO posts. Personally, if it save the moderation team just 10 man-hours of work I'd consider it a positive tradeoff.
> 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.
I've been considering writing a distributed filesystem which makes shell pipelines easier to share with others (e.g. stronger guarantees that they'll do the same thing when run elsewhere).
Luigi, in the Mario bro's sense, goes through a lot of pipes. Perhaps I'll call it LuigiFS.
Stack Overflow's rules for bounties [0] discourage promotional bounties but do not state that bounties cannot be given to the same user or on the basis of the user as opposed to a user's answers.
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.
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.
In cases where voting patterns appear to be targeted, the votes are likely to be reversed, either by automatic systems or manually following an investigation by the staff, which will cause a loss of reputation earned from these votes.
-----
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.
Just to be clear though, if I find a user because they gave a great answer to my question and then I look at their other answers, *am I allowed to upvote them on the basis that they are great answers?*
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.
For whatever it's worth, I've done that before and haven't noticed them being undone. But then, neither did the auhtor of the article so who knows.
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
I wouldn't worry about it. It's generally not something that gets noticed.
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.
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...
>(or - let's be honest - imagined new rules after the fact)
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.
A warning would have been absolutely sufficient, at most a very short term ban but given there was no harm being done currently and the rules weren't even clear no ban is justified.
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).
This specific user has a very long history on SO and the rest of the network. You have to assume that this history might have played a part in the decision to suspend instead of only warning.
1 year suspensions are not handed out for first offenses. The guidelines for mods are to give escalating suspensions for 7/30/365 days, so this is most likely at least the third suspension for this user.
This case could be different. Do you know he was suspended before? It makes sense that they'd want to ban him for a year if this is retribution. It all checks out. The email doesn't mention a previous ban which I'd expect to be mentioned if it was a factor.
Let's move this away from Mr Mangione's direct example and consider what appropriate policy should be where serious crime gathers attention.
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.
Marc Lépine's manifesto (he walked into Montréal's Polytechnique and killed 14 women and shot several more, he was blaming them studying and feminism for his not getting accepted) is treated as gospel on incel forums. Many acts of incel/misogynist terrorism have been committed by people who frequented such forums. Ideology is not videogames and does have an impact on people's actions. You can look at the whole history of the 20th centuries' wars for another very obvious example.
I don't need others to decide what ideology I need to be protected from for me. I'm much more concerned about the ideology of the people who think information control is justifiable.
Others are responsible for their own actions. Don't impose information control on me because others do stupid shit.
>I'm much more concerned about the ideology of the people who think information control is justifiable.
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.
"Won't someone think of young men!" is a point that won't travel far because the world is owned and ruled by men, young and old. Of course, most men are poor and powerless in comparison. So they (we) rage against those we do have some power over.
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.
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.
Fair point, and I tried to call that out elsewhere in my comment. Though IMO it's not entirely a class problem. Males as a gender do have certain tendencies that require (more? different?) nurturing to avoid antisocial outcomes. (I say this as a male who has struggled with antisocial behavior and seen it in my peers.)
>"Won't someone think of young men!" is a point that won't travel far because the world is owned and ruled by men, young and old
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.
>Since when do women have more job opportunities than men?
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.
> 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?
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?
>You also haven't answered what help men are receiving but choosing to refuse. I realize I'm wasting my time since you're not arguing in good faith so I'll end the discussion here.
I am not the person you were talking to before. I don’t have to answer questions you didn’t ask me…
Perhaps the issue with "the Internet enables self-learning" is that people just read the arguments they like and dismiss the ones they don't like; however perverse it is, there's some merit to an authority figure/your friends in a classroom saying "you're wrong" -- but then again, in the Taliban-ruled areas of the United States they teach that evolution is a lie.
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.
"Inspired" seems perhaps too strong a word for the connection.
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?
Nope, wrong cause direction. Do people never become mass killers to get attention? Does giving mass killers more attention, making them famous affect anything, maybe encourage more?
"No" is a reasonable response if you can support it.
You know what the actual biggest difference between countries with large amounts of mass killings and those that don't is? Gun control.
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
Legality and enforcement are orthogonal concepts. They should align, but sometimes they don't and you get an unenforced law.
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.
> Luigi Mangione's comments on stack overflow don't even register in terms of violence caused.
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.
Marx is incredibly helpful in most things as long as you realize that he managed to identify the right problem (which I referenced by the quote), not necessarily the solution; and that his proposed solutions have never been properly tested, and that his ideas for the solution to the problem were -- just like Nietzsche's ideas -- bastardized by terrible people for their own gain.
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.
>Is there now an incentive to advertise your views by committing crime to attract as much attention as possible?
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.
It would no doubt have an effect, but availability of firearms is probably the biggest factor. School shootings in my country (where gun ownership is strictly controlled) are almost non-existent, but definitely reported on when they occur — probably more so for the very reason they are so infrequent.
This is probably optimistic - they're a meme, kids don't need to see reporting about new school shootings to get the idea that shooting up your school is the way to go, it's something communities are quite naturally propagating amongst themselves - but it seems super clear that they wouldn't have become a meme in the first place without repeated breathless scandalising reporting.
If they do so with a political point eg "you should care as much about children in ...." Maybe that point has some considerable support too. Should that be suppressed too? Maybe it should. Uncomfortable.
The point raised about removing the attributions of Luigi Mangione is valid and important. I don't sympathise much with the authors whining about being suspended for upvoting Mangione's post, just because they were Mangione's.
>Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
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.
The post makes it clear that the author made the votes because of who wrote them. He did it intentionally and systematically. That was the reason to suspend the author.
Reading before commenting saves everyone time, not only mine and yours, but everyone else’s that might stumble upon this thread.
Or it could be a reference to the Portuguese patrol ship Viana Do Castelo, which has that very registration number! I think there are so many numerical ID schemes in use that you'd be able to find something relevent for any large number.
There is a certain irony in this, given that such behaviour (demonstrating that rule of law applies only to the peons) is what has so inflamed the public in support of Mangione.
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.
I would argue the 2024 election was quite the opposite.
> 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.
Don't use absolute numbers here, that's lying with statistics.
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
People can care and think the two candidates with a chance to win are too bad to endorse with a vote, leading them to stay home and spend their time more wisely than in what they might consider to be a farce of democracy.
They may also live in an area where their preferred candidate has no chance of winning, making their vote a waste of time.
Of course it makes a difference to vote for what you actually want, no matter if they win this time. If you don't have an appointment at the euthanasia office and you (or someone who can vote in your name) is in good enough health to reasonably go, I can't (currently) think of an argument why it wouldn't be worth one's time to vote for who should govern you
Speaking of relative: since the term "landslide" has been thrown around in the direct aftermath of the election quite a bit, it's interesting to note that nationwide, Trump only received 1.5% more votes than Harris.
This is especially telling in the light of the numbers you just gave on voter turnout.
The enthusiasm gap was entirely on the Democrat side this past election. Donald Trump won considerably more votes this past election than he ever has. There are also a significant number of prominent former lifelong Democrats that switched to being Trump supporters. Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., and Elon Musk come to mind.
> 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.
Quite astonished to see Elon Musk being used as an example of someone whose views are worth following. If someone goes from e.g. Red Cross employee to ever more worrying statements and eventually outright racism and misinformation, I'm worried what happened to them (some disease?) more than thinking "ah crap, the racism party was right after all, let me go and vote AfD now"
So, turnout was still really high but not literally the highest in 120 years. Who's talking about lying with statistics again?
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.
The relative turnout is always going to be more interesting given that population growth means you'll almost always soon exceed your total turnout within a few election cycles:
> 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.
There are actual statistics about this past memes though.There were conservative personalities dogged down in trying to reject Luigi.
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.
In the case of Mangione, some stats proved his support reached the real world. If I remember correctly, something like 43% of <30s approved of his crime.
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).
Not an American, so I don't really have much say in it. But, if 31% of your younger population is thinking that assassination was justified... That's tens of millions of people. I would be wondering why, and how that is even acceptable. It's definitely showing how it can't be categorized as black/white issue.
Look at the website for that polling company. It is bizarre. None of the people on the people page have the company on their LinkedIn pages. Seems to be astroturf.
Edit: look at the photos of the people… AI generated perhaps?
Ah, thanks, I forgot the real numbers. That's still tens of millions of people supporting an assassin, which majority or not, should tell you something about this country.
