The assassination of United Healthcare's CEO is a real life trolley problem, and a select few are trying to argue to save all lives while the train is going to kill the masses.
The assassination of United Healthcare's CEO is a real life trolley problem, and a select few are trying to argue to save all lives while the train is going to kill the masses.
It appears that in every thread about this event there is someone calling everyone else in the thread sick and twisted for not proclaiming that all lives are sacred and being for the death of one individual.
It really is a real life trolley problem because those individuals are not seeing the deaths caused by the insurance industry and not realizing that sitting back and doing nothing (i.e. not pulling the lever on the train track switch) doesn't save lives...people are going to continue to die if nothing is done.
Taking a moral high ground and stating that all lives matter is still going to costs lives and instead of it being a few CEOs it will be thousands.
You're viewing a single thread.
I honestly cannot believe how fucking stupid the reaction to this has been. I did see that reddit reacted similarly, so at least y'all are on par with the average redditor when it comes to intelligence. It relieves me to know that this is less an issue with Lemmy extremism and more an issue with basic reasoning skills.
How about you name one single human being, not even thousands, who has benefited from this contract killing? Whose life has been saved by "pulling this lever"? Explain yourself.
It helped my mood considerably. Stress can be deadly.
It worsened my mood drastically. So that seems like a net negative so far.
Collaborationists don't count.
Do you have a job? Live in a house? Have any family or friends? Do you eat food?
Unless you answer no to all of these questions, I unfortunately must inform you that you too are a collaborationist.
Actually don't bother, the fact that you're using the internet already proves that you are.
That is such a lazy bullshit argument. "You have to exist in the system as it is now, so you can't possibly oppose that system". There is a difference between doing what you must to survive in a system, and opposing efforts to reform that system.
It's just the inconvenient truth. You are all so desperate to prove that you're opposed to the system, because deep down you know that you're a part of it. None of us can escape this guilt.
I'm also desperate to prove that I'm opposed to the system, but unfortunately I'm intelligent enough to understand the difference between a rational attempt at reforming the system, and random acts of violence that actually cause the system to become even more dysfunctional. I can't naively cheer on this stuff like you, because I understand how futile and counterproductive it is towards the end goal of reform.
Honestly, I suspect many you gave up on changing anything for the better a long time ago. Now you just want to watch the world burn. I still have hope and determination to change things, and for that I get called a collaborationist and bootlicker by edgelord keyboard warriors. Oy vey!
It's just the inconvenient truth. You are all so desperate to prove that you're opposed to the system, because deep down you know that you're a part of it.
Shifting goalposts. You have not addressed my criticism of your goofy point here. Oppressors, collaborators, and rebels all have to exist within the systems that exist, and that has nothing to do with each group's intentions for the future of that system.
None of us can escape this guilt.
The assignment of moral culpability is reliant on the ability of a person to make a choice. When I pick up my prescriptions, that has no impact on whether or not little Billy gets his heart operation. No choice I could make would impact that, except through my political activity or, failing that, through some sort of violence.
Deontological Ethics (you decided to debate morality with a Theology BA) is the dominant system in the West, and it does not put any moral requirement on agents to actively oppose injustice. I personally reject that system, but it is dominant in the Abrahamic religions. Collective responsibility is not incompatible with this system, but has been almost entirely rejected in Christian traditions, the only real exception being original sin.
I personally subscribe to a mix of different utilitarian systems, and utilitarianism has no concept of collective moral responsibility. It would also not require someone to refrain from living or functioning in an imperfect society. If becoming a hermit and living off your own garden won't help, then there is no obligation to do so.
I can't naively cheer on this stuff like you, because I understand how futile and counterproductive it is towards the end goal of reform.
I certainly don't claim perfect knowledge, but I feel confident in saying that I'm far from naive. I think I have a better understanding of both the morality and the politics than you do. Politically speaking, the kinds of reforms required to fix our healthcare system are far greater than anything ever achieved without at least a credible threat of violence.
The amount of wealth opposing us is nearly unfathomable, and it has control of the media, what's left of our educational system, and the means to spy on our communication. An uninformed democracy is no democracy.
On top of that, we now have a fascist executive with both the legislative and judicial branches under his thumb. If we somehow manage to oust the fascists, it will be almost impossible to keep the neoliberals from regaining power. As we are seeing in France right now, Neoliberals greatly prefer losing to a fascist over losing to a socialist/progressive.
There is no plan of action that gives us a violence free route to an equitable healthcare system for at least the next 50 years. Violence won't be sufficient on it's own, but it will be necessary. Public support for this shooter actually decreases the amount of actual violence that might be otherwise required.
I still have hope and determination to change things, and for that I get called a collaborationist
No, I didn't call you a collaborationist because of your hope and determination. Hope and determination are great, but aren't worth much without a viable plan of action. We have tried all the "right" things for decades and have only lost ground. Maybe it's time to move on to the "next" thing.
Your demand for a civil approach is literally what collaborationists have always done. We aren't going to win by limiting ourselves to a system designed by our adversaries to keep us from winning. I know you found comfort in the idea that history is over, but that's just not the case. I wish it were.
Shifting goalposts. You have not addressed my criticism of your goofy point here. Oppressors, collaborators, and rebels all have to exist within the systems that exist, and that has nothing to do with each group’s intentions for the future of that system.
Let me explain more fully. You are correct that all three groups have to exist within the extant systems. What you fail to understand