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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 an

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.

xyzzyz 2y ago
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.
- chimpanzee 2y ago
  Justice isn’t confined to the law. Nor to any one person’s opinion.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  By some accounts Thompson was a killer of thousands.
  - xyzzyz 2y ago
    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.
    - thowawatp302 2y ago
      I’m standing behind this. I think that Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. His actions as CEO put profit before people and caused many people’s lives to be lost.
      - xyzzyz 2y ago
        What actions? What did he do? You're just repeating empty phrases to smear the murder victim.
        thowawatp302 2y ago
        > 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.
        xyzzyz 2y ago
        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?
        anigbrowl 2y ago
        I think you understand very clearly what point is being made, and are just pretending not to get it.
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        [flagged]
        xyzzyz 2y ago
        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.
    - Philpax 2y ago
      Ok: https://fortune.com/2024/12/05/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-lawsuits-social-media-reaction-motive/ https://fortune.com/2024/12/05/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-th...
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      - xyzzyz 2y ago
        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.
        impossiblefork 2y ago
        Yes, but if there were a crime, then there'd be a legal remedy, so any vigilante action would be unjustified. That something harmful is legal or effectively legal is a necessary requirement for a vigilante action to morally acceptable.
        davrosthedalek 2y ago
        Wouldn't the moral acceptable way be to try making the harmful thing illegal? And if people in their majority, in their stupidity or cleverness, reject your argument, isn't then vigilante action deeply anti-democratic?
        impossiblefork 2y ago
        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.
    - jimbob45 2y ago
      No one will have concrete answers until discovery during Mangione’s trial. That is, if United doesn’t find themselves their own Jack Ruby.
      - xyzzyz 2y ago
        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?
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    - madaxe_again 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - xyzzyz 2y ago
        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?
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        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.
        CaptainFever 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation 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.
      - 2y ago
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      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.
      - xyzzyz 2y ago
        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.
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        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.
        xyzzyz 2y ago
        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.
    - ruthmarx 2y ago
      > moral error, 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.
- PhasmaFelis 2y ago
  Everything Brian Thompson did was legal, which is not the same thing as being "innocent."
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weaksauce 2y ago
> 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.
- tevon 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - technol0gic 2y ago
    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.
    - wang_li 2y ago
      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/ https://surgerycenterok.com/. There are also many cost sharing services, like this one https://altruahealthshare.org 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.
      - DangitBobby 2y ago
        I guess that means the only reason healthcare in this country sucks so bad is because everyone already likes the way it is!
  - kergonath 2y ago
    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.
gostsamo 2y ago
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".
- stackghost 2y ago
  >His case shows that people do not believe that their society is a just one. Exactly this. That was a watershed moment, I think.
- cbozeman 2y ago
  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.
Timothee 2y ago
“especially against nonviolent offenders” 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.
- xyzzyz 2y ago
  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.
  - the_gipsy 2y ago
    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.
    - xyzzyz 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - tivert 2y ago
        > 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'm basically Hitler. If you say so. No one else is.
mahkeiro 2y ago
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.
thowawatp302 2y ago
> But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong In our society we don’t objectively consider it wrong, otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular.
- logicchains 2y ago
  >otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular. Batman is the absolute opposite because he goes out of his way to avoid killing villains, even incredibly evil ones like the Joker.
  - thowawatp302 2y ago
    The goalposts were ‘ vigilante justice’ not killing people.
  - Glyptodon 2y ago
    It's not like the Punisher isn't popular. 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."
    - pzo 2y ago
      True. Dexter tv series was also popular - reason they made so many seasons.
      - pcthrowaway 2y ago
        A Dexter reboot where the protagonist targets extremely powerful people who commit mass violence within the confines of the law might actually be entertaining
- whatevertrevor 2y ago
  Batman is quite famous for non lethal vigilante justice. If anything Batman's position is antithetical to Luigi's.
Y-bar 2y ago
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.
Aurornis 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
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- fullspectrumdev 2y ago
  A lot of folks who are sympathetic to his actions publicly go “oh no murder is bad” while privately being sympathetic. I’m unsure how that shows with polling, tbh, but it certainly shows up in the discourse.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  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.
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  I know more older adults who just avoid the topic than say it was truly wrong.
carabiner 2y ago
There are like 4 pro-Luigi subreddits with 10k+ users.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Reddit is not real life.
  - Supermancho 2y ago
    > Reddit is not real life. ...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.
tivert 2y ago
> 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.
Glyptodon 2y ago
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.
wesapien 2y ago
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.
thefz 2y ago
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.
unrealhoang 2y ago
Why would they (the companies) have to do anything should be the question.
perlgeek 2y ago
> I don’t know what SO should have done Well, nothing. 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?
lazide 2y ago
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.
ruthmarx 2y ago
> vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong. I guess hiding behind the veil of legality and murdering thousands if not hundreds of thousands if considered worse. Rightfully IMO.
beachhutman 2y ago
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beachhutman 2y ago
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xyzzyz 2y ago