Ok, show me a non-peon who shot a man in broad daylight and on video and didn't face the law afterward.
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.
There has been worse, such as the affluenza case. I don't think peons get away with running over a bunch of people and then claiming they didnt know better because they grew up too rich.
They ad up though. How many DUI murders are equivalent to a single premeditated murder?
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)
Right! It was an accident, not murder! Even if they were drunk. And high. And on Valium. And doing 70 in a residential neighborhood. And on a restricted license from a previous DUI...
...Doesn't mean they meant to kill someone! Completely different crimes.
CIA officer Allen Lawrence Pope flew a B-26 bomber targeting civilian merchant vessels in Indonesia as part of an operation to overthrow the Indonesian president by weakening the economy and inspiring local discontent. He personally claimed to have "enjoyed killing Communists". His plane was shot down, and he was eventually returned to the US, where he continued to fly planes for the CIA.
Does this count? Or is the government allowed to indiscriminately kill civilians whenever and wherever they feel like it?
Bug issue is we have more than enough research and awareness that you can consider drunk driving a "choice" not just some unfortunate accident. You're not relieved of all mental cognition when you're drunk.
The thing here is, the non-peon has other means to get the same result, just caring about if he did it or not does not make the situation less worse - same intention, same severity.
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.
As someone else mentioned Duck, I’ll add all the questionable police shootings that gets a slap on the wrist as the Police can be seen as the enforcers of the upper class / c-suite
Absolutely blows my mind that, in 2025, anyone can treat getting in a car drunk and causing death as anything less than premeditated. Motonormativity strikes again, I guess.
While this isn't a good thing, the fact that it was Luigi's account would've maybe caused some people to upvote his answers and questions just as-is now and thus would've artificially inflated his account's points. Thus, maybe freezing his account would've been a better thing to do (if possible to freeze upvotes/votes too)?
>Today's best known examples of damnatio memoriae from antiquity concern chiselling stone inscriptions or deliberately omitting certain information from them.
>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?
As Evan points out in TFA, this has happened before.
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.
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.
Just a hunch that this could be a mistake of an overzealous community mod that thought that the nick Luigi Mangione was a troll... and that Evan Carroll is the best troll on the Stack Exchange network and he pushed the situation as he does and simply had the opposite effect than he thought he would ("Evan Carroll is flamebaiting again? There's no real problem, give him one year suspension" instead of "Oi, did someone make a mistake here here?")
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)
You can't be the best troll, if you never troll: I never troll, ever. But other than that. Luigi's acct wasn't renamed by a community mod, from Zoe and as quoted in the article
> 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
I see this as a trade off for moderation. The question for this could be rephrased as "which takes less moderation?" Option 1 is moderating the votes, voting reversals, and bounty reversals... or changing the user name so that it's less visible?
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.
I have a feeling this action will only have a Streisand effect.
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.
This case is such an interesting crossroads. He has such insane support — I went to two improv shows this past week where he was the crowd choice for a topic and the shows received insane applause. But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.
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.
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.
"The people behind that kind of violence can hide behind the layers of indirection."
>[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.*
> 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.
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.
This is the same 'get out clause' that the antagonist in the Saw films uses: "I didn't harm those people directly, I only created the conditions under which they would be harmed."
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.
Distorting the meaning of words is how these people justify their actions. Not giving them what they want? That’s violence now! Thus justifying retaliatory - or even pre-emptive - 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.
Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
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.
> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Correct! I was more-so addressing the following statement, not necessarily the mathematical maximum one:
> 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.
> This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
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.
> This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
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.
If you think payday lenders care one iota about debtors going bankrupt after collecting multiples of the original loan amount in interest, I cannot help you.
I get that you have an ideological position to defend and, based on your other comments in this thread have either an inability or an unwillingness to cede any ground. So while, yes, I do understand how loans work, I do not have any further interest in talking to you about payday lenders. Have a nice day.
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.
I live in a Nordic country and the state-owned insurance provider often denies healthcare, much like health insurance companies in the US.
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.
In the US they deny treatment that is considered essential by their own doctors. I know you were saying the same thing, but your comment seems to minimize the difference.
I'm confused, you said that there isn't any denial of healthcare where you are, but then described very clearly and explicitly how some people are denied healthcare, and they sometimes die as a result. Maybe you understand the word "deny" differently?
the big point you are missing is the denial of paying for treatment after it has been applied.
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.
Because you mentioned Germany and surprise bills...
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.
it's most likely because you didn't have insurance at all. if you had travel insurance you should have forwarded that to them. (but see below about calling an ambulance that is not needed)
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.
indeed. while i was reading up on this i kept wondering if there is no way to call a doctor without calling an ambulance. i know there are private doctors that you can call (i recently saw a report about a doctor who said that he gets called specifically because his patients do not want to be taken to a hospital (and don't need to)), but when you call emergency services then an ambulance seems to be the only option.
Of course it does. The patients wanted care early enough to save their live. They denied them that care. Hypothetical care after death is worthless.
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.
Except it just doesn't, denial of claim has a very specific meaning, there's no reason to go all philosophical.
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.
This sub-thread is about denying healthcare. Not about denying claims. In fact, denying a claim (i.e. payment for healthcare services) has the moral implications discussed here mainly if not only because denial of payment is tantamount to denial of healthcare.
Ah, so it's the system that's bad. Can't do anything about it, only shrug and follow orders. Somebody else would have switched the gas chamber on anyway.
> Ah, so by saying that denying insurance claims is not violence, because all insurance systems must deny some claims, I'm basically Hitler.
You're probably purposefully derailing the conversation, but for the sake of others let me bite: pointing out the resemblance of following orders of a killing system and excusing the individuals working in this system as "order followers", has nothing to do with calling anybody "literally Hitler".
> Do you think that Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung never denies claims? That it never denies care? Is it also violence when it does so?
IIUC, those are also private companies or at least to a degree. So probably similar to american healthcare, just more regulated.
Let's take a look at a 100% pure public healthcare instead, for example La Seguridad Social in Spain.
It denies some claims, care, and can cause some suffering and death. The institution is administered directly by some leadership individuals, and to some degree even by the elected government. Those individuals are not driven directly by the "financial obligation to make the maximum profit" out of healthcare. However they indirectly are, there are decisions to be made on spending, and budget is not magically infinite. These decisions are hard: you can't make everyone happy and healthy, whatever the result, some people suffer and die. See the trolley problem.
So if a public healthcare system works badly, and causes too much pain and suffering, then some of these individuals can also be held responsible. It's just that in practice, in general any public system works more towards the benefit of society than for some shareholders.
To be blunt: if the government individuals take decisions that degrade the public healthcare system, for their own benefit, whatever that is, then those individuals should maybe be shot in public too. This kind of violence, terrorism, works historically well, especially if it isn't targeted at random civilians. Democracy is not simply the rule of the majority.
It's not a matter of awareness, the public knows how perverse the incentives of private health insurance are, and how a public system can do much better. But the private system will never be replaced in the current american political landscape - without violence.
OK, I’m glad that we agree that any healthcare system will deny care to some people. That’s my point: this is necessarily the case, so it cannot be automatically “violence” when that happens. It is extremely naive to believe that whenever that happens, the cause must be necessarily nefarious.
> It's just that in practice, in general any public system works more towards the benefit of society than for some shareholders.
I think that this is simply empirically false. You cannot just assert something like this, you need to provide evidence for it.
> To be blunt: if the government individuals take decisions that degrade the public healthcare system, for their own benefit, whatever that is, then those individuals should maybe be shot in public too.
And here is the critical question: is there any evidence whatsoever that Bryan Thompson made any decision like that? As far as I can tell, there is absolutely zero. Many just decided he must be guilty of something, but nobody actually points to anything in particular.
> It's not a matter of awareness, the public knows how perverse the incentives of private health insurance are, and how a public system can do much better.
Again, you are asserting something that’s far from being universally agreed on. Public healthcare systems have their troubles too, and if you ask anyone with experience with both, you will not find people universally preferring their public experience. Ask Canadians or Brits how long it takes to get a visit at a specialist, for example.
> That’s my point: this is necessarily the case, so it cannot be automatically “violence” when that happens.
You're going in circles around an argument that you made up yourself. Do you want a pat on the back?
> I think that this is simply empirically false. You cannot just assert something like this, you need to provide evidence for it.
