Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tptacek 545 days ago
We don't have to retcon subtle rationales onto the murder; the guy wrote a manifesto. It was bad, and dumb, as writers from both ends of the political spectrum and points between have observed.
2 comments

The point is the CEO (and other United HeathCare exec's) is not as squeaky clean as widely mentioned in the media
Who cares? What possible difference does that make?
By your tone, I would bet that your cited "writers from both ends of the political spectrum and points between" read the fake manifesto [0].

The (more likely) real [1] one isn't as easily dismissed.

0 - https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2024/12/fact-check-fake-m...

1 - https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto

I'm referring to the especially dumb one you linked at [1].
His actions touched a nerve. If you want to try and smear the alleged manifesto, go ahead, but I don't think you'll be changing many minds. And by the way, there's no shortage of "writers from both ends of the political spectrum and points between" who broadly agree with its points.

Luigi is more popular than Joe Biden lol [0]. 60% of New Yorkers would acquit him [1] (100,000 sample size).

0 - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/suspected-unitedheal...

1 - https://www.econotimes.com/Shocking-Poll-60-of-New-Yorkers-S...

Your second link seems to be fabricated. I'd guess it's an invention of AI. A survey of 100,000 people is extremely large, and would be quite expensive to administer, and its source as given as "PoliticsVideoChannel", a twitter account with 200,000 followers. There's no link to the survey. My guess is, if it's based on anything, the Twitter account ran a poll which got 100,000 votes. That's quite different than a survey of 100,000 New Yorkers.

The social media section gives quotes from several accounts that I don't think exist. Like, it's the only result is you search "@JusticeSeekerNYC".

Given you were talking about people being duped by a fake manifesto I am not sure why you'd share this link.

Thanks, it does look like a bad source/poll.

I don't think anyone who has been on the internet the last couple weeks can argue in good faith against Luigi's broad popularity across left and right; that's why I didn't put effort into verifying the source. I still ought to have tried a bit harder there though.

Sure they will. We now have actual polling about him. He is extremely unpopular. The number we were working from upthread was 15%, and I found (real) polls where Hitler did better than that.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had noisy fans on the Internet! Rolling Stone put a glamor shot of him on its cover. People misread Internet fandom as popular support constantly. There is nothing too stupid or repellant for the Internet to create a fandom for it.

No, you just tried to imply that the "real" manifesto was somehow difficult to dismiss. That's the one I was referring to. It's obviously easy to dismiss --- it literally dismisses itself at one point, saying that other people understand the problems better than he does. I'd be interested in what led you to think it was strong.

"The poll, conducted by PoliticsVideoChannel". Heh.

> It's obviously easy to dismiss --- it literally dismisses itself at one point, saying that other people understand the problems better than he does.

That's a failure of both logic and reading comprehension on your part, I'm afraid.

It's honestly odd that you'd think this to be true. It reads as if you're a little too keen to find a 'gotcha'.

The alleged manifesto outlines that while there are more knowledgeable experts on the corruption and greed at play, who have been opining for decades, no one has taken action and the problems have remained. To reinterpret this as it "dismissing itself" is far from justified.

> I'd be interested in what led you to think it was strong.

I never said it was strong, or implied such. I said it wasn't as easy to dismiss as the proven fake manifesto, and I said that many people broadly agree with its points.

As an academic essay, or as a finished draft to try and justify murder, it has serious flaws. However, I think that if it were as easily dismissed as you insist, then at least one of the mainstream news organizations would have published it.

The manifesto claims that our health care system is responsible for our lower life expectancy, which is trivially falsifiable; the causes of the gap between US life expectancy and the rest of the G8 (spoiler: cars, guns, heart disease) are well studied. In fact, when it comes to the treatment of illness, we outperform.

That is his central claim. He murdered someone over it. It's luridly false.

I should note that aggressively calling something dumb over and over again does not actually make it dumb.
It's very short, so you can just read it and see how dumb it is.
I did not find it to be terribly dumb, simple though it was.
The causal factors for the life expectancy gap between the US and the G8 have in fact very little do with our health care system, and the (manifold) problems of our health care system have in fact very little to do with health insurance. In fact, if you isolate the health care system, and don't try to six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon every inequality and equity problem in America onto the health care system, we actually tend to outperform the G8.

Don't take my word for it. The manifesto itself says that the guy doesn't understand any of this stuff. Didn't stop him from murdering something. A first, I think, in murderer manifestos!