A doctor explains how he feels about the killing of a CEO. I agree with him — you can simultaneously believe that killing is bad and that a corporation and its executives are bad. You can have two bad things at once!
All these right-wingers fainting at the thought of the Left not joining them on the fainting couch fail to recognize that the last thing we want is swarms of armed vigilantes shooting anyone they don’t like — we’re not modern Robespierrists. What we’d prefer is a responsible government that checked the excesses of corporate capitalism without bloodshed…it’s just that it doesn’t look like that’s what we’ll ever get.
Two wrongs don’t make a right? Maybe we should try three…
PZ , Thank you !
Government controlling corporate capitalism excess won’t happen while the money from corporate capitalism controls the government. From both Houses of Congress to the Presidency and the Supreme Court. Until the voters smarten up and begin to vote for their own good, expect life to get more expensive with less and less rights and privileges (except for guns). I don’t foresee this happening because of the bumper sticker mentality deeply imbedded in the American populace. The Republicans have mastered this, using it on the country through their messaging. Pried from my cold dead hands, welfare queens, and MAGA to name a few.
Nope. The CEO is a murderer. If you believe in capital punishment then he deserved what he got. If you don’t believe in it in all cases then he shouldn’t have been assassinated.
The only reason we are talking about these things right now is because of the killing. All of the other approaches have done nothing and in fact things have gotten worse. So this is not a bad thing and violence is sometimes the only answer, unfortunately.
Maybe we do not need Robespierre, but Danton and Marat are beginning to look good.
…also, the guillotine is unhygienic. I am thinking of modifying the zombie virus so it only affects people who eat caviar.
The only reason the killing is not recommended is that it is impractical because a new asshole CEO will simply replace the old one. For as long as the “for profit” insurance infrastructure is running with very little checks the problem will persist and no amount of CEO whacking will fix it.
Well actually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LZP6BVeLX0
Two wrongs does make a right.
If we have to sacrifice a healthcare insurance CEO every once in a while to improve healthcare or rollback harmful policies, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
Bad translation by me:
Human bees,
did nature only give you honey?
Look at the drones around you!
Where is your sting?
But…I don’t believe in capital punishment.
SQB: you raise the interesting question why the Gods always seem to want sacrifices of virgins and rams, rather than of sinners.
Remember that two wrongs don’t make a right,
but that three do.
–Deteriorata.
National Lampoon
The thing about not believing in capital punishment is that there’s a very different dynamic involved between a state (which has access to an enormous amount of non-fatal ways to handle dangerous people) and non-state actors (which don’t). It’s not a contradiction to both think that states, with their near monopoly of violence and ready access to things like imprisonment, shouldn’t be in the business of killing civilians and to think that when the state is failing to handle a certain class of mass killer because they’ve decided that their killing is legal and not murder it’s fine for individuals to use lethal force as the one tool they have.
Maybe health insurance companies should not make decisions that inspire such a large number of people to have such a unpalatable(to them) reaction to the assassination of an insurance company CEO. Maybe we do not need to kill them but maybe we just need them to understand that they have no sympathy from the people if they do get killed for what they have done.
“Watering the tree of liberty yadda yadda yadda…” Where have I heard that before?
jheartney: reportedly, from right-wingers whose grass-roots are even happier to celebrate this murder than the left wing is.
What we need is capital punishment for corporations – legally dissolve the evil ones and then arrest those in charge.
Of course, most are evil – corporations exist so people can do evil without consequence – but it shouldn’t be hard to pick out the worst malefactors in a few key industries.
Urge everyone to watch The Corporation, a 2003 documentary. I had no idea capitalists hijacked the 14th amendment, intended to enshrine personhood to formerly enslaved people, to give their evil organizations personhood. https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-corporation/
@ #13 Akira MacKenzie
–Deteriorata.
National Lampoon
I remeber riding around in Dodge Colt in 1973 – 74 listening to the National Lampoon’s 8-track tape with that on it.
The morality of killing people aside (and it should not be aside): For those who think that assassination of CEOs is the right approach to social change, read up on the anarchist assassinations of the period around 1900. Lone egomaniacal would-be heroes versus mass social movements. Which worked?
It is impossible to have much sympathy for people who dedicate their lives to making their shareholders and themselves ever increasing profits by denying healthcare to their customers.
For people who have serious chronic pain from a spinal injury, the insane process to get effective treatment or painkillers is very much an adding insult to injury situation. Being accused of being a drug seeker because debilitating pain is making your life miserable is apparently enough to drive the patient to murder the source of such draconian practices.
It’s crazy that it took a vigilante and murder to highlight the daily injustice of the health insurance industry.
@ 13
I’m a little younger than you, but I first heard it when listening to Dr. Demento (or trying to… Tuning into the Chicago radio station that played it was infuriating, to say the least.)
Whoops, that should have been for 19.
Don’t murder people. We have systems of justice, if you don’t like it, change it, if you can’t change it, maybe you are wrong.
The other execs will make a lot of pr noise but will only change 1 thing: getting better security
And the long line of people ready to leap into any “open” positions will not get any shorter because $$$
The only fix is a fundamental shift in how we handle healthcare and that ain’t gonna happen.
#sadbuttrue
I never advocate violence as a solution to anything. You can’t allow or excuse murder and still have a viable society.
But there are a helluva lot of victims of gun violence that I will grieve over before I shed a tear for that guy.
Condemning violence against the ruling capitalist class is Stockholm syndrome—CEO-on-CEO violence is nothing new, and it seems the consensus in my realm of existence is Brian Thompson’s acute lead poisoning should, and needs, to be deemed a preexisting condition.
It’s really not, Tadd.
[Too terse? e.g. Enlightened self-interest take: if killing people one dislikes becomes normalised, I myself will face a greater risk of being killed. Plenty of other possible reasons]
John @30: You can be annoying, but as far as I know, neither your comments nor your actions have resulted in the deaths or ruinations of thousands of people. So you’ll probably be OK.
If health insurance CEOs are forced to live inside a bubble of security guards worthy of a lifetime president of a banana republic it clearly demonstrates no one -except corporate flunkies and their client politicians- likes the system.
Birger, they shan’t be (seriously! The ruling class ain’t shook) doing that; also, if security goes up, well, expenses go up. So the customers will have to pay more.
(Wishful thinking is fine, but one has to account for reality, too)