Now read that out back again loud.
> Again, you are asserting something that’s far from being universally agreed on.
I said: "It's not a matter of awareness, the public knows". That cannot be read as "universally agreed on" in good faith.
> Public healthcare systems have their troubles too, and if you ask anyone with experience with both, you will not find people universally preferring their public experience.
I never claimed public healthcare is perfect, on the contrary.
You will find rich people preferring private healthcare, which are a vocal minority.
> Ask Canadians or Brits how long it takes to get a visit at a specialist, for example.
I don't have to ask nobody because I live in a country with fully public healthcare. I am glad that poor people have the same access as rich people, and that triage by urgency, not money, works well (again not claiming that it's perfect, since you give everything your own meaning).
The USA on the other hand are infamous for the healthcare bankruptcy and literal horror stories. I think you don't realize how non-existant your safety net is. It only works well for you when you don't have a major health problem, and while you have a relatively very good paying job.
> Ah, so by saying that denying insurance claims is not violence, because all insurance systems must deny some claims
> Consider, for example, a public health insurance system like Germany. Do you think that Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung never denies claims? That it never denies care? Is it also violence when it does so?
Denying claims can be violence, it can also not be violence. There are other factors which you keep ignoring. Stop doing that.
I am ignoring that? This thread is literally full of people who take any insurance denial as automatically wrong. It is me who's asking people to think carefully about this!
If you say so. No one else is.
Did you miss the "gas chambers" part in the comment I replied to?
> This thread is literally full of people who take any insurance denial as automatically wrong.
Then go and reply to those people (if they are really in the room with us). In _this_ subthread nobody has said or implied that ANY insurance denials is automatically wrong.
"Literally hitler" wasn't directed at you personally, obviously, but you couldn't help but pick it up that way.
It’s impossible for all instances of these things to constitute violence. I do, however, find the idea that they are sometimes akin to violence very enticing. Can you argue that? Can the actions of a stereotypical slumlord, one behaving within local law and never physically touching one of his tenants, potentially constitute violence? If not, how are you defining it?
> Running a shitty business, even an exploitative one, isn’t violence.
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.
People lump the inappropriate denial of necessary resources into "violence", as well as actions which happen because of the threat of physical harm.
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.
I really don’t think it’s that simple. The violence we’re talking about might be most easily defined as a particularly extreme form of coercion, one which causes deep trauma and/or physical harm. Doesn’t this capture the nature of a lot of violence? Isn’t it also evident that this wouldn’t always require physical contact by the aggressor, or even a single, tangible aggressor at all? I’d argue, for example, that whether or not hitler personally pulled the trigger on holocaust victims, he absolutely did violence against them. The level of indirection doesn’t preclude this.
We can define violence as “that guy hit that guy,” and leave it at that and you’d be right. I think this alternative view is a recognition that a lot of other behaviors look very similar in how they work, like when the slumlord chains the emergency fire exit and a family burns alive because of it (an extreme example, but I do recall reading about a case along those lines). I feel like calling that sort of thing violence perpetrated by the slumlord is accurate to everyone but the pedant. It captures the essence of the behavior to me, this bringing about of great personal harm through either malice or sociopathic apathy.
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.
> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
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?
In your contrarian urge to defend some of the worst of the status quo, you forget the insurance company's whole role is to pay for medical care.
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.
An insurance company's "role" is to distribute risk, not to "pay for medical care" without question. The perversion of what constitutes "insurance" in the US medical industry is the fault of our legal system and tax code, and the insane cost of medical care (which is ultimately the root cause of most of these problems) is down to the medical cartel (also legally enforced).
There are systems that cannot deny life saving care, and where everyone is necessarily insured.
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.
There are no systems anywhere in the world which don’t deny life saving care. All systems make life and death decisions. British NHS, for example, will generally deny life saving care, if such procedure will cost more than 30,000 pounds per quality-adjusted year of life you’re expected to gain as a result of the procedure.
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 mean it seems you’re dunking on a strawman yourself. Like if I said Denmark virtually denies no life saving claims, and when it happens it’s due to edge cases, you’ll insist just because it occurs it’s indistinguishable from a system where it happens systemically and regularly?
I believe that healthcare is deliberately limited by insane policy. Contrary to opinion insurance is not the problem. It’s doctors charging exorbitant fees.
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.
> Thank you for your comment, I thought that there's nobody left here who understands this.
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.
And why do doctors make 5x what normal people make? It's because they have to pay off a million dollars in school debt and risk ruining their entire lives if they fail.
His case shows that people do not believe that their society is a just one. If the high class do not act on this signal, they leave space for further radicalization and even more disruptive actors will utilize the discontent. Currently, they are attacking the symptoms in the new version of "beatings will continue until morale improves".
If we actually lived in a "just" system, when people are executed for murdering a single individual, which many people have been, we would certainly execute people for things like, say, losing billions of dollars in pensions for the elderly with greedy mathematical trickery.
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.
> vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong.
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.
No, violence is violence only when it's physical and direct. For example, mental violence doesn't exist. Verbal abuse does not exist. And in this case, United Healthcare had committed no sin at all, because due to being a non-physical entity incapable of physically interacting with the world, it didn't physically hurt anyone. Therefore it committed no violence. QED.
Strange rationale. By that logic you are also a prolific mass murderer as you have not paid physicians to provide medical care to patients. Indirectly you have killed, well, everyone because you didn’t pay infinite money to provide unbounded medical care for every person who has died.
This is strange logic because anyone who is insured pay for other indirectly - that’s how insurance works: pull the money together so that anyone that will have bad luck of getting sick will use money from that pull. The assumption is majority of people won’t get seriously ill but once ill normally it would be financially devastating.
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.
Applying moral and ethical justifications to an event that is fundamentally caused by an ever-widening social rift is pointless.
It doesn't matter if he's right or wrong or justified or evil or a saint. This happened because tensions among non-filthy-rich and filthy-rich people are increasing to a point of non return.
You are not replying to their point. It was not that murder was non-violent, it was that statistical violence is indeed violence. Even if you hold a “denied and go die bankrupt” stamp and not a gun.
not to justify murder in the street, but i'm fairly certain you'd be systematically prevented, logistically and businesswise, from building an alternative system.
Nope. You are free to establish an alternate system if you like. There are medical facilities that are flat rate and cash only, like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, https://surgerycenterok.com/. There are also many cost sharing services, like this one https://altruahealthshare.org. Ultimately you also have the personal option of becoming a physician and setting any rate you choose for your services, including $0.
If a terrorist is running down fifth avenue with a bomb, would it be justified to shoot and kill them? What if the shooter isn't a police officer, but a member of the public?
Oh please, like if it's 1930 and you're walking behind Hitler knowing the future, you probably stab him. Or maybe if you're walking behind Ted Bundy in 1970. At least if you're a future-knowing trolley problem type person.
It's obvious that there are plenty of situations where murder in the streets is justified. Just that we rarely know of them in the moment.
I think the people making those arguments are suggesting not that the murder that Luigi Mangione committed was is right, but that it was good. It is not right by the laws of our nation; it is illegal because it is not right. It is the government's function to investigate and prosecute that crime. The overwhelming popular support for Luigi suggests that there is a collectively-recognized significant justification for the crime. Like Ken McElroy, the town bully who was murdered in 1981, in broad daylight in the town square, by bullets coming in from different angles, and nobody saw a thing.
Hitler was well on his rise to power by 1930. None of us can know who the next Hitler is. We are all familiar with Ray Bradbury and Back to the Future, which told us about how you cannot really know the future or bend it to your will. Furthermore, vigilantism is against the law, and the justice system of the government also has the job of preventing violent uprisings for various and good reasons.
The collective feeling that everybody, and I mean everybody displays, and is clearly being censored on media, is that there is a weighing of the collective morality of the situation which does not add up. This young man has been charged with a multitude of crimes. He has been charged with terrorism. Like, I went to school for international law, and I am going back to my resources, looking at the definitions, and trying to figure out how that fits. To me, a terrorist is somebody who plotted or crashed the planes into the towers. The idea that Mangione's victim, through the decisions of the company, might have caused millions of unnecessary deaths, when there could have been different paths taken, it is an leap, but it is not abstraction that is out of the grasp of many persons who have faced the medical system, specifically with treatment denial letters, on an individual level. By the way, that school that I attended was in another country which gave me free public healthcare during the length of my studies.
