6 ms·

I think much the reaction to the Brian Thompson killing also seemed ok with the violence despite it happening before the events you describe, though I guess tha

I think much the reaction to the Brian Thompson killing also seemed ok with the violence despite it happening before the events you describe, though I guess that could be an outlier.

culi 6mo ago
I think more and more Americans have what C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination". We pour tons of effort into punishing visceral, direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. But if white collar crime is being committed that leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, it's rare that anyone sees jail time. Maybe you could argue the decisions of Brian Thompson made only account for maybe 10% of why XYZ died but when you scale that out, you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder. I think the younger generations are increasingly aware of this disparity in justice. If you find it hard to understand the celebration of violent vengeance but don't feel the same inability to understand the celebration of Jeffrey Doucet's retribution, then perhaps you are lacking the sociological imagination.
- wavemode 6mo ago
  What "white collar crime" was Brian Thompson guilty of? As I understand it, he was merely the CEO of an insurance company. Nobody likes how insurance companies do business, but that doesn't make it "crime".
  - polishdude20 6mo ago
    Its less about "crimes" and more about a moral or ethical boundary that people feel is being crossed.
    - culi 6mo ago
      Yeah think of it as a moral crime. Someone can achieve tax evasion completely legally but that doesn't make it fair or right.
  - wanderingjew 6mo ago
    What a crime is is determined by the population. For a very long time, the population has given the idea of a "justice system" to... Well, the justice system. Things have deteriorated lately, and the population does not see the justice system as effective. It is completely expected that we see vigilantism, but it is in no way extrajudicial.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 6mo ago
    > Nobody likes how insurance companies do business, but that doesn't make it "crime". The way they "delay, deny, defend" as a matter of course shows a lack of a good-faith execution of the insurance agreements, to the point that a sane world would understand it as extremely obvious (and documented!) fraud. Sure, it is de facto not fraud, but tell that to someone who didn't get insurance payments which they were owed to pay for life-saving treatments (or, I guess tell it to their grave).
  - solid_fuel 6mo ago
    He didn't say "white collar crime." He said "white collar mass murder." The implication here is that it is wrong even though it is not currently illegal.
    - dan-robertson 6mo ago
      Maybe the comment was edited as it definitely says crime now.
      - solid_fuel 6mo ago
        > But if white collar crime is being [...] anyone sees jail time. > Maybe [...] Brian Thompson [...] you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder. Nope. Read it more carefully. It's two separate sentences.
    - culi 6mo ago
      I won't pretend I had the foresight to purposely make this distinction but I do agree with and stand by this clarification. The US is a very litigious society and Americans more than any nationality I've met are way too quick to conflate legality and morality. My personal guess is that this derives from a long running lack of class consciousness that is present in most other nations
  - fuy 6mo ago
    There's been many examples of societies where killing or abusing people was legal etc. Law is not math, it can be (and often is) wrong; in many cases a law is just a way for ruling class to make money/keep power etc. It's completely OK to protest laws, and it may be completely reasonable to consider someone a criminal even if they haven't broken any laws.
- retrac 6mo ago
  I'm reminded of this recent Pew Research poll [1] about whether people believe their fellow citizens are moral. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-country-survey-americans-especially-likely-to-view-fellow-citizens-as-morally-bad/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...
  - hoppyhoppy2 6mo ago
    That's a stark difference between the U.S. and Canada!
  - culi 6mo ago
    Fascinating to see Canada and the US and the opposite extremes of that. Also interesting to see Indonesia, who had a massive genocide within living memory, as second most trusting. Most of all I'd love to see this study replicated in different years to get a sense of how quickly these attitudes can change. Fascinating study. Thanks for sharing!
- nz 6mo ago
  This is a long comment, but I swear it is going somewhere (new terminology). Someone once said (I think Kay), that "a change in notation is worth 20 IQ points". Historically, people struggled with presently-mundane basic concepts, such as Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, and Maupertuis' Principle of Least Action, because they lacked the "notation" (concepts, really), that would have allowed them to integrate them into their consciousness (or otherwise were not willing to discard or diminish another pre-existing notation, like biblical stories). The younger generations have the advantage of being exposed to a much greater variety of notations than any previous generation, thanks to the internet, and its unrestricted nature. There is a lot of alpha in being able to instantly find numbers, and compare them with other numbers. Those aggregations, and second-hand experiences (I did not need to get murdered by federal officers personally, in order to start questioning the legitimacy of the government more aggressively), are a kind of substitute for a few decades of lived experience (by the time you turn 30 or 40, you are old enough to understand a lot of the dynamics, but too old to do much about it). What this does, in effect, is create an acute awareness of what I like to call "sign-flip institutions" (I have never heard/read this term used before). A sign-flip institution, is an institution, in which a "customer's" minus is their plus, the overwhelming majority of the time. So for example, a bank is a sign-flip institution (unless you never take out any loans). This is in fact _codified_ in how they do their accounting. To a customer, a loan is (in the accounting terminology), a _liability_, while deposits are _assets_. To a bank (ask any accountant who works at a bank), loans are _assets_, while deposits are _liabilities_. Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans. Historically, most sign-flip institutions were heavily regulated[0] (to prevent them from impoverishing the populace, or worse). In banking, it used to be the law that they could not give mortgages for housing, unless the purchaser can pay 1/3 of the mortgage up front. This kept housing prices very low. It also kept bank performance low. After decades of bribery (sorry, lobbying), the banks got those regulations removed, and now the housing prices are so high that people _have_ to go into debt to (not own, no), but _have access_ to a home[1], that they may never fully pay off. Combine this with the fact that we have very aggressive anti-vagrancy laws (you are not even allowed to sleep in your own car/van, in an empty parking lot), and it should be no surprise that people will say that society is rigged, that those who govern (cities, states, federations, corporations, banks, etc), are illegitimate. Most AI companies, are openly marketing themselves sign-flip institutions! I don't know how true this is in practice[2], but given their round-the-clock FUD-based marketing, one would think that they are designed to turn your time into their money. That they are designed to turn you into money. The only surprising thing about this story is that it took a nation, known for school shootings, this long to get violent against the executive/governing class. It took them this long, to learn to leave their smartphones at home, and to bring their molotov cocktails instead[3]. [0]: Hospitals, for example, were not allowed to make a profit before 1978. [1]: Landlords get a lot of hate, but, most of the landlords that I've spoken to, are in the same exact situation as most home-owners (mortgage, debt, inflation), which means that they are really just arms-length employees of the _true_ landlords, the banks. Similarly, if you peel back the finances of most AI companies (maybe even most Silicon Valley companies), I am sure you will banks at the center of that web. [2]: My big suspicion/fear is that the anti-AI sentiment is being cultivated to scapegoat the nerds, and to protect the bankers/executives. [3]: Most Americans stereotype the French, as a nation of sad artists, but to the contrary, their protests are glorious.
- ETH_start 6mo ago
  1. Claims of structural harm are far more speculative, and thus harder to establish, than direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. 2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime. 3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability. What is most disturbing in your comment is that it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable". That logic erodes the distinction between disagreement, accusation, and a right to kill. Once people treat their own ideological conclusions as sufficient moral license for violence, they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process — beyond just the letter of law, as in the Jeffrey Doucet case, but also in its spirit, for we have democracy and due process precisely to tease out the ambiguities that social questions of causation and responsibility are so replete with.
  - culi 6mo ago
    > Intent is a key element in criminal culpability. There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect. > it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable" There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crimes like burglary, murder, etc despite the abundance of scholarship we have arguing for social forces driving those actions. I'm not against applying the sociological imagination in both instances. I think it's almost always more useful than a narrow personal perspective. I'm just pointing out the obvious inconsistency. > they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process This "democracy" has clearly produced a result where poor people crimes are heavily policed and rich people crimes are heavily underpoliced. All robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft amounts to about $12 billion a year while the total amount lost due to wage theft each year is over $50 billion. Yet one version of this crime is much more heavily policed than the other. I never called for a "right to kill", I'm calling for fair application of justice. I don't think we individual citizens should have the responsibility of carrying out this justice. Instead I think a properly running representative system would be carrying out the justice. But it's simply not. Nothing in my original comment was prescriptivist. I'm just describing the state of matters as I see it. And I predict we will continue to see a rise in this sort of vigilante acts of justice until we have a valid alternative to it
typon 6mo ago
And the reason for _that_ is because of the callous way American society accepts the deaths of thousands of people who die due to the Healthcare Industrial complex (of which Brian Thompson was a key member of). Just because those deaths don't happen with guns doesn't make them any less important.
chaosharmonic 6mo ago
That's because Brian Thompson was functionally a serial killer.
- disqard 6mo ago
  From a POSIWID perspective, you are right. From a "we live in a civilized society" perspective, I can see why some people are outraged about his killing. Finally, looking at the balance sheet of his accomplishments, I can also see why the pitchfork crowd is cheering.
  - apothegm 6mo ago
    POSIWID?
    - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
      > POSIWID? "purpose of a system is what it does" > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  - simianwords 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - card_zero 6mo ago
      It does seem to be nonsense, yes. The duck test makes more sense. In the duck test, you can't claim something is an eagle if it walks and quacks like a duck. In POSIWID, however, you can't claim you intended it to be an eagle.
  - justinclift 6mo ago
    > From a "we live in a civilized society" perspective, I can see why some people are outraged about his killing. I sometimes wonder how many of the "outraged" are really just people who don't want to be judged for what they've done too.

