'Free Luigi Mangione' billboard seen from Southern California freeway
Supporters of Luigi Mangione insist he is being framed, despite New York detectives saying they have enough evidence to prove he murdered UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson.
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I get why people like him, but some of y'all need to get your heads on straight and understand the gravity of the situation. Murder shouldn't be given a free pass if the target was unpopular enough. You can both appreciate him and also recognize that it's reasonable to hold him in jail at the same time. Society isn't, and shouldn't be treated as, a one dimensional thing.
The thing is, most people aren't celebrating this as "murder", they're celebrating it as self-defense.
Imagine someone walks into your home and starts waving a gun around, threatening to kill your kids. It's completely uncontroversial that in that situation, you have a right (perhaps even an obligation) to defend yourself and anyone else in immediate danger.
Now imagine instead you're in a hospital room, and your kid has an autoimmune disease that's shredded their lungs. A ventilator is the only thing keeping them alive while they wait for a lung transplant. The same guy comes in, but instead of waving a gun around he says he's going to unhook the ventilator. Why is this different? Why do you have a right to defense in one situation and not the other? Sure, CEOs aren't literally walking into hospital rooms and pulling plugs, but Charles Manson didn't walk into homes killing people and we all agree he deserved to be convicted of murder. They're directing subordinates and directing systems to kill people, on purpose.
The working class is under siege by people who are willing to sacrifice our lives in the interest of corporate profits. We have a right to defend ourselves.
Did his act prevent the imminent death of another who was being threatened by the man he killed? That's what self defence is about.
If you believe something strongly enough to sacrifice for it that's fine, but to go around pretending that everything popular should be consequence free is childish. If you want to get involved in such serious matters, you ought to be a hell of a lot smarter than people are acting.
prevent the imminent death of another
Honestly most likely at least some due to the mass outrage sparked by the killing, yes. It is at least likely that some in the health insurance industry are reconsidering the level of shit they can get away with. For example, immediately after the killing:
I had a doctors appointment earlier this week and stuff I've been trying to get treated for years got approved
Murder shouldn't be given a free pass
Indeed! And now that the murderer has been executed, we are celebrating that justice has been done. Don't be mad at the executioner for pulling the lever.
Luigi Mangione has not been found guilty of any crime. As of the time when writing this, he is an innocent man suspected of committing a crime. Until proven otherwise, he is not the person who shot the CEO.
Seems more like a live by the sword die by the sword kind of thing. Luigi absolutely should be arrested. Luigi should absolutely be prosecuted. A jury of his peers should absolutely give them a Westworld verdict, "doesn't look like anything to me".
I think that would send a powerful message that the rank and file American public is willing to guillotine a few CEOs if that's what it takes to fix this problem.
I don't care if his job was legal. I don't care if The law is on his side. I just don't care. The law allows people to deny care using an unthinking machine that can't be held responsible all in the pursuit of keeping the money that was paid to the company to provide that care.
Nope, I'm sorry. If you want a recipe for how to be unpersoned, there you go. If we don't call what soldiers do on the battlefield murder I'm going to have a tough time calling this murder.
Murder shouldn’t be given a free pass if the target was unpopular enough.
I agree. The US BRUTALLY MURDERED Osama Bin Laden. He had a family, how cruel are you people. Disgusting. We should arrest and charge the people that killed him for MURDER!!!
/s
I'd honestly even say killing Bin Laden was less morally acceptable than killing Thompson tbh. One had 0 additional casualties, and one was preceded by a war which fucked the entire middle east, created multiple power vaccuums, killed thousands of civilians, and involved literal warcrimes.
And I am Felix, nice to meet you.
If you can't recognize the difference between a military operation and shooting someone in the face on the street, you seriously need help.
Bin Laden wasn't on a battlefield, he merely directed others to perform deadly acts. Same as Thompson.
No, but you see, because Mangione wasn't employed by the US military (who started a baseless, illegal war in Iraq that led to literal hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and massive regional instability), he's on the hook for this one. Sorry, them's the breaks. There's no moral authority quite like the US military, I tell ya what.
If you can't recognize the difference between a military operation and shooting someone in the face on the street, you seriously need help.
Say what now? Have you ever heard a term "war crime"?
Yes, it absolutely should be given a free pass. Brian Thompson was an enemy combatant in the class war, and responsible for many deaths.
Heard of Daniel Penny? He killed a problematic black man with mental issues, he was acquitted some time ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jordan_Neely?wprov=sfla1
Worth considering that Neely was merely behaving in an erratic way that made people on the train feel unsafe, while Thompson is a man who made decisions that literally killed people. I guess I don't feel good about murder, but all of these situations are such gray areas. In the case of Mangioni/Thompson, Mangioni saw a trolley problem where people were already getting run over, and he could get run over himself and let the same rate of death continue, or get run over while pulling the lever to put the trolley on a track that might have fewer people tied to it. I certainly can't see my way to the conclusion that what he did was clearly wrong.
Imagine if someone was living in a dictatorship. The dictator was passing laws and policies leading to thousands dying yearly. They were embezzling funds from the country and stealing money from citizens, putting them in debt and leading to all the consequences that would entail. They increased the prices of essential goods like medicine in order to skim off the top. They never directly killed anyone, all of the pain and suffering and death they caused was due to policies that technically seperated them from the outcome, being enforced by courts, banks, police, hospitals, and prisons. And they also never broke any laws. Sure people died, or were forced into debt causing them to lose their homes, but all of that was allowed since they helped make the laws.
You've heard stories of other distant countries which don't have these problems, but your country spends a considerable amount of time and money to convince you that those other governments are worse or impossible. Even so, the people tried voting this dictator out, but they rigged the elections so that no matter the outcome they still kept power. Some tried leaving, but all the neighbouring countries have the same type of government, so it was futile.
If in this situation someone kills the dictator very few people would believe that the assassin should be in jail. They didn't kill someone because they were violent or dangerous, they did so out of desperation and a desire for improvement. This assassin won't be a threat to any other citizen, only to other dictators doing the same thing. Why imprison someone who was fighting for a better future?
This isn't a damn movie where everyone claps because the bad guy is dead.
Alright, I'll get back to you and be sure to apologize when this alleged Act II starts and shit goes south. For now, I'm going to be enjoying the part where everyone claps because the bad guy is dead.
I mean honestly the being knee deep in blood because a revolution started after one guy was acquitted for killing a CEO sounds way more like a movie plot to me but idk.
Regardless, the point of that wasn't that "the CEO is dead, now everyone is saved!!!" Right now we literally have a situation where a dictator was removed from power in Syria. The outcome of that is still unknown, and could turn into something worse or something better, time will tell. But either way no-one is really saying "how dare they violently overthrow the government, don't you know that violence is bad", because that would be a stupid reaction to Assad being removed.
In any of these situations saying that the person using violence to respond to violence deserves to be imprisoned doesn't make sense. Luigi Mangione would not be someone I'd feel unsafe walking past in the street, so why should they be locked up? The point of a prison system should be preventing someone from committing crime again, but I wouldn't be worried about that in the case of Mangione so it makes no sense to sentence them to prison.
I also don't want a violent revolution to come from this. Some violent actions leading to a government making large reforms as a concession to avoid further violence is something that happened all throughout history, and is how we got the New Deal. Something like that coming out of actions like this would be great, but my ideal system of change is more based on mutual aid and setting up dual power to allow people alternatives to replace corporations or weak government programs.