New York Penal Law Section 490.25 "Crime of terrorism", which is one of the statues of the second count under which Luigi has been charged, reads: A person is guilty of a crime of terrorism when, with intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping, he or she commits a specified offense.
I do not believe that the Luigi has intimated the civilian population. A shop in his hometown has a portrait of him depicted as Jesus. Luigi did not attempt to target a unit of government; he wrote an explanatory note to "The Feds".
I think that many what many people are saying is that universal, single-payer health care is expected to be a function of government, and in fact something like the opposite is being protected.
I really hope that the District Attorney has the argument for the second count pinned down, or that it is dropped. I think that is where the ethical test for this crime lays.
I think if Luigi had merely assaulted the CEO to teach him a lesson, and not killed him, then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion nationally. Or at least not to the same level of debate. That (admittedly arbitrary) line is a reason most DC characters like Batman and Superman generally refuse to kill even the most deserving of villains.
Everyone you listed don't kill people. Very few people consider Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man to be objectively wrong. They consider them to be objectively right, and it's because they're enforcing the law when the police aren't around to do so.
"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.
Batman, Superman and Spider-Man are not real. And that does matter. It is super normal to watch a movie and sympathize with what would be clearly bad guys in real life.
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.
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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.
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."
A Dexter reboot where the protagonist targets extremely powerful people who commit mass violence within the confines of the law might actually be entertaining
Mangione support is largely isolated to young age groups of certain demographics, according to polling numbers.
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.
It's not most people, it's a plurality. There's a large 'don't know' contingent who either haven't made up their minds or don't want to share their opinion. Also, I would expect this data to skew toward younger people because anyone at or above retirement age is eligible for medicare, and thus not impacted by the decisions of private insurers to anything like the same degree.
Condemning people to death and bankruptcy is violence.
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.
Just a reflection, when you say: "especially against nonviolent offenders", I‘m pretty sure that a lot of people see it like this. People will directly die when a treatment is denied and for impacted people this is seen as a violent crime (even if indirect). This case is triggering more support as it has a potential impact on a the life of a lot of people.
> This case is such an interesting crossroads. He has such insane support ... But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.
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.
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?
Non-violence...lines get blurred while being cut throat and cold hearted when you do it to thousands or millions of people. I'm surprised the GFC didn't have anything like this given the damage it did.
...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.
The ”nonviolent” part is interesting. We as a society has many examples of holding such people responsible for ”legal” and ”non-violent” actions that clearly resulted in deaths of lots of people.
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 so weird to me that people
say vigilante violence is so universally abhorred, when we literally have Batman and the Punisher as major draws at the theatre.
Bringing justice to the person responsible to hundreds/thousands of deaths and immense suffering is right - was the murder of Mussolini unjust? Hitler's?
If the justice system won't take care of it, there has to come a tipping point, IMO.
But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong.
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.
Using such a weasel phrase like "by some accounts" means that there's absolutely nothing standing behind this. If there was any concrete thing Brian Thompson did that was any kind of legal crime or moral error, you'd be able to name it.
My intent was merely to point out that it is a commonly held belief, because it seemed like you were not aware. I didn't want to champion that belief.
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.
There is absolutely no way to run an insurance scheme without denying some people coverage. No system anywhere in the world, public or private, accepts every single claim. You must deny some claims, there's no way around it. This means that according to you, there's no ethical way to run health insurance system. I disagree, I think we need insurance to exist, and given that someone needs to run insurance, I don't think that taking such a job is inherently a moral error.
It's really just for-profit health insurance systems that I think can't be made ethical. If you have to deny some claims based on resource availability, that's an uncomfortable necessity, but we can do insurance-like things without asking people to balance human life against shareholder greed.
It seems pretty obvious that opting into a position where you'll have to do that might make you unpopular with the humans.
What is "resource availability"? In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined? Is there no person involved making a decision that causes the amount of available resources to change? Think about it. Consider, for example, politicians who set the healthcare tax rate. If they set it 1% higher, there will be more resources available. Does it mean that by not doing so, they deny care to some?
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.
> In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined?
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.
Presumably somebody involved in deciding budgets, a politician perhaps, or somebody with a rather political role in the hospital. Whoever they are, in most cases they're balancing ventilators against test kits or against hiring more doctors or against letting people keep more of their paychecks, or all kinds of other things which might indeed be more important for the patients/citizens/etc...
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.
Sure, and that's not exactly comfortable (maybe "reelected" shouldn't be a thing, idk). But if the people reelecting you are also the patients then the particular conflict of interest I'm worried about is not present.
True, and we need to get our shit together about that, but it's not an apples to apples comparison. A government allocates 100% of the available healthcare funding towards healthcare outcomes. A corporation (in the US) allocates 80%. You can tolerate a sloppier slicing if you're starting with a bigger pie.
You are right, BUT: Those denials have to follow contractual terms. I know a local (Europe) real world example where a friend of a friend (insurance company area manager) literally was told "this is your sum of money on claims that you can accept in this quarter, it cannot go above that". Which either you get lucky and make the quota, or you screw people over and hope they don't sue. And since we live in a world where the company wants "a little more" each year, well.. I don't see how this ends well.
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 line is on why you are doing the denying. Are you doing so because providing the healthcare is literally impossible, or are you doing so in order to make more money?
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.
> UnitedHealthcare in particular denied coverage for post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization. In 2019, the insurance provider’s initial denial rate for post-acute care prior authorization requests was 8.7%; by 2022, it had increased to 22.7%.
Buck stop with him; between 2021 and 2022 he did that. Being the CEO and all.
And what's the crime here? What's the moral error? Can you elucidate? I hope you're not trying to argue that insurance should not be allowed to ever deny claims?
You don't see a moral error with a health insurance company going out of their way to more than double the claims they deny, not because it's ethical or necessary but because they find ways to do so legally and the motive is profit?
Perhaps you're not well equipped to evaluate moral errors in the first place.
My understanding is that people are twisting themselves into pretzels to blame the murder victim for something, but they have extremely hard time finding anything explicit to point to, so they just throw allusions, hoping that the reader will complete the bogus argument in their head.
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.
It's a general category (all claim denials) and it did not go up, it more than doubled; as you are probably aware, it's far, far above the industry average. Also you're misusing the word 'allusion' which means 'to refer to something. You probably meant 'implication'.
The only potential crime that article lists is allegation that the murder victim failed to disclose some material fact to the company investors. Are you saying that Luigi Mangione killed Thomson on behalf of the stock holders, who lost money by holding UnitedHealthcare stock?
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.
I suppose it depends on how you view things and what tradition you're from.
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.
Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe. 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, because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty, and only then try to find reasons why.
> Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe.
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
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.
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.
> You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place.
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.
What discovery? Are you suggesting that the defense in the murder case will be able to do any kind of discovery on UnitedHealthcare? How would that even be possible?
Since anecdotes seem to be data points in this thread, I would say that as a non-American, the online public support for incident horrifies me and makes me think that this is a symptom of a collapsing society. It is also horrifying that so many Americans online seem to be bloodthirsty for more. Makes me not want to associate with them.
Ah yes, let's murder people we feel (without even any concretes to support this) are not morally pure, what a perfect idea. Which other CEOs do you think it would be justified to murder? Or are there any that are morally pure enough to you that they can live?
Just a guess, but I think if we found a way to put together a list, perhaps by voting or something, 99% of CEOs would be fine. And if the fear of being found to be in that remaining 1% is an effective deterrent against bad behavior, well maybe we ought to be making such lists.
Detective Chief Inspector Karin Parke and Trainee Detective Constable Blue Coulson unravel a deadly conspiracy involving autonomous drone insects (ADIs). After the controversial journalist Jo Powers dies in an apparent suicide, forensic evidence reveals an ADI embedded in her brain. The investigation escalates as similar ADI-related murders occur, including that of rapper Tusk, targeted after social media backlash.
The detectives uncover a sinister "Game of Consequences" launched by hacked ADIs, where the most-mentioned person under the hashtag #DeathTo is killed daily. The situation spirals out of control when the ADIs are used to surveil citizens, and public engagement with the hashtag results in mass casualties. A manifesto from Garrett Scholes, a former Granular employee and hacker, reveals his motive: to expose societal cruelty and complacency.
