Right, because as the school shooting example was brought up, what is legally defined is not necessarily what some feel is morally right. And after more than a month I agree with PC on something: charged is not convicted.
bsky.app
Something can be lawful and unethnical and something can be moral and illegal. Innocent has multiple meanings; it's not just about whether or not a law was broken. i.e., a baby is considered innocent but as they learn more they are less innocent.
And some things are both unethical and illegal. At the time of his death, Thompson was being sued for insider trading and fraud because he secretly sold off millions of dollars of his UHC stock after learning the company was under DOJ investigation for antitrust violations.
Biden, Trump, abortion, or any other hot buttons you throw against the wall aren't the point. You said the CEO was an innocent who had broken no laws. I simply brought to your attention that he is the subject of investigation and litigation.
I absolutely agree that this may have been a motivating factor in determining the terrorism charge,but my issue with the DA using this line of thinking is that
You have got to be kidding me. I'd love to hear the argument that touching someone's breasts and buttocks is not sexual in nature.
The argument I always see is that breasts and butts don't make babies and therefore are not sexual organs.
Morons. If he had touched other areas too, you might be able to make that claim. But only those? Yeah, what else could it be? Nobody roughhouses by touching someone's breasts.
www.youtube.com
The manifesto and the notebook provide the base for the charges, but I doubt the DA and Feds would have bothered had there not been the public vitriol toward UHC and the other insurers. Luigi would still get 25 to Life for 2nd degree murder. The new charges greatly complicate the case. But the message is sent that anyone else who copycats will have all the books thrown at them.
www.thefp.com
Didn't Thompson make $10 million a year and exercise more than $20 million in stock options in 2024? At that salary he most certainly was aware of, and responsible for, the percentage of claims that were denied. Moreover, it is really unconscionable that a health care executive was paid that kind of salary. Health care should not be for profit, and executives should not be making that kind of money, if for no other reason that the optics that they are profiting off the suffering of their clients (which they are). I find this journalist's analysis very deterministic and in line with some recent populist notions of human beings lacking any free will. Determinism seems to lead to fatalism which in turn exonerates all those "cogs in the system" who make millions of dollars a year, but are ostensibly not responsible for their actions.The Free Press has a piece by a journalist who corresponded with Luigi Mangione. Mangione's emails to him were among his last known online communications. Lots of interesting takeaways in here, including the flawed analysis of Mangione and those who celebrate him.
My Conversations with Luigi Mangione
He told me that once we surrendered our agency, we’d surrender everything else.
[Mangione] was warm and gregarious from the outset, praising my writing and telling me how excited he was to speak with me. Mangione said he was on holiday in Japan, and I asked him about it. He said that while he loved many aspects of Japanese culture, such as its sense of honor, he believed Japan was full of “NPCs,” or non-player characters—which is internet slang for people who don’t think for themselves. He then told me a story he’d first mentioned in an email: One morning in Japan, he saw a man having a seizure in the street, so he ran to the nearest police station for help. They followed him back to the man, but refused to cross any street if the stoplight was red—even if the road was empty—as the man was seizing on the ground. Mangione lamented what he called “a lack of free will” in Japan, by which he meant a lack of agency.
I quickly realized that agency was a major concern of Mangione’s. He identified three of my articles that particularly resonated with him, all of which describe threats to human autonomy.
[...]
Unlike most people who decry others as “NPCs,” Mangione showed enough awareness to identify that he, too, lived much of his life on autopilot, confessing that he sometimes wasted whole afternoons doomscrolling social media. He said he wanted to regain some of the agency he felt he’d lost to online distractions, so we spent much of the chat discussing ways he could become more active.
[...]
Besides Kaczynski, Mangione’s intellectual tastes were relatively normal. Writers he spoke fondly of included Tim Urban, Sam Harris, Yuval Noah Harari, Jonathan Haidt, and Aldous Huxley. His political views were less conventional; when I asked him if he was voting in the presidential election, he scrunched his nose and said he wasn’t crazy about Donald Trump or Joe Biden, but liked some of the things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was saying.
[...]
Somehow, from there we ended up talking about intergenerational trauma, and it was here that we had our only significant disagreement. Mangione implied that he believed trauma could be directly inherited, and that it accumulated in families much like generational wealth. He claimed to have based this view partly on his own personal experiences. (I can’t elaborate.) It sounded to me like he was describing a pseudoscientific misinterpretation of epigenetics, popularized by activist-academics and books like The Body Keeps the Score.
