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The term "social murder" has a long pedigree, and is really the term of art for this kind of concealed/indirect "violence". Mark Twain's quote about the two Rei

The term "social murder" has a long pedigree, and is really the term of art for this kind of concealed/indirect "violence". Mark Twain's quote about the two Reigns of Terror also applies, and is perhaps a little older.

tptacek 1y ago
Right, and if you go from the actual definition of social murder, basically everybody in the G8 is a murderer, unless you artificially confine the analysis to your own county. I'm sure the concept has a lot of utility philosophically, but when you try to distill it down to "PE firm owners are murderers" you wind up in pretty crazy places unless you supply a lot of motivated reasoning and special pleading.
- array_key_first 1y ago
  There's infinite levels of badness and eventually it does reach a point, be it in risk, probability, magnitude, or impact, in which it is super bad, and we may consider it violence, or murder, or crimes against humanity, or what have you. Everything is not everything else. Scale not only matters, it's almost the only thing that matters.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    If you can define that threshold, you don't need terms like "social murder" anymore.
    - array_key_first 1y ago
      Nobody can really because it's complicated. Or, at least, nobody can agree, which is why we have the terms. However, I think the terms have some validity, because the broader concept does. I mean, is Hitler a murderer? Is your run of the mill burglary gone wrong worse than the Holocaust? Obviously not. So there has to be some kind of understanding of organized death.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        I'm not sure "at least it wasn't the Holocaust" is, in practice, quite the defense legal argument it's being made out to be here.
        array_key_first 1y ago
        I'm purposefully choosing extremes to highlight the concept in such a way it can't possibly be argued against. The concept being - organized or institutional crimes are real, and can be much, much, MUCH more severe than murder.

tptacek 1y ago

Right, and if you go from the actual definition of social murder, basically everybody in the G8 is a murderer, unless you artificially confine the analysis to your own county. I'm sure the concept has a lot of utility philosophically, but when you try to distill it down to "PE firm owners are murderers" you wind up in pretty crazy places unless you supply a lot of motivated reasoning and special pleading.

array_key_first 1y ago
There's infinite levels of badness and eventually it does reach a point, be it in risk, probability, magnitude, or impact, in which it is super bad, and we may consider it violence, or murder, or crimes against humanity, or what have you. Everything is not everything else. Scale not only matters, it's almost the only thing that matters.
- tptacek 1y ago
  If you can define that threshold, you don't need terms like "social murder" anymore.
  - array_key_first 1y ago
    Nobody can really because it's complicated. Or, at least, nobody can agree, which is why we have the terms. However, I think the terms have some validity, because the broader concept does. I mean, is Hitler a murderer? Is your run of the mill burglary gone wrong worse than the Holocaust? Obviously not. So there has to be some kind of understanding of organized death.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      I'm not sure "at least it wasn't the Holocaust" is, in practice, quite the defense legal argument it's being made out to be here.
      - array_key_first 1y ago
        I'm purposefully choosing extremes to highlight the concept in such a way it can't possibly be argued against. The concept being - organized or institutional crimes are real, and can be much, much, MUCH more severe than murder.