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Personally I would prefer that he get out of jail as soon as he is not considered a risk to society, since that is the only valid justification for prisons. Maybe months, probably years. And then he can consider the evilness and futility of his act.
And for all the people celebrating it here, you might consider your own hypocrisy and outright callousness at defending the indefensible. I still can't quite get over my shock at the level of hatred and vituperation here. I thought this community would be better than that.
From a person who knew Luigi Mangione, just published in Unherd:
Get off your high horse and shut the fuck up. Were you shocked when people celebrated Kissinger or Bin Laden dying or do you only get upset at corporate America?
WE CURRENTLY LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE AN UNQUALIFIED STRANGER CAN DECIDE YOU DON'T DESERVE MEDICAL TREATMENT. Healthcare CEOs kill people EVERY DAY but we should draw the line when it's a gun and not a denial letter? Get the fuck out of here with that logic.
Go point your outage at the millions of innocent people who die every day from preventable disease. Or if that's too abstract for you, how about the people getting bombed and starved in Palestine?
Palestine? Kissinger? Completely irrelevant. You are advocating first-degree murder. Look in the mirror and start there.
The bureaucratic plumbing of American healthcare? So fix it then! Vote. Send letters. Get more involved in politics. Protest. What have you done about the problem you seem so worked up about, apart from cheer on a murderer? What?
If speaking out against vigilante murderers is "being on a high horse", that's fine by me and I'll stay there.
Goddamn, you are insufferable.You're not speaking out against vigilante murderers, you're pearl clutching that people dare to lack empathy for someone completely devoid of it.
The "victim" attacked first by denying the killer healthcare.
Yes. How dare I have my own opinions and values that contradict yours?
Someone openly advocates murder and then talks of empathy. The hypocrisy is almost beyond words.
There you go again, deliberately misinterpreting to feel superior.
For sure, I feel morally superior to anyone who openly advocates murder. Not a high bar.
What a shame that your hand-wringing is causing second hand embarrassment for everyone who reads it.
A murder by policy and a murder by gunshot should be valued equally.
In a perfect world, someone with Brian's insatiable, murderous greed disease would be put in a psychiatric hospital for public safety, along with every billionaire and hundred million plus inaire that treats society as their exploitation piggy bank, not that many people, but the sociopaths run the asylum here.
This is a class war, whether you choose to show your belly and say thank you for trading your life for their profit to your enemy or not. Brian was an enemy combatant of this class occupation.
Asklemmy: what do CEO boots taste like? I'm sure they will see this post
Right. Because being against vigilantism must mean you love vigilante victims.
He is a husband and a father rheeeeee
No idea, I don't know any CEOs. I'm disappointed you seem to think that a job title disqualifies someone from the right to life, the right not to be murdered.
- the person who thinks a job title qualifies someone for the right to murder
If you're claiming this guy (a human being with a family, and friends, and children) "murdered" people, you are either delusional or (more likely) twisting logic to breaking point in order to justify your own advocacy of cold-blooded murder.
Just because there's a few steps between your decision and someone's death doesn't mean your decision didn't cause their death.
Better hope nobody starts making such complex calculations about you and deciding that it's therefore time for you to be shot dead in the street.
The thing is, unlike that shithead CEO, I presume, neither of us have actually made decisions to kill masses of people so that we can make ourselves so rich that getting 100k every day for 30 years wouldn't reach their wealth.
You make it sound so simple. It's not. It's complex. This guy was a cog in a system that we are all part of, that we are all responsible for. To blame him personally is transparent scapegoating. To gun him down while he walks in the street is, well, what it is: blatant, inexcusable, first-degree murder. Deep down, I'm sure you know that all this is true.
Cog? The guy was the CEO of the insurance company with the highest denial rates in the industry. He wasn't subject to this system he was actively designing and lobbying for it.
He was maximizing value for the shareholders of his company. That's what happens in capitalism.
If you're going to analyze the moral balance sheet of every private company then you're going to need to be more consistent. Any major oil company will surely account for far more damage to people (not to mention other creatures) than this health insurer. Do all their CEOs deserve extrajudicial capital punishment too?
What about you personally? What are the wider effects of your personal choices of diet, for example, or mobility? Not great, I'd guess. Perhaps you don't merit a bullet, but maybe some prison time is warranted?
Yes. He was a cog, I am one and so are you.
Lives are more important than shareholder value and no feduciary lawsuit would ever rule otherwise.