I think much the reaction to the Brian Thompson killing also seemed ok with the violence despite it happening before the events you describe, though I guess that could be an outlier.

culi 6mo ago

I think more and more Americans have what C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination". We pour tons of effort into punishing visceral, direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. But if white collar crime is being committed that leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, it's rare that anyone sees jail time. Maybe you could argue the decisions of Brian Thompson made only account for maybe 10% of why XYZ died but when you scale that out, you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder. I think the younger generations are increasingly aware of this disparity in justice. If you find it hard to understand the celebration of violent vengeance but don't feel the same inability to understand the celebration of Jeffrey Doucet's retribution, then perhaps you are lacking the sociological imagination.

wavemode 6mo ago
What "white collar crime" was Brian Thompson guilty of? As I understand it, he was merely the CEO of an insurance company. Nobody likes how insurance companies do business, but that doesn't make it "crime".
- polishdude20 6mo ago
  Its less about "crimes" and more about a moral or ethical boundary that people feel is being crossed.
  - culi 6mo ago
    Yeah think of it as a moral crime. Someone can achieve tax evasion completely legally but that doesn't make it fair or right.
- wanderingjew 6mo ago
  What a crime is is determined by the population. For a very long time, the population has given the idea of a "justice system" to... Well, the justice system. Things have deteriorated lately, and the population does not see the justice system as effective. It is completely expected that we see vigilantism, but it is in no way extrajudicial.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 6mo ago
  > Nobody likes how insurance companies do business, but that doesn't make it "crime". The way they "delay, deny, defend" as a matter of course shows a lack of a good-faith execution of the insurance agreements, to the point that a sane world would understand it as extremely obvious (and documented!) fraud. Sure, it is de facto not fraud, but tell that to someone who didn't get insurance payments which they were owed to pay for life-saving treatments (or, I guess tell it to their grave).
- solid_fuel 6mo ago
  He didn't say "white collar crime." He said "white collar mass murder." The implication here is that it is wrong even though it is not currently illegal.
  - dan-robertson 6mo ago
    Maybe the comment was edited as it definitely says crime now.
    - solid_fuel 6mo ago
      > But if white collar crime is being [...] anyone sees jail time. > Maybe [...] Brian Thompson [...] you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder. Nope. Read it more carefully. It's two separate sentences.
  - culi 6mo ago
    I won't pretend I had the foresight to purposely make this distinction but I do agree with and stand by this clarification. The US is a very litigious society and Americans more than any nationality I've met are way too quick to conflate legality and morality. My personal guess is that this derives from a long running lack of class consciousness that is present in most other nations
- fuy 6mo ago
  There's been many examples of societies where killing or abusing people was legal etc. Law is not math, it can be (and often is) wrong; in many cases a law is just a way for ruling class to make money/keep power etc. It's completely OK to protest laws, and it may be completely reasonable to consider someone a criminal even if they haven't broken any laws.
retrac 6mo ago
I'm reminded of this recent Pew Research poll [1] about whether people believe their fellow citizens are moral. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-country-survey-americans-especially-likely-to-view-fellow-citizens-as-morally-bad/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...
- hoppyhoppy2 6mo ago
  That's a stark difference between the U.S. and Canada!
- culi 6mo ago
  Fascinating to see Canada and the US and the opposite extremes of that. Also interesting to see Indonesia, who had a massive genocide within living memory, as second most trusting. Most of all I'd love to see this study replicated in different years to get a sense of how quickly these attitudes can change. Fascinating study. Thanks for sharing!
nz 6mo ago
This is a long comment, but I swear it is going somewhere (new terminology). Someone once said (I think Kay), that "a change in notation is worth 20 IQ points". Historically, people struggled with presently-mundane basic concepts, such as Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, and Maupertuis' Principle of Least Action, because they lacked the "notation" (concepts, really), that would have allowed them to integrate them into their consciousness (or otherwise were not willing to discard or diminish another pre-existing notation, like biblical stories). The younger generations have the advantage of being exposed to a much greater variety of notations than any previous generation, thanks to the internet, and its unrestricted nature. There is a lot of alpha in being able to instantly find numbers, and compare them with other numbers. Those aggregations, and second-hand experiences (I did not need to get murdered by federal officers personally, in order to start questioning the legitimacy of the government more aggressively), are a kind of substitute for a few decades of lived experience (by the time you turn 30 or 40, you are old enough to understand a lot of the dynamics, but too old to do much about it). What this does, in effect, is create an acute awareness of what I like to call "sign-flip institutions" (I have never heard/read this term used before). A sign-flip institution, is an institution, in which a "customer's" minus is their plus, the overwhelming majority of the time. So for example, a bank is a sign-flip institution (unless you never take out any loans). This is in fact _codified_ in how they do their accounting. To a customer, a loan is (in the accounting terminology), a _liability_, while deposits are _assets_. To a bank (ask any accountant who works at a bank), loans are _assets_, while deposits are _liabilities_. Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans. Historically, most sign-flip institutions were heavily regulated[0] (to prevent them from impoverishing the populace, or worse). In banking, it used to be the law that they could not give mortgages for housing, unless the purchaser can pay 1/3 of the mortgage up front. This kept housing prices very low. It also kept bank performance low. After decades of bribery (sorry, lobbying), the banks got those regulations removed, and now the housing prices are so high that people _have_ to go into debt to (not own, no), but _have access_ to a home[1], that they may never fully pay off. Combine this with the fact that we have very aggressive anti-vagrancy laws (you are not even allowed to sleep in your own car/van, in an empty parking lot), and it should be no surprise that people will say that society is rigged, that those who govern (cities, states, federations, corporations, banks, etc), are illegitimate. Most AI companies, are openly marketing themselves sign-flip institutions! I don't know how true this is in practice[2], but given their round-the-clock FUD-based marketing, one would think that they are designed to turn your time into their money. That they are designed to turn you into money. The only surprising thing about this story is that it took a nation, known for school shootings, this long to get violent against the executive/governing class. It took them this long, to learn to leave their smartphones at home, and to bring their molotov cocktails instead[3]. [0]: Hospitals, for example, were not allowed to make a profit before 1978. [1]: Landlords get a lot of hate, but, most of the landlords that I've spoken to, are in the same exact situation as most home-owners (mortgage, debt, inflation), which means that they are really just arms-length employees of the _true_ landlords, the banks. Similarly, if you peel back the finances of most AI companies (maybe even most Silicon Valley companies), I am sure you will banks at the center of that web. [2]: My big suspicion/fear is that the anti-AI sentiment is being cultivated to scapegoat the nerds, and to protect the bankers/executives. [3]: Most Americans stereotype the French, as a nation of sad artists, but to the contrary, their protests are glorious.
ETH_start 6mo ago
1. Claims of structural harm are far more speculative, and thus harder to establish, than direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. 2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime. 3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability. What is most disturbing in your comment is that it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable". That logic erodes the distinction between disagreement, accusation, and a right to kill. Once people treat their own ideological conclusions as sufficient moral license for violence, they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process — beyond just the letter of law, as in the Jeffrey Doucet case, but also in its spirit, for we have democracy and due process precisely to tease out the ambiguities that social questions of causation and responsibility are so replete with.
- culi 6mo ago
  > Intent is a key element in criminal culpability. There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect. > it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable" There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crimes like burglary, murder, etc despite the abundance of scholarship we have arguing for social forces driving those actions. I'm not against applying the sociological imagination in both instances. I think it's almost always more useful than a narrow personal perspective. I'm just pointing out the obvious inconsistency. > they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process This "democracy" has clearly produced a result where poor people crimes are heavily policed and rich people crimes are heavily underpoliced. All robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft amounts to about $12 billion a year while the total amount lost due to wage theft each year is over $50 billion. Yet one version of this crime is much more heavily policed than the other. I never called for a "right to kill", I'm calling for fair application of justice. I don't think we individual citizens should have the responsibility of carrying out this justice. Instead I think a properly running representative system would be carrying out the justice. But it's simply not. Nothing in my original comment was prescriptivist. I'm just describing the state of matters as I see it. And I predict we will continue to see a rise in this sort of vigilante acts of justice until we have a valid alternative to it

typon 6mo ago

And the reason for _that_ is because of the callous way American society accepts the deaths of thousands of people who die due to the Healthcare Industrial complex (of which Brian Thompson was a key member of). Just because those deaths don't happen with guns doesn't make them any less important.

chaosharmonic 6mo ago

That's because Brian Thompson was functionally a serial killer.

disqard 6mo ago
From a POSIWID perspective, you are right. From a "we live in a civilized society" perspective, I can see why some people are outraged about his killing. Finally, looking at the balance sheet of his accomplishments, I can also see why the pitchfork crowd is cheering.
- apothegm 6mo ago
  POSIWID?
  - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
    > POSIWID? "purpose of a system is what it does" > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- simianwords 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - card_zero 6mo ago
    It does seem to be nonsense, yes. The duck test makes more sense. In the duck test, you can't claim something is an eagle if it walks and quacks like a duck. In POSIWID, however, you can't claim you intended it to be an eagle.
- justinclift 6mo ago
  > From a "we live in a civilized society" perspective, I can see why some people are outraged about his killing. I sometimes wonder how many of the "outraged" are really just people who don't want to be judged for what they've done too.