I pay around $20k/year for health insurance for myself, my wife and my daughter. I need insurance coverage to save my life and it is denied and I die. Under what US Statute (any state or federal) can a prosecutor charge the people
responsible for my death? surely on the system of laws and courts you say we have there is something… I’ll wait…
also people should most definitely NOT kill law abiding citizens! we do have laws for that
I guess this is the crux of it. The law does not hold anyone responsible for your death, and nobody is responsible for providing you life saving services.
These are the laws that your fellow citizens have chosen and established.
you know, our history says that at times, injustices may need to be fought with a touch of violence…
killing CEOs is not the kind of violence any reasonable human being can condone, but people tragically affected by someone’s actions may not be all that reasonable
It's exactly the same logic. You can't just take your own set of issues, say you're obviously right about everything, and then factor out everybody else's big issues. If you make a consequentialist argument for murdering insurance executives, other people do in fact get to use the same moral logic to stop things you disagree with them about, like gender-affirming care and abortion.
If we throw up our hands and accept that each individual can be the judge of injustice, and execute whatever retribution they see fit, these individuals also meet that criteria.
By abandoning democratic law, you also abandon 3rd party discretion and control over which injustices are legitimate.
Another person has tried to rationally explain to you why your position is unhinged and you weren’t taking it, so I’ll put this more plainly. Take up arms today to defend your ideology. Rally everyone you can and go to war. It won’t be a long war.
> We have a system of laws and courts to decide what is criminal.
We do, but unfortunately it heavily favors the party with the most money. If you want to take a health insurance company to court it's gonna cost you a lot of money in lawyer fees and you'll face a phalanx of corporate lawyers who have a lot of experience in crushing cases brought by their customers. That's not to say that people should go out and take matters into their own hands, but there is a lot of pent-up frustration out there and we really need to start addressing some of these issues before more of this happens.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that one killing implies anarchy and and discarding of the system. It does not. Chances are, most reasonable people believe there should be a chain of justice with courts, laws, and investigations.
Someone has turned to vigilante justice here not because they believe that the courts are useless, but because they believe that this is such an extreme case that courts would not have worked in this case.
What I believe people fear is not the rise of anarchy due to one killing, but a fundamental shift in attitudes of the ordinary people in response to the unreasonable rise of the power structure. This threatens not order but the very power structure itself, which implies that a lot of people who benefit from injustice will suddenly be at risk of losing those benefits (money).
> People should not kill law abiding citizens they disagree with because everyone has a different opinion.
That's not what happened.
Brian Thompson isn't a "law abiding citizen I disagree with" he's a law abiding citizen who killed people. If you or your loved one died because of his actions, would you "have a disagreement with him"? Is that what you'd call that?
There is a massive difference between not helping and killing someone. If you attribute the deaths from healthcare denials to him, did he also save every life that wasnt denied?
> There is a massive difference between not helping and killing someone.
Tell that to the people whose family members died due to his actions.
I'm not arguing this with you again for you to ignore what I say again.
> If you attribute the deaths from healthcare denials to him, did he also save every life that wasnt denied?
> How many millions of people did he save?
None that wouldn't have been saved by anyone doing his job. Literally, it was just his job, and he was close to as bad at is as he could get away with. All the evidence I've seen is that this guy was an obstacle to saving lives at every opportunity he got.
Even if we somehow pretend he made any effort to saving lives, how many lives do you have to save to get a free pass for a murder in your mind? Is that how you think this works?
Honestly, I think there's something wrong with your conscience. Grow some compassion for other humans.
No way. Humanity since the dawn of time has always had the potential to mob when things became dire. We still have it today, only it is more controlled via technology and rationality. This killing will not start anarchy. But it does have the capability to start a resistance against existing power structures, and that is what everyone is actually (consciously or unconsciously) worried about. We are only conditioned to believe that anarchy might ensue as that is the easiest way to instill fear of rebellion against the power structure.
Yes, and mobbing often leads to mass deaths and people worse off than the state before. I dont think this is the straw that breaks the camel's back or anything. It just seems like one more incremental step in the wrong direction.
Maybe I'm sensitive because I have been reading about the french revolution, and how mob rule lead to mass murder which left everyone worse off.
I think the french revolution left everyone worse off than if it didnt happen, The first republic didnt address any one the underlying economic issues. The failure of populist mob governance lead to first empire, and the Napoleonic wars which killed several percent of Europe's population (~6million) in France's attempt to loot its way back to economic prosperity.
Jumped the shark there, dude! But some of these posts are hilarious over-the-top horseshit. Seriously...
Get a grip. For all we know the shooter was pissed b/c his girlfriend was banging the health insurance executive while babysitting for him!
[I would loooove for HN to have optionally-visible meta-threads, so onlookers like me could sit in the gallery, drink a beer, joke and remark about what is posted w/o affecting the stream of thought. Now back to y'all...]
also people should most definitely NOT kill law abiding citizens! we do have laws for that