Yes I think extra-judicial punishment is a fitting end when judicial punishment fails to even start. Again, what's legal and what's moral are not the same. Luigi took one life sure, but how many lives do you think will be saved because insurance executives are a little more scared of looking like murderes to their customers? Hundreds? Thousands?
If I'm making decisions that directly lead to the death of my customers in exchange for monetary gain then yes please lock me up.
Indeed. That's why murder is illegal, not to mention a moral abomination. I didn't read the rest of your comment.
Clearly not all murder is illegal. And the whole reading thing tracks. They have systems out there that will help you learn.
It's not a complex calculation. He regularly traded other people's lives for his own money.
It’s murder if it’s against the law. If you think whatever the CEO did should be against the law, maybe you should work on that instead.
Morally it's murder either way. Just because you found a legal loophole doesn't make it not murder morally. There tons of actions that are legal but are morally reprehensible.
Of course. The problem is that morality is subjective, which is why we have laws instead of anyone being allowed to kill whomever they consider morally reprehensible.
it was never about a "job title"
The rich and the poor came to an agreement once upon a time, a social contract if you will. That contract was - You treat us with respect and pay us our worth, or we drag you into the street. The rich have broken that contract
The world you are advocating is a very dark place indeed. In historical terms, it's France of 1794. A bloodbath that ended, as it always has in history, with a conservative backlash and a dictatorship. You talk in grandiose terms of the social contract but you seem not to know much about history.
I am not advocating for the world that we find ourselves in, which is a dark place. This is the first of many events that are going to happen due to the lack of care of the C suite that is robbing us at every chance and turning the legal system against everyone but themselves. This is a world of their making along with the consequences. Yes France was bloody due to the financial disparity between the rich and poor, all actions have consequences. The Americans also went through this with unions, where business interests murdered union reps and workers on strike, we came to a deal eventually but as always the deal was reneged. The social contract I "talk about in grandiose terms" was to keep us, rich and poor, from each others throats. It is in their hands what the population does, keep taking and not giving back, it will be taken from them.
When all other avenues fail, there is only one choice left. Most are not there yet, but more and more are getting to this point. Buckle up, it is going to be a rough ride.
Yes, they do - bad consequences for everyone. If you take the law into your own hands it always ends in tears. Either you'll get a strongman who "alone can fix it", or you'll get some kind of revolutionary regime which tolerates no dissent and eventually collapses, hated by the very people it was supposed to represent. Every. Single. Time. There is no exception in history.
I am against extrajudicial cold-blooded killing, just as I am against the judicial variety (capital punishment). But this does not even need to be a moral argument: human history shows very clearly that vigilante justice is a dead end.
The only way forward is discussion, and compromise, and hard choices.
Well, there is a way out of this. They can stop the anger being rightly directed at them, but they won't. The law is not in our hands, the law is not there to help us, and here we are.
BTW to be clear, I am not advocating violence. I am merely pointing out what many others see, we are reaching a breaking point and if compromise is not reached it will push past the point of no return leading to what you are so worried about. Which seems to be happening anyway with the far right starting to take power across the globe
You already (probably - assuming you are American) live in a dictatorship.
It didn't "end" with a dictatorship. Social change continued for a century, in which the people gained more and more power to the detriment of autocrats, until the establishment of today's strong liberal democracy. The millennia-old institutions that opposed this change couldn't be replaced in a day.
Indeed, the dictatorship was followed by a restoration of the monarchy. And, after a few more revolutions, some of them bloody, by various other forms of regime.
In parallel, other European countries (the UK most famously) skipped all the violence and ended up at roughly the same destination of "strong liberal democracy" as you put it. A handful of them are today even stronger liberal democracies than France, with even better social protections.
What a waste of blood.
Ah yes, the peaceful and bloodbath free British empire.
Replace Thompson with Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
Our celebratory reaction to Thompson being brought to justice isn't going to lead to bad things. No, it's the result of being on the losing end of the world we already inhabit.
Brought to justice? Is this the kind of "justice" you advocate for every transgression or are you making an exception for this one? Who decides what the penalties are? You? What if some other evil CEO committed some other nebulous "crime" but only a bit less serious, what would he deserve? Just a beating in the street? An hour in your personal torture dungeon?
In a civilized society we have institutions that dispense justice. They operate on the principle that a law must be broken first. If you don't like the law, then you first need to get the law changed. You don't get to decide unilaterally who gets punished how much and for what.
It's like Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote about pornography: I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. It was 100% warranted in this case.
With the small caveat that you are not a judge, either appointed or elected.
Neither is the President.