Efforts to neutralize the hacked ADIs fail, resulting in the death of 387,036 people who used the hashtag, including a member of Parke's team. The fallout leaves Coulson presumed dead by suicide, though Parke later receives evidence that Coulson is alive and pursuing Scholes abroad, leaving the case ominously unresolved.
This is SE's modus operandi, protest their choices around AI training, policies, etc., by deleting your content and you'll get your account locked and your posts reinstated because you're "hurting the community" and that is more important than your (now non-exclusive) right to your own words (and by non-exclusive, I mean SE's wishes about what to do with your own words matters more than your wishes).
> This is SE's modus operandi, protest their choices around AI training
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
My account was locked for deleting my own comments. I sent them a GDPR request to delete my comments. They ignored it. I posted on meta asking if they followed GDPR. It was deleted and I was banned from meta.
Actually, I don't think this is covered by GDPR, but if you are European (which is implied by the fact you invoke GPPR) you can and should file a GDPR complaint to your local DPA.
For people out of the loop like me (the article doesn’t mention it): Luigi Mangione is an American man who was identified as the suspect in the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
You can't ask a question. And even if you could start a new account, you wouldn't have thousands of rep points to spend on bounties, so the answers won't be as good or quick.
Unfortunately it seems like a lot of the patriotic stories us Americans were taught in school were to violently overthrow your unjust oppressors (not to mention film). Not surprising that his story resonates with some of the public.
It's been an incredibly toxic place for years. I tried to ask questions 2 or 3 times only to be chastised by aggressive power users, or to have my posts immediately closed and locked for being "duplicates", even though they were not duplicates.
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.
This has been my experience since the last 5 years or so. I find the only responses I get to questions are lazy copy pasted.. "we need more info..", the same "power user" doing this on multiple questions even when the question didn't require more info to be provided. And then when you point this out you get a rude response and action. If you do provide the information, they never return. I don't think they have enough qualified people answering questions.
The tone of this blogpost is over the top. I mean...
The *erasure* of Luigi Mangione
The saga on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, *and how tech always serves the ruling class.*
or
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
We're not talking about the Department of Defense, or the Catholic Church. StackOverflow is just a popular Q&A website. Since it's popular with the software development community, it's of some importance - not enough to merit using the tone of Woodward and Bernstein or John Rawls.
To your point of: "... 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 ..."
I can't comprehend the reason for account deletions. I'm sure there are plenty of convicted killers or even worse people with accounts. Why would that matter? It has nothing to do with the service these sites provide.
Is it legally feasible to fork StackOverflow and create a competing platform using the same content? Or is the license just window dressing to provide contributors with the feeling that they could do that if they wanted to... but not really.
Legally? yes. The users own the content, SO only has a license to do as they please and users have already given CC license to anyone (that is the nature of copyleft after all).
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.
>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.
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.
I think it’s a seriously good idea. I believe they could create problems during the content scraping phase but considering that Internet Archive has most of the content already, I don’t see how they could legally prevent such a move if you’re careful with their trademarks and other intellectual properties like logos and look-and-feel.
There are many sites that rehash popular questions from Stack Overflow and other Q and A sites. I regard the scraped content as search spam. Of course, there isn't the same ideological motive behind it. I imagine that SO retains some kind of IP rights to their content.
Completely legal. But in public opinion, you won't be able to attract any users away from the real site, and your site will be indistinguishable from all of those content scraping SEO spam sites that get heavily penalized by search engines.
tbh I'm surprised stackexchange still has employees. I thought all that value was already extracted by LLM scrapers and they're well on their way to becoming another quora.
Given the mismatch between public sentiment and the reporting on all things Luigi Mangione, the establishment is really scared. Trying to scrub him from the internet is really sending a signal that we can influence the c-suite as a class the way Luigi Mangione did, which is incredibly stupid - they are ultimately inviting more murder.
If somebody's getting "shocked" by this, then it's having the intended effect as far as poetry is concerned. It's important reminder to what HN is, really, even though I would expect it to largely fall on deaf ears. Reminds me of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I think I would have checked the "unacceptable" box if I took that survey.
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.
It was 41% approve, 40% disapprove. All the polls are filled with massive numbers of "don't know" people that I think is likely going to be filled with people struggling with cognitive dissonance. How can one oppose murder, but not feel particularly upset, to say the least, about this murder?
The same way people justify killing in wars, regardless of how justified they feel the wars are.
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.
No, they weren't. In the 18-59 age group, they made up about 20% of every response group. Even in the 60+ group it was about 10%. [1] And in the YouGov poll [2] that surveyed all Americans instead of just voters, and also asked the question in a less leading way found 37% "don't know" amongst all Americans.
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.
I'd guess that most people that responded "somewhat unacceptable" really wanted to say "somewhat acceptable" but without directly admitting that they semi support the act.
• 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.
> A significant majority of Americans are medically satisfied with their health insurance provider.
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.
Polls are only as good as the pollster. Watch how “popular” Kamala was in polls because it was the “right” thing to say.
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.
Presidential polls were "inaccurate" by only a few %, which is to be expected. But to be so inaccurate that >50% support for Luigi is reported instead as only 17% would be staggering and unprecedented, requiring nothing short of fraud.
Kamala did quite well in the election, it was close. In hindsight I don't think there was any particular evidence the polls were inaccurate. Poll-watchers like fivethirtyeight.com predicted that the election was a coin toss (with the toss sliiightly biased towards Trump up until their final forecasts from what I recall) but whoever won the coin toss would probably achieve a comfortable victory. That is pretty much what transpired.
If you want me to refer to private polling you're going to need to hint which poll you mean. I'm working off public data which was pretty accurate on aggregate, there weren't any surprises on election night which was something of a https://www.xkcd.com/1131/ moment.
I dunno. Given the public polls seemed to be accurate in hindsight that just suggests Harris' internal polling was off. They were the C-team that were losing to Trump with Biden and struggling to match his raw charisma with Harris' campaigning. Maybe their pollster wasn't very good or they didn't do that much polling? We can't really assess what was going on inside the campaign in that way.
> People openly cheering for the murder of law-abiding citizens minding their own business.
It is hard to feel sorry when their own business implied throwing thousands of ill people into hardship and reneging on their contract to pad the bottom line. Murder is wrong, but the way these insurance work is very much not right either and when there is no relief valve like fair regulations, pressure is bound to mount.
Asserting that murder is wrong without caveats or discussion, and that the problem’s root is the murder is also bound to increase pressure even further. The future government won’t do anything to help, so pressure will keep increasing and things will get more volatile.
I don't need to feel sorry for anyone to assert that murder is wrong. Morals (and laws) don't depend on how sympathetic the victim is or isn't. The fact that there's a sizable chunk of American society which doesn't see this is scary as hell, and speaks very poorly of those people.
Were you actively telling everyone you thought the murder of Bin Laden was wrong when it happened? I definitely don't remember seeing a single person doing so in the West.
There is a huge difference between killing someone who is actively organizing terrorist attacks versus killing a bureaucrat who is in the unfortunate position to catch heat no matter what because he has to say no to some people. Acts of war are seldom considered murder, even by religious people. Vigilantism against someone who didn't even break any laws is definitely murder.
Both of the examples referenced were the killing of someone who killed tens of thousands (at least) of innocent civilians at random. The only reason one doesn't get called terrorism is that there weren't any action movie fireballs involved.
Thank you, going on my reading list! Definitely not the best example then.
Nevertheless, the person I was replying to has 100% voted for murderers assuming they live in the US, unless they never voted for anyone who won. They consume products by businesses who murder. I strongly doubt they're a pacificism absolutist, given how extremely rare those are nowadays, as most people understand how quickly that falls apart when someone shows up with a big stick who can't be reasoned with.
I'm curious if you'll indulge a hypothetical. Imagine executives could be held responsible for deaths proven to be reasonable caused by their actions (or inactions) with penalties comparable to normal penalties for murder/manslaughter. And now this man was found responsible for a countless number of deaths, and thus himself sentenced to death, or lifetime solitary confinement if you happen to unconditionally oppose the death penalty. Would your view change?
I assume the answer is yes, but I'm sure you see the issue with letting laws define one's own personal code. This isn't a 'gotcha' or anything. I myself have lots of cognitive dissonance on this issue, and am just genuinely curious what your take would be.
