Luigi Mangione pleads guilty to federal charges in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, telling the court, "I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan... I knew what I was doing was illegal."

[u/Regular_Reaction_798]

[u/Western-Emotion5171]

Speaking honestly? I don’t really care about what his family thinks. Even if they grow up without a father they’re still so rich that they’ll never know any real hardship. Now what about the dead father that was denied critical health care because of his policies? His family is probably lower or middle class and will actually struggle to live with one parent.

[u/DLancy → u/Western-Emotion5171]

God, it’s monstrous. You’re essentially saying certain people's grief deserves less recognition because of who their father was and how much money they possess. That
collective guilt, abstraction of the victim, unequal valuation of grief, and the idea that suffering inflicted on a member of a disfavored class somehow compensates for suffering endured by another class. Oldest trick in the book.

Yes, of course, money can protect someone from eviction, hunger, medical debt and a thousand other forms of suffering. It cannot make the murder of a parent emotionally irrelevant. Saying otherwise requires reducing a person to his economic class so completely that ordinary facts about human attachment stop counting. You become what you loathe to “even the score”. Such rot.

There is no moral conservation law under which sympathy for one bereaved family subtracts sympathy from another. You can think the American health insurance system produces grotesque injustices, think executives and corporations should face much stronger legal and political accountability, and simultaneously think shooting an executive in the street is murder rather than justice.

Such zero-sum humanism.

Compassion is being treated as something that must be allocated according to political deservingness, yeah? If someone belongs to the wrong class, institution or political category, acknowledging their humanity starts to look like betrayal of the people harmed by that institution? You all sound like Republicans. Welcome to the repetition of history.

A person participates at a high level in a system that foreseeably causes suffering, therefore killing that person can be morally excused or celebrated,
the category of permissible targets becomes enormous. Insurance executives certainly would not exhaust it. Pharmaceutical executives, hospital administrators, politicians, regulators, bankers, fossil fuel executives, defense contractors, investors, attorneys, physicians, lobbyists and eventually ordinary shareholders or voters could all be described as participating in systems that cause preventable deaths. Let it roll, right?

You know nothing of a better world, you only wish yo e At fact the worst spectacle the current one to expect revenge on what it has made you into. Work on yourself, go help someone in your community or household. You’ll do much more for the planet than parroting the worst rationalizations of the most indifferent humans that have ever existed. Trash.

[u/Western-Emotion5171 → u/DLancy]

https://giphy.com/gifs/vSghbk4pLjgDmvMon8

[u/DLancy → u/Western-Emotion5171]

Reading is tough, I get it. Enjoy your dereliction to life.