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.

chimpanzee 2y ago
Justice isn’t confined to the law. Nor to any one person’s opinion.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
By some accounts Thompson was a killer of thousands.
- xyzzyz 2y ago
  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.
  - thowawatp302 2y ago
    I’m standing behind this. I think that Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. His actions as CEO put profit before people and caused many people’s lives to be lost.
    - xyzzyz 2y ago
      What actions? What did he do? You're just repeating empty phrases to smear the murder victim.
      - thowawatp302 2y ago
        > 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.
        xyzzyz 2y ago
        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?
        anigbrowl 2y ago
        I think you understand very clearly what point is being made, and are just pretending not to get it.
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        [flagged]
        xyzzyz 2y ago
        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.
  - Philpax 2y ago
    Ok: https://fortune.com/2024/12/05/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-lawsuits-social-media-reaction-motive/ https://fortune.com/2024/12/05/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-th...
    - deleted 2y ago
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    - xyzzyz 2y ago
      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.
      - impossiblefork 2y ago
        Yes, but if there were a crime, then there'd be a legal remedy, so any vigilante action would be unjustified. That something harmful is legal or effectively legal is a necessary requirement for a vigilante action to morally acceptable.
        davrosthedalek 2y ago
        Wouldn't the moral acceptable way be to try making the harmful thing illegal? And if people in their majority, in their stupidity or cleverness, reject your argument, isn't then vigilante action deeply anti-democratic?
        impossiblefork 2y ago
        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.
  - jimbob45 2y ago
    No one will have concrete answers until discovery during Mangione’s trial. That is, if United doesn’t find themselves their own Jack Ruby.
    - xyzzyz 2y ago
      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?
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  - madaxe_again 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - xyzzyz 2y ago
      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?
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        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.
        CaptainFever 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation 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.
    - 2y ago
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    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.
    - xyzzyz 2y ago
      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.
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        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.
        xyzzyz 2y ago
        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.
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    > moral error, 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.
PhasmaFelis 2y ago
Everything Brian Thompson did was legal, which is not the same thing as being "innocent."
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weaksauce 2y ago

> 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.

tevon 2y ago
[flagged]
- technol0gic 2y ago
  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.
  - wang_li 2y ago
    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/ https://surgerycenterok.com/. There are also many cost sharing services, like this one https://altruahealthshare.org 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.
    - DangitBobby 2y ago
      I guess that means the only reason healthcare in this country sucks so bad is because everyone already likes the way it is!
- kergonath 2y ago
  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.

gostsamo 2y ago

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".

stackghost 2y ago
>His case shows that people do not believe that their society is a just one. Exactly this. That was a watershed moment, I think.
cbozeman 2y ago
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.

Timothee 2y ago

“especially against nonviolent offenders” 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.

xyzzyz 2y ago
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.
- the_gipsy 2y ago
  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.
  - xyzzyz 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - tivert 2y ago
      > 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'm basically Hitler. If you say so. No one else is.

mahkeiro 2y ago

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.

thowawatp302 2y ago

> But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong In our society we don’t objectively consider it wrong, otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular.

logicchains 2y ago
>otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular. Batman is the absolute opposite because he goes out of his way to avoid killing villains, even incredibly evil ones like the Joker.
- thowawatp302 2y ago
  The goalposts were ‘ vigilante justice’ not killing people.
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  It's not like the Punisher isn't popular. 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."
  - pzo 2y ago
    True. Dexter tv series was also popular - reason they made so many seasons.
    - pcthrowaway 2y ago
      A Dexter reboot where the protagonist targets extremely powerful people who commit mass violence within the confines of the law might actually be entertaining
whatevertrevor 2y ago
Batman is quite famous for non lethal vigilante justice. If anything Batman's position is antithetical to Luigi's.

Y-bar 2y ago

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.

Aurornis 2y ago

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.

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fullspectrumdev 2y ago
A lot of folks who are sympathetic to his actions publicly go “oh no murder is bad” while privately being sympathetic. I’m unsure how that shows with polling, tbh, but it certainly shows up in the discourse.
anigbrowl 2y ago
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.
Glyptodon 2y ago
I know more older adults who just avoid the topic than say it was truly wrong.

carabiner 2y ago

There are like 4 pro-Luigi subreddits with 10k+ users.

CaptainFever 2y ago
Reddit is not real life.
- Supermancho 2y ago
  > Reddit is not real life. ...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.

tivert 2y ago

> 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.

Glyptodon 2y ago

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.

wesapien 2y ago

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.

thefz 2y ago

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.

unrealhoang 2y ago

Why would they (the companies) have to do anything should be the question.

perlgeek 2y ago

> I don’t know what SO should have done Well, nothing. 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?

lazide 2y ago

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.

ruthmarx 2y ago

> vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong. I guess hiding behind the veil of legality and murdering thousands if not hundreds of thousands if considered worse. Rightfully IMO.

beachhutman 2y ago

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beachhutman 2y ago

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