It's called the Medical Loss Ratio rule of the Affordable Care Act. From my understanding the law states that health insurers MUST spend 80% of revenue from premiums on health care and if they don't, they must provide rebates to the policy holders. This is one of the reasons why health care costs have gone through the roof; health insurers must be spending all this money on health care costs, so they buy pharmacies and gouge the costs of cheap medicine to make up for the lost profits. Instead of paying $5 for insulin, they make you pay $60, which helps them hit the 80% rule.
> so they buy pharmacies and gouge the costs of cheap medicine to make up for the lost profits. Instead of paying $5 for insulin, they make you pay $60, which helps them hit the 80% rule.
Yah, that's not really true. Sure if they can increase healthcare costs, then they can increase premiums, but that also makes them less competitive.
But the bigger reason it's not true is that insurance companies don't set the reimbursement rate for drugs in the first places. Instead that's set by PBM's, which are separate companies. Insurance companies hate PBM's because the PBM's prevent the insurance companies from doing exactly like you describe.
(This hate translates into a lot of badmouthing which I'm sure you'll find if you lookup PBM's. They get called "middlemen" who take money and don't provide a service - this is just propaganda by insurance companies.)
The whole hero worship of Luigi is based on a complete misunderstanding of who actually causes healthcare costs to be high. It's not insurance companies or PBM's! It's actually Dr's and hospitals.
> This is one of the reasons why health care costs have gone through the roof.
I doubt that it has much affect, for two reasons.
1. Looking at graphs of US health care costs over time I don't really see much change in the growth of health care costs during pre-ACA times and post-ACA times.
2. Looking at health care costs of other first world countries, their health care costs over the 50 years have been growing fairly similarly to the way US health care costs having been growing.
This suggests that the reasons for most health care cost increases in the US are neither things we do differently than most other first world countries (e.g. more heavily relying on private for-profit insurance companies) nor any relatively recent changes to how we regulate things.
So... if claims (and thus expenses) are reduced but we have the same revenue, we simply need to increase some other expenses: raise C-suite salaries! :) I'm speculating/joking, but wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be accurate.
Unfortunately that link doesn't say anything about profit margins, or revenue/expenses. It only talks strictly about premiums, which is a monthly fee for insurance coverage, and is just one source of revenue for such a company. (at least it did help me learn more about the US healthcare system and some of its regulation, so thanks regardless haha)
> Robin Young: ...you testified before Congress during the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and at that time, that law demanded that health care plans spend 80 to 85% of premiums on patient care. This is called the Medical Loss Ratio. So what happened?
> Wendell Potter: They figured out how to work around that. For one, they've gotten more and more into health care delivery, and they now own physician practices and clinics and big pharmacy benefits middlemen, and none of that is affected by the medical loss ratio. So in other words, they've figured out how to work around it, plus it also has enabled them to jack up their premiums. So the more premiums they take in, the more money they have.
> Congress would ultimately include language in the ACA to require health plans to spend at least 80% to 85% of premiums insurers take in on enrollees’ care, known as the medical loss ratio. But big insurers have figured out if they also become health care providers — by buying physician practices, clinics, and pharmacy benefit managers — they can meet that threshold by paying themselves and avoiding payment for their customers’ care.
> An argument could be made that the medical loss ratio provision of the ACA has contributed to or even fueled the vertical integration of the big insurers, UnitedHealth especially. UnitedHealth is massively bigger and more profitable than it was on the day I first testified as a whistleblower, June 24, 2009, when it ranked 21st on the Fortune 500 list of U.S. companies. Its share price at the close of trading that day was $24.81. Hundreds of acquisitions later, UnitedHealth is now the fourth largest U.S. company — just behind Walmart, Amazon, and Apple. At the end of trading on Monday of this week, the share price was $560.62. That’s an increase of more than 2,100% since June 24, 2009. By comparison, the Dow Jones average has increased 438%.
> In the years since then, UnitedHealth, Cigna, and a handful of other New York Stock Exchange corporations have cemented their roles as unelected gatekeepers to care, and Americans are now waking up as they never have before to the consequences of that. If their rage can be harnessed and channeled with clear policy proposals, that dike the industry built might just give way without more violence.
> But it has nothing to do with the claim that "denying claims increases profits", which is simply not true.
Well, it's kind of transparently true. If the worst-case scenario is that you need to return some premiums, then you should always deny enough claims that you're always returning some amount money, as you should always hit your profit cap. The second reason issue is that an approved claim has Opex costs. The platonic ideal of an insurance company in the current system is one that collects (# of patients * annual premium), and approves 0 claims. If you don't approve any claims, you'll have the lowest possible Opex costs, because there's no processing to do, no fraud to check for, no follow up visits that might take you below the profit cap, etc.
What does following the law have to do with someone's character? I judge someone based on their ethical compass, not how good they are at manipulating a compromised legal system.
Are you kidding? It is rare for someone to deliberately break the law and also be ethically upright. I'm saying that he is not obviously compromised. His murderer on the other hand apparently is. You can imagine a world in which murdering someone you have no connection to, based on a bunch of BS, is ethical. But civilized people don't think that way. If you don't like the way insurance is done, the civilized thing to do is to lobby for better regulations or something, not go on a killing spree.
The justice system generally doesn't tolerate revenge, even when the average person might feel it justified. If someone murdered your child in cold blood right in front of you, you don't get a free pass to go out and lynch them. Civilized people know this is necessary to keep innocent people safe and ensure some kind of consistency in outcomes. How much less justified is "revenge" like this case, where there is no connection between the attacker and the victim, the perceived offense is abstract and arguable, and taking the guy out does essentially nothing to make the world a better place?
> It is rare for someone to deliberately break the law and also be ethically upright
Strawman. Your goal is to prove that there is full alignment between ethics and law in our current system. If there isn't, then we cannot use one's adherence to the law as an indicator of their ethical standing.
The Holocaust was legal once. Harboring Jewish political refugees was not.
The Palestinian genocide is legal now (according to the US, not the ICC). Speaking out about it at univerities is met with extreme police action.
Slavery used to be widespread in the West, and freeing/harboring escaped slaves would land you in prison or a grave.
> The justice system generally doesn't tolerate revenge
That's an idealistic take. The reality is that the justice system is frequently used to make examples out of political dissidents.
This has been true for millennia. My patron saint, Joan of Arc, was burned to the stake for essentially wearing pants. Are you going to sit here and try to tell me that burning a 17 year old at the stake for not being "womanlike" is ethical?
Intentionally/ostensibly mistaking the legal system for a system of ethics is such a colossal red flag that someone is willing to allow the exploitation of innocent people in order to improve or protect the quality of their own life.
You would think on a forum called Hacker News that people here would be more sensitive to how Corpgov warps society's perception of political dissidents, given the history of our own kind.
You should post this higher up . It's the most succinct way I've seen anyone put it across the many threads on here with hundreds of comments, most of which I read.
Most political dissidents don't kill anyone. There's no indication that this guy tried to do anything within the system to effect positive change. How would you feel if a tech company CEO was murdered because someone's life was wrecked by automation? Nearly any business or government official could be targetted on the basis of such ridiculous self-righteous vigilantism. It's the kind of rationale that leads to political purges, lynchings, and even mass murder. We have legal systems in place to protect everyone from the tyranny of mob rule and other forms of uncivilized behavior.
It depends on what the "meaningful change" actually is. Lots of possible changes are meaningful but not worth killing people over. Not all proposed changes are actually possible. Mobs of people are usually really stupid and bloodthirsty. Look at the 1970 Cambodian coup for example. You don't want to open that Pandora's box unless there is a real urgent emergency or violation of natural rights. If people were as excited about losing weight as they are about some CEO getting shot, we could all have much cheaper insurance and maybe the government could even afford to give us free health care. You should look into what the government pays for and how much they pay for it. It's really eye-opening. The government isn't a magic money machine. If they pay for something, the value is extracted from somewhere in society either in monetary form or through inflation.
What a stretch. So you're insinuating I'm racist because I don't approve of a guy being gunned down for no good reason in broad daylight by another guy who could have had a bright future, and even been a successful activist for the cause he was allegedly trying to advance. Two lives ruined, two families wrecked, and probably more to come as this is egged on.
The comparison of violent vigilantism over what is really a financial issue to a peaceful civil rights movement is so classy. You don't know what you're really supporting, and if things continue in this uncivilized trajectory, you will regret it.