The idea that trauma is passed down epigenetically is not only unscientific, it’s also un-agentic; if you believe your trauma is hardwired into your DNA, you’re prone to passively accept it rather than actively trying to overcome it. And so, in a bid to increase Mangione’s agency, I pointed out, as politely as I could, why he was wrong.
[...]
[T]o me, Mangione seemed like a particularly nice guy[...] he showed a desire to help even people he didn’t know, frequently expressing concerns about humanity generally, and wishing to find ways to improve everyone’s lives. He viewed most people as NPCs who needed to be awakened, but he never came off as arrogant, regarding himself as equally zombielike in many of his thoughts and behaviors. His view of society was somewhat pessimistic, but he tempered it with a sense of humor and a focus on finding solutions rather than merely complaining. And although he seemed to have some unscientific views, he was always open to other viewpoints, and was willing to update his beliefs if corrected.
[...]
[W]hile thousands reacted with laughter emojis to Thompson’s murder, and with love-heart emojis to his alleged murderer, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenseless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You, in fact, advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.
[...]
[W]hen Mangione was revealed as the suspect, everything became surreal. My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues that he could’ve done this. The only thing that stuck out was when Mangione briefly mentioned healthcare in the U.S. was expensive, he also said we Britons were lucky to have a socialized National Health Service. But even this statement, by itself, gave no indication that Mangione was capable of what he was being accused of.
When someone is found to have committed murder, friends and relatives will usually say things like, “I can’t believe it, he seemed like such a nice guy.” I instinctively said the same thing about Mangione. But as the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be surprised. I’ve long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity. It’s why many of the people celebrating the murder are those who self-identify as “compassionate” leftists. And it’s why most of history’s greatest evils were committed by people who thought they were doing good.
Much more puzzling than the cruelty was the stupidity. Mangione had seemed intelligent, far too intelligent to do something so dumb. Sure, smart people are better able to rationalize stupid actions and beliefs, but Mangione’s alleged rationalization, given in a 262-word “minifesto,” was nowhere near the intellectual standard I would’ve expected of him.
The data blogger Cremieux Recueil dismantles the minifesto line by line, but, to give an example, it claims “the U.S. has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” ignoring the fact that the U.S.’s healthcare costs are broadly in line with its income level, and its life expectancy has little to do with health insurance and much more to do with Americans being disproportionately obese, violent, and drug-addicted. Further, the minifesto makes basic factual errors[...]
Not only was the justification for the targeting of Thompson stupid, but the targeting itself was stupid. While it’s true that UnitedHealthcare has the highest denial rate for medical claims, the CEO doesn’t set the approval rate of a health insurance company’s payouts—that’s done by the actuaries, who themselves are constrained by various considerations, such as the need to keep costs low, including for policyholders. But even if Thompson did have carte blanche to set his company’s approval rates, it wouldn’t have made a big difference.
Health insurance companies don’t get rich by denying payouts for claims. As the economics blogger Noah Smith points out, UnitedHealthcare’s net profit margin is just 6.11 percent, which is only about half of the average profit margin of companies in the S&P 500. If UnitedHealth Group decided to donate every single dollar of its profit to buying Americans more healthcare, it would only be able to pay for about 9.3 percent more healthcare than it’s already paying for.
[...]
The ultimate point here is that Thompson was not the problem. He was a normal, flawed guy trying to keep costs low both for his company and his policyholders, while keeping his fiduciary duty to shareholders, whose investment his company depended on. He was a cog in a vast and unfair system that’s controlled by no single person but by the cumulative actions of millions of people operating in their own immediate interests. Kaczynski called such decentralized problems “self-propagating systems,” recognizing that they weren’t the result of human coordination, but rather, a lack of it.
If Kaczynski’s bombs and book-length manifesto couldn’t destroy such a system, then Mangione’s alleged 3D-printed pistol and shoddy minifesto certainly won’t. You can’t kill your way out of a problem that’s ultimately no one’s fault.
Still, people allocate agency strategically, to assign praise to allies and blame to enemies. Mangione’s supporters misattribute total agency to Thompson, so they can scapegoat him for a societal problem he had little control over. Meanwhile, they deny all agency to Mangione, claiming he was pushed to do what he allegedly did by a corrupt system or simple back pain.
[...]
I don’t know if Mangione ever found the agency he was searching for. If he didn’t, I hope he gets the help he needs. And if he did, he will soon discover that the price of agency is culpability.
Something the article ignores is that other employees quit rather than be part of these unethical business practices. But Thompson did not.
I wasn't addressing the vigilante justice element. It was the journalist's exoneration of Thompson as a "cog in the system," unable to exercise agency, that bothered me. It looked like he was letting him off the hook entirely with his weird deterministic world view.
