Is the US a dystopia?

dont worry nypd is on the case https://bsky.app/profile/area.man.professorbutts.com/post/3lcl66oa2nc2h

hawk tuah arc <--> action park

TV has taught me that only cat burglars and teenage hackers are lovable

Imagine if the nypd had this kind of urgency and commitment to solving the murder of non billionaires

Their urgency is to be seen doing something given how they've shared photos of 3 different people like they're the same person

No one ever accused them of being competent iirc

the nypd understand that if the super-rich started to boycott nyc it would bankrupt a lot of boutique hotels and expensive restaurants which are the lifeblood of the city!

Finally a respectable and successful assassination attempt. And apparently they were on a bike. we are so back

— tara (@taraxrh) December 4, 2024

i guess the dystopian aspect is that nobody knew this guy's name before this but everyone immediately figured out why he was assassinated

It does feel great that Something Happened

Even the mums like it

I’m seeing my moms suburban middle aged mom friends post stuff like “I hope more of them die” what is even happening lmao

— Val for Nevada 🌹🇵🇸 (@ValforNevada) December 5, 2024

a message from Santa to the children...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY9PZvK6CZs

All I have to add to this discussion is that maybe it's not a bad thing to instill a little fear in billionaires that live cushy lives by pressing their boots down on the faces of the poor and powerless.

better late then never. though this is just one incident. and on my fave FBI drama show it turns out that the guy who shot him is the ex-boyfriend of the woman the exec was sleeping with and not a political statement at all.

Genuinely struggling with this like obviously insurance companies are bad but you're all literally delighted? A doctor who performed abortions was shot on his doorstep in Boston around 30 years ago and I'm sure the pro lifers were also delighted. Where do we draw the line? Yeah this guy prob sucked but I'm not sure excitedly cheering this on is the answer.

And yeah it prob does have to do with someone being denied a drug/procedure/claim. I worked with a doctor who was shot dead at work by the son of a patient of his who had died. The guy blamed the doctor so killed him in a workplace shooting so maybe that experience clouds my judgement but this actual happiness over this event doesn't sit right with me.

I don't see the equivalence between a doctor who performed abortions and a multimillionaire CEO who profited from misery and death.

I just keep thinking of a line from the movie Grosse Pointe Blank: "If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there."

i mean, pretend it was trump who got capped. or musk.

how would we feel? I'm not going to feel fucking bad about it.

Aside from being a chief of Immiseration Inc., the guy was being sued by firefighters for insider trading. Firefighters!

I feel like "insurance companies are bad" is significantly eliding the fact that insurance companies that build tools purposefully to DENY valid claims because people can't fight them in court are murderers for profit. They are literally professional killers with a trail of bodies behind them. ENBB, of course what you experienced was horrific but it is not the same.

The point is not that violence or murder are good or desirable outcomes, it's that only one kind of violence is even acknowledged as existing, while the other, mechanized, systematized version that makes a few people incredibly rich is normalized.

i mentioned it upthread but live by the sword, die by the sword, and when jesus said that i don't think he was being cruel. people "celebrating" are doing something else that's not a great feeling (it's very dystopian yeah) but means very little compared to the endless lives they ended to enrich themselves

in orbit otm

Obviously it's not the same. I just don't know that I could be happy about anyone being killed like this. There has to be another way or solution. I agree with everything you said I just don't get being happy about it. Idk. I'm probably being dumb it's been a long week.

I think being disturbed by violence is probably good on the whole. I am just not bothered by this because my caring is all being spent on people who don't make $10m a year by profiting from systemic violence

what was the movie where the kids invite horrible people to dinner and then kill them? But Ron Perlman plays an awful shock-jock they wanna kill but at dinner he turns out to me more complicated and nuanced?

I don't know why I thought of that

i am numb to violence now, I live in the USA

My dystopic moment of the week was interviewing the CEO of the Vonnegut Library and Museum about Slaughterhouse-Five being pulled from the shelves in all our local school libraries. (Because of a new state law, books are being yanked across the state.)

My son read Slaughterhouse-Five for 9th grade English in the same school district, and that was just two years ago. Just nuts how fast all of this is hapening.

If true then well,,

BREAKING: Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield calls off decision to cap anesthesia for surgical patientshttps://t.co/cG6H5Jf3Qi

— Axios (@axios) December 5, 2024

i'm not happy when anyone gets murdered but on the other hand the very rich are way too comfortable in this country. they wear hundred thousand dollar watches. in public! i just want their watches to get stolen. and their cars defaced. something. anything. but i think the people who would fight back against the super-rich are too comfortable themselves. they don't want to start a civil war. they have too much to lose. so, what do you do? one day of pussy hats didn't change anything. it made people feel better, i guess. occupy wall street, wto protests...did they have an effect? or is it that these kinds of protests have to go on for years? i think they do. and nobody wants to sit in a tree that long. there were protesters outside planned parenthood in philly when i lived there for YEARS. week in and week out. decades. i can't imagine anyone i know doing anything like that. the dedication. the fire. the anger. there were so many bombs going off in the 70s. i don't think people want that. and i don't know if it helped anything anyway. i dunno. there is no easy answer to anything in this place.

one of my favorite musicals by Sondheim, Assassins, establishes that assassinations are a symptom of a society that has festering wounds that nobody is willing to acknowledge. While on the individual level, you might not condone the action a specific assassin took or fully understand their motives, collectively these things happen because citizens are being harmed on a large scale, and desperation to be heard and understood is what leads to these assassinations. The targets are chosen for symbolic reasons moreso than strategic ones.