>Your goal is to prove that there is full alignment between ethics and law in our current system. If there isn't, then we cannot use one's adherence to the law as an indicator of their ethical standing.
This is the real straw man. Have you ever heard of a generalization? Of course we can and do use adherence to the laws of the land as an indicator of general moral character. They rarely deviate far from the moral demands of society, and are in fact the only rules that we all have in common with our compatriots.
>That's an idealistic take. The reality is that the justice system is frequently used to make examples out of political dissidents.
That has nothing to do with vigilantism, and in our country dissidents are almost never murdered like this.
>Are you going to sit here and try to tell me that burning a 17 year old at the stake for not being "womanlike" is ethical?
I think notions of what is ethical change over time, and so do the laws. Your example is way off topic and misses the point. This guy was a boring bureaucrat who was probably doing his best to run an upstanding business that inherently pisses people off sometimes. You can't be a terribly evil person in modern times without breaking some laws. There is no way to see this random act of violence as "eye for an eye" no matter how much you hate insurance companies. There is no equivalence between walking up to someone unprovoked and shooting them dead versus making necessary financial decisions that might give people vaguely worse health care. Even if you could calculate that a specific change in policy that this CEO did result in some deaths, the nature of the business makes such things inevitable (short of gross negligence or evident malice for the customers). It certainly isn't as contemptible as armed robbery, murder, felony theft, or burning someone alive for bad fashion.
> This is the real straw man. Have you ever heard of a generalization? Of course we can and do use adherence to the laws of the land as an indicator of general moral character.
The irony of claiming that the fundamental principle of my argument is a straw man and then presenting a new straw man directly after. Who said anything about morals? We're talking about ethics. Do you know the difference? Society does not have moral demands, it has one or more ethical consensus. Please learn the difference between the two before trying to argue with authority on them.
> in our country dissidents are almost never murdered like this
What are you talking about? I was talking about domestic smear and ruination campaigns on a slew of political dissidents from the past such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, Timothy Leary, etc... COINTELPRO?
> There is no equivalence between walking up to someone unprovoked and shooting them dead versus making necessary financial decisions that might give people vaguely worse health care
This sentence does a lot of hand-waving. Vaguely, indeed. I think, if you look for it, you will find the quantification you're looking for. The difference is one act of direct violence vs tens of millions of every day acts of indirect violence, in a system where the class perpetrating the latter acts of violence continually gain the upper hand incrementally over time, like a political ratchet. Our forefathers would have revolted over much, much less than we put up with today.
>The irony of claiming that the fundamental principle of my argument is a straw man and then presenting a new straw man directly after. Who said anything about morals? We're talking about ethics. Do you know the difference? Society does not have moral demands, it has one or more ethical consensus. Please learn the difference between the two before trying to argue with authority on them.
Your argument IS a straw man. You literally put words in my mouth. Try learning what a straw man is before using the expression.
>Society does not have moral demands, it has one or more ethical consensus. Please learn the difference between the two before trying to argue with authority on them.
You should try using a dictionary. The first definition of "moral" on dictionary.com is this:
> of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical:
If you go to 'ethic' then all two of the definitions are here:
> the body of moral principles or values governing or distinctive of a particular culture or group:
> a complex of moral precepts held or rules of conduct followed by an individual:
So you're wrong, plain and simple. I don't care about some philosophy class attempt to split hairs here. The distinction is really a red herring that you're getting obnoxious about.
>What are you talking about?
You said that the state would retaliate against dissidents, in response to me saying that the state will not tolerate acts of revenge in general even in the face of popular support for the offender. Again, it will not suffer people who are following the law to be murdered. You brought up the dissident thing presumably to relate Mangione to a dissident. But dissidents don't murder people. MLK, Malcolm X, all the dissidents most people admire, are not murderers.
>This sentence does a lot of hand-waving. Vaguely, indeed. I think, if you look for it, you will find the quantification you're looking for.
Perhaps I would find it, but the real numbers are discovered through trial and error and are not at all straightforward to interpret. You really want to get people in a frenzy over some unintentional policy mistakes with outcomes that can only be understood with advanced statistics and a mountain of data?
>The difference is one act of direct violence vs tens of millions of every day acts of indirect violence, in a system where the class perpetrating the latter acts of violence continually gain the upper hand incrementally over time, like a political ratchet.
Apparently you don't understand the definition of "violence" either. Unfortunately the word has been so abused that the dictionary now has totally wrong definitions in it.
>Our forefathers would have revolted over much, much less than we put up with today.
This much I agree with. I don't think they would tolerate income tax or gun laws. As for health insurance I think they'd just say, nobody is forcing you to buy it, so you don't get to just go on a murder spree as revenge against the industry.
Friend, I'm not going to use the literally lowest common denominator dictionary.com as a source of the distinction between the concepts of morality and ethics. This is the definition of cherry-picking on your part. There are centuries of philosophical literature on the subject. Google "morality vs ethics" and actually spending some time to understand what you're talking about.
> Try learning what a straw man is before using the expression
No, my argument was not a straw man. It is literally the basis for the original discussion, but you can't seem to comprehend that.
Now you're just sarcastically parroting back things that were said to you. This is just immature, you're arguing in bad faith and becoming increasingly vitriolic, so this conversation is over. Please review HN guidelines, and learn to argue in good faith and without a bad attitude.
I don't believe you were here arguing in good faith either. If you are then you at minimum don't understand what a straw man is, and accused me of having constructed one while doing the exact same (the Fallacy Fallacy plus a factual error). How ironic is it that you, someone arguing that someone who followed the law (specifically our laws) can be overwhelmingly immoral to the point of deserving to be murdered, is going to lecture me now about the art of civil conversation and the rules of the site. I think you knew deep down how ridiculous your premise is and refused to let it go. All of your pedantic red herrings are not going anywhere with me. I hope you reflect on the real topic of conversation and think about how your family would feel if you were murdered because one of your products made someone's life somewhat worse.
"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.
This quote is painted onto one of my lockboxes and I have read and internalized it daily for over a decade now. Such a powerful sentiment, and I wholly agree. In my pursuit of accountability of law, I have come to understand just how much I respect the importance of law, as an anarchist.
Thank you for the kind words. Adding them to the pile of inspiration to finally start blogging. I'll be on the lookout for your account. Currently my bluesky feed is garbage and I need to train the algorithm.
The CEO was minding his own businesss, putting his head down and getting busy to use the SOTA AI and other technologies to dslover the most efficient way to decline healthcare for people paying for it. Sure, some fraud was prevented, at the cost of denying service for people in legitimate need, surely causing premature death in some cases. He might only wanted to make the line go up, but that does not relieve him of his responsibility.
This is simply not true. Denying claims does NOT increase insurance company profits, it actually DECREASES it. Read this thread I posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642405
Maybe he just bought into the AI hype as so many other business leaders are. Any kind of fraud prevention method is going to have false positives and associated costs, and in health insurance it can cost lives. But not handling fraud also costs lives by making insurance more expensive. If people just trying to do their best to manage a business and its customers are murdered over honest mistakes then nobody is going to want to run such a system. The fact it's an insurance company is not relevant. A government-run system could involve the same kind of mistakes.
Doctors themselves make a lot of potentially questionable choices that may be seen as costing lives. We have a fairly high bar for proving malpractice because any given patient could choose to blame the doctor personally. A business guy who is not egregiously messing things up on purpose or through gross negligence deserves some benefit of the doubt as well.
> That law abiding citizen openly cheered for the murder of the people as a business method.
I think you've drank the Kool aid straight from the firehouse.
The general reaction to the assassination of a health insurance exec in protest to depriving people from life-saving healthcare treatment is not endorsing it but completely understanding and even sympathizing why anyone would do it.
The very fact that you're framing this issue as "murder of the people" instead of wondering why anyone would cheer when someone targets a health insurance exec speaks volumes to how effective the propaganda around this has been.
Do you have proof of that? Look I know insurance companies are rarely eager to pay out. If they were, they would quickly go out of business or else have to charge you so much as to make the coverage pointless. Nobody would be allowed to be a CEO of a health insurance company for long if they "openly cheered for the murder of people" as you claim. The business involves tough decisions affecting the lives of people who are often deathly ill and/or mentally unstable. It's really easy to blame businesses for things that really aren't their fault.
