Everyone seems shocked at this. I personally felt a lot less shocked and more like I’d been waiting for this shoe to drop for 20 years. I’ve been waiting for people to notice the tools of the Iraq War being turned against American citizens for over a decade now.
I spent the better part of 2001 and on arguing against the PATRIOT Act and its codification of terrorism as a crime. Lots of people were against it (we were in the minority, obviously), pointing out how the PATRIOT Act would consider the Founding Fathers terrorists. They committed violence to achieve political ends.
Did everyone just forget that at one point there was actually a nascent conversation on why this was a bad idea, especially considering people warning that they would soon use these laws against their own citizens?
Why did these conversations stop? More importantly, now that Mangione is being charged with terrorism, why aren’t the conversations beginning anew?
It makes sense, from the perspective of the legal system and of liberalism as an ideology. But I disagree with the claims after. Justification and ideas of morality are highly subjective, that’s why we have philosophical thought experiments like the trolley problem. There are plenty of mainstream moral frameworks that consider the killing of that CEO to be morally justified, just as there are ones that don’t. But ultimately, hard idealistic moral stances like ‘killing another human is always immoral’ just aren’t a useful approach to apply to the real world, it’s flaws and its constraints. Sometimes there just aren’t other viable options which won’t just cause more people to die.
I mean considering law is the practical application of a moral construct, and this moral construct is mostly agreed upon, I would not wanna question the laws that make killings a crime for example, although there is obviously nuance.
I understand that some people think “there can be a justification for a killing” but I would always say, if we justify some killings, there is always a chance people will abuse this “loophole” for crime we created. So saying all killings are illegal is kind of the best application of our morals we have. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to include every little nuance and detail in the moral system we base our laws upon, but that’s why our laws are not absolutely rigid, and our moral systems are bound to change inherently.
I get it, it feels wrong, I really do. But there can be both. I can both say that even a CEO shouldn’t be killed, and at the same time acknowledge that there is good reasons and something like that was inevitable given the status quo.
Oh you mean how UHC uses that loophole to kill people with social murder, and our moral system doesn’t consider it a crime because they didn’t directly stab someone to death, but instead purposefully denied them care that they had paid for by paying for insurance, leaving them to die.
Except, we clearly don’t say all killings are illegal, as evidenced by what I just discussed. We have clearly made the choice that social murder though things like denying healthcare or denying housing and pushing people into the frozen deadly streets of winter are totes okay. That’s literally what’s at issue here, is that a whole swath of killings are allowed, and not just allowed, but are allowed to be profited from, and handsomely. Which is far darker and worse, imho.
Genuinely, it’s easy to say that we have banned all killings, but we clearly haven’t. Cops even have qualified immunity to murder with impunity. We have the largest military in the world, and we’ve been known as the violent “World Police” that will bomb your country to the fucking stone age. Those deaths and that violence is normalized. That’s why they say “the state has a monopoly on violence.”