In the musical, when asked why he went for President-Elect Roosevelt instead of then-lame duck President Hoover, Zangara responds "You think I care who I kill? I no care who I kill, Long as it's King!"

A doctor being killed for merely doing their job and being blamed for not being able to save a patient is simply a murder - they're just trying to get by and do their job like everyone else. They're harmed by the same machine we are. That's a tragedy.

United Healthcare, a major player in the insurance industry, has been found guilty of manipulating reasonable and customary charges and passing the cost onto patients, 900,00 violations of California's Unfair Insurance Practices Act, systemic compliance problems leading to Medicare denials/delays resulting in a 2.5 million dollar fine, and were sued for improperly denying $5 million in behavioral health treatment claims. These are cherry-picked examples, there's a lot more that they've been sued/fined for, nevermind the things that they've done to people on an individual level in the name of profit. That is, as in orbit mentions, intentional and systemic harm performed upon millions of people - many of their actions resulted in the death, permanent disability, bankruptcy, etc of untold numbers of people.

So United is basically the symbol of violence and corruption against the common man - their CEO is the figurehead for that symbol. it's understandable why he's a target. Was he a good person? Probably not - few CEOS are. He was responsible for much of the same shit UHC had been doing for decades, many of which were mentioned in this thread, but his administration resulted in the increase of prior authorization denials, predominantly amongst the elderly and disabled who relied on Medicare Advantage plans. so he wasn't one of the good guys, he was an equal contributor to their rot.

but it's irrelevant anyway - whether or not he was a good guy running a bad company or a bad guy helping the company stay bad, he's the face of the company and hence why he's the target.

*900,000

I think being disturbed by violence is probably good on the whole. I am just not bothered by this because my caring is all being spent on people who don't make $10m a year by profiting from systemic violence

he was making about $10M a year. source: unh's proxy statement https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/731766/000110465924050055/tm2332959d4_def14a.htm

Just bought a copy of Bryan Burrough's 2015 book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence on eBay. The paperback has a great Seventies cover.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71wrWIdFPkL._SL1200_.jpg

Years, decades ago, I was stuck somewhere without a book to read, and I found an old paperback novel that portrayed a Black revolutionary armed struggle with US forces (police?) which I now understand was either actually a fictionalization of the MOVE bombing or meant to evoke it. Can't find it now and the results of searching for the possible keywords are not things I want to click on at work.

Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman?

While I personally neither celebrate nor promote the assassination of even the super-rich, I completely understand why people might opt for such an approach in a world where the elites exist like a tribe of diseased apes who wantonly destroy the lives of multitudes while suffering precisely zero substantive consequence. And I ain't gonna lose the teensiest wink of sleep over it.

xp I don't think so from the plot summary but thanks for trying!

Days of Lead American Style

I imagine that the reaction might not be as intense if it hadn’t come after a month of the most evil pieces of shit alive celebrating their plans to strip the country for parts and dismantle the safety net. When the possibility of anything improving for the vast majority of people has been closed off indefinitely, bad things happening to bad people is the closest thing to good news out there.

i mean, pretend it was trump who got capped. or musk.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Thursday, 5 December 2024 bookmarkflaglink

That would be the real talk.

xp yeah and Musk is set to make $56 billion for no work at all, except for a hazy plan to turn the nation into a massive 99 cent store (on its last day of business)

he was making about $10M a year. source: unh's proxy statement https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/731766/000110465924050055/tm2332959d4_def14a.htm

― 龜

Thanks, I guess he only makes $10m because there are several people in the organization making much more than him.

William McGuire made $124.8m as CEO of the parent company, UHG, back in 2005.

that could just be his salary too

TV has taught me that only cat burglars and teenage hackers are lovable

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel)

maia arson crimew taught me that teenage catgirl hacker burglars are also loveable

If you want to get creative. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For The Future has that chapter about drone swarms bringing down 300 jets all at once - only now the Russia-Ukraine War has driven the cost of such an operation down to GoFundMe levels.

ok back to discoursing for me

The kind of person who owns a pistol with a silencer and plans the assassination of a CEO on a NY city street in the daytime is unlikely to be the kind of impeccable character we might hope he'd be.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

actually gonna agree with aimless on this one

i will cheer the death of this detestable human being just as much as the rest of you. doesn't mean i'm a supporter of people who think the best solution to systemic injustice is to go travis bickle on someone.

-

All I have to add to this discussion is that maybe it's not a bad thing to instill a little fear in billionaires that live cushy lives by pressing their boots down on the faces of the poor and powerless.

― Maxmillion D. Boosted (jon /via/ chi 2.0)

maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. mostly i just find it interesting. if people think the shooter was justified in killing this dude, to me that suggests that the state no longer has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. now, if i was a member of the in-group the law protected but did not bind, rather than a member of one of the increasingly numerous out-groups the law binds but does not protect, i'd be pretty concerned by this.

as it happens, i'm a member of one of the out-groups. vigilantes shooting down ceos on the streets? i'm pretty afraid of that kind of thing becoming normalized, quite honestly. at the same time, since the law doesn't protect me, since the law protects people like _him_ at the expense of the rest of us...

well, me personally, i _do_ have respect for the rule of law. i do fundamentally respect that the government of the united states of america has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, even if that legitimacy is vested in the hands of the NYPD. i guess not everybody sees it that way. these folks who are cheering on a vigilante killer, i strongly disagree with them, but i'm not gonna say i can't see where they're coming from.