This it no run of the mill insurance company. This is the absolute worst insurance company, putting it mildly. I would really recommend looking into it first before trying to downplay what they did and continue doing.
>HealthPartners, a major health care provider (...), has announced its decision to leave UnitedHealthcare's Medicare Advantage network (...), HealthPartners says the decision stems from the insurer’ high rates of coverage denials and payment delays, which adversely affect patient care. (...) The health system highlights that
>UnitedHealthcare's denial rate is up to ten times higher than other insurers in the market. [0]
Different source:
> in 2023 UHC claim denial rate was flat out highest in the industry, 1.2x more than the second highest rate, and twice as high as industry average. [1]
https://qz.com/unitedhealthcare-denied-claim-1851714818
Denial rate went from 10% to 22% between 2020 to 2022. Furrher, the CEO has said he saw this as good for business, and seemed to imply it’d be a good thing to deny more.
The headline of your link says that nobody knows how often insurance companies deny claims, but it also includes some percentages which you reproduced in this comment. Do you understand the reason for the apparent contradiction between those two statements? Turns out, the answer is interesting!
> Do you have proof of that? Look I know insurance companies are rarely eager to pay out. If they were, they would quickly go out of business or else have to charge you so much as to make the coverage pointless.
That's not how it works.
Insurances charge monthly payments in return to providing access to healthcare services for free or reduced cost. This means the bulk of their customers is people who do not need the service right away, and instead are investing in assuring they will get the treatment they need when and if they need it.
Those who do not get access to healthcare services and die will not be able to vote with their wallets. They are gone. The same holds if you are bankrupted by having to pay your treatments out if your own pocket, specially if you lose your livelihood in result of your health issues.
On top of that, there's the question of whether there's a free market on healthcare insurance. Big if.
>Those who do not get access to healthcare services and die will not be able to vote with their wallets. They are gone.
While I agree with most of what you said, if the insurance company lets a person die, then that person no longer pays them for insurance and never will again - essentially "voting with their wallet", even if not directly. While that may be an insignificant amount of money to the insurance company, if their policies led to many people not getting the treatment they needed, the people would either die or seek other insurance, and either way stop paying the company for insurance. Though this can be problematic if the insurance is supplied by an employer, as they don't always offer a choice of insurance companies.
But the real problem with the US medical system is the medical treatments costing far, far far more than is reasonable. In other countries medical care costs are way more reasonable. People don't get bankrupted by medical expenses. And there's too many stories out there about hospitals and doctors billing insurance ridiculously high costs, and if the bill isn't being paid by insurance companies then the price is lowered substantially.
It's a fucked up system, through and through. Many/most hospitals are for-profit ventures, and they really do try to extract the most money that they can, however they can get it - and that usually means sending a ridiculously high bill to the insurance company and then insurance tries to negotiate it down. A routine operation should not cost over $100,000, but that is often what the insurance company gets billed.
But if their basic business model is to collect premiums while denying coverage as much as possible (which evidence suggests is the case), that's basically murdering and bankrupting people for money.
And it's hard to say it's not the case when you're denying claims at 2x the industry norm.
You do understand several countries have solved this, right? Several "third world" countries even. This business argument reeks of the inability to understand how shitty healthcare has been planned and executed in this country.
Are you willfully ignorant, or arguing in bad faith?
Private health insurance exists as a pure "middle man", and hence 100% of their profits are at the cost of less health care being delivered by the actual supplier of medical help. Hint: Not them.
Imagine if a car insurance company simply refused to pay for a third of all accident claims!
"I see that you car was totalled, but you can clearly see a scratch in a previous social media post you made, so that's a pre-existing condition, and based on that we're required to reject your insurance claim. Have a nice day!"
PS: The USA is the only western country with this kind of madness going on. Whatever your follow-up argument will be, just consider that nobody else in the modern, developed world is so stupid as to simply give a bunch of billionaires 15% of all money expended on medical services.
No problem with destroying lives and indirectly causing many deaths for pure personal gain, as long as under some definition of 2025 US law, it can be argued to be legal.
Much better than breaking the law by going 10 mph over the limit!
For what it's worth, there's 0 chance that the CEO had been a "law-abiding citizen" for their whole lives. Far too many laws open to interpretation for that to be the case for anyone.
Adolf Hitler was a law-abiding citizen who never harmed a fly. He just changed the laws to make his actions legal and got other people to commit the holocaust on his behalf. So yeah, the fact that someone follows the law is meaningless. Sometimes the law is bad. Sometimes really really bad.
German people still have this mentality btw - that if you follow the law you are good. They think since the Holocaust is no longer the law and the constitution says there shall never be another one, that means they are safe.
>You know what else invites more murder? People openly cheering for the murder of law-abiding citizens minding their own business.
It's a testament to the staggering weight of antipathy the lower classes bear towards the CEO class.
Let's not delude ourselves by pretending Brian Thompson was just a normal law abiding citizen. He was living a lavish lifestyle funded by his company's industry-leading rate of coverage denials, which bankrupted families.
If there exists a definition of social parasite, I suspect "health insurance executive" fits. Is it any wonder why Americans, living under their dystopian healthcare system where one essentially spins the roulette wheel to decide between being bankrupted by cancer or being able to afford to send one's children to college, might feel some schadenfreude?
> lavish lifestyle funded by his company's industry-leading rate of coverage denials
It's really astonishing how many people believe this. But actually in the US the higher the coverage denials the LOWER the company profits. What actually happens is more denials reduces premiums, making the insurance cheaper to buy.
I wonder how many “outraged” about Luigi killing are also outraged at the capital punishment that gets celebrated by a large fucking portion of Americans.
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.
> Polling numbers (actual gauge of public sentiment)
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?
>in this survey, 70% of people polled are negative toward trump. The 2024 election results gave almost 50% of the popular vote to trump
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".
Polls have not proven the most reliable in recent times. I can tell some folks avoid him as a topic, but I've yet to see anyone I know in any socioeconomic class or age group seemingly do anything besides avoid acknowledging him, express support, or express support with some kind of caveat.
You live in a bubble, even in the real world. In fact, your real-world bubble is usually stronger than your online bubble. Just because your bubble shows support for murder doesn't mean that most people do.
From a brief look at their "people" page, it seems like they're all involved with chapters of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). If anything, this suggests against foul play, as their incentive would be to denigrate for-profit healthcare and overstate support for Mangione.
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.
Owen Jones "the establishment and how they get away with it" points to the _evidence_ for the conspiracy without providing the mechanism. The existence of an establishment (in the conspiratorial sense) is rather like gravity - hard to deny but who knows how it works. Just saying..
I can believe it to some degree. Believing that what the killer did is wrong, and being unsympathetic to Brian Thompson's death isn't mutually exclusive.
They don't even need to do anything especially conspiratorial, I would expect those polls to have substantial anti-Mangione bias by construction.
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.
Not a glitch! We edited it. But you're slightly mistaken about about the policy. It is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Note that "unless". The second clause is as important as the first!
"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.
This entire song-and-dance from executives, media, platforms, and the general "status quo preservationists" over the last month in response to Luigi is priceless.
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.
Administrators reflexively lie. They are committed to preserving whatever institution employs them, not to any objective standard of truth or behavior. I have lost count of how many times I have highlighted such behavior over the alst decade.
I find it hilarious that they can't even keep their power in check to save it for when it would REALLY matter... but they just cant help themselves, they love to execute the control as quickly as it is available even though this leaves a trail of erosion.
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
Me as well, but instead highlighting their lack of commitment to morals and integrity; rather than standard of truth or behavior - equally valid take, mind you!
It's not the first time they've done this. They've consistently done it with Gaza. When they do cover it at all, it's only to paint protestors as terrorists. (Yet the France vs Israel sportsball match was played to a three quarters empty stadium because that many people hate Israe now)
An aspect worth considering: everyone with a large investment in civil society is opposed to murderous vigilantism, and while that includes the economic 1%, the fellow CEOs, the Media Industrial Complex*, et al., it also includes a much more boring demographic: simple, decent folk who are opposed to violence and law-breaking.
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.
True but I think it just shows that this isn't malicious on their part, like journalists and politicians aren't all uniformly intentionally creating and maintaining a broken healthcare system that murders¹ thousands of people and bankrupts an estimated 650k people a year. It's rather the very natural result of their ideology, if the same people had to rebuilt the healthcare system the end result would be identical.
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.
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.
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