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by jacquesm 2646 days ago
Armstrong's actions had implications way outside of his individual career.
3 comments

Yet another example of how our culture considers drug offenses to be deplorable while white collar crime is just someone being a little too ambitious. Not an attack on you personally, it's just a pattern I see a lot.

The comparison isn't even all that relevant -- one was people basing life-and-death medical decisions on a fraudulent device business built on fraudulent patents, on which the recently departed U.S. Defense Secretary Mattis sat on the board. And the other was... sports. Not that the culture of doping isn't bad for all the athletes in all sorts of ways, but there is a big difference when someone is making bad health decisions without your knowledge.

> Yet another example of how our culture considers drug offenses to be deplorable

Armstrong went just beyond drug offenses - he destroyed careers of people around him who wouldn't play along and attempted to call him out.

Betsy and Frankie Andreu, Emma O'Reilly, David Walsh, SCA Promotions, defrauding the USPS, lying under oath, etc.

Exactly. It's not as if this was a case of an individual only doing harm to themselves or 'just' cheating at sports.
I think the main problem with people like Armstrong and Holmes is that they are widely admired by people and put forth as an example of "success" while in reality they are ruthless psychopaths who will stop at almost nothing to get their way.
That is related to cultural mores as well. Do we not celebrate tech CEOs who have never made a profit?

They can become millionaires/billionaires by dint of their privately traded stockholdings, and the NYT will write a puff piece on them, but all we're doing is applauding them because they managed to convince VCs to float them cash to try doing something.

Most cyclists were doping back then, so are they all ruthless psychopaths or just the one who won?
Everybody doped but only Armstrong went viciously with all his money and lawyers after people who claimed correctly that he was doping. He was on a different level from others.
Fair enough, I did not know this. That makes him worse than I thought.
Read some stuff about his behavior. He was a bad dude who would do almost anything to win and keep winning.
Still nowhere near as important as a medical device with false promises.
Absolutely, no contest there.
Not comparable to the health implication for customers of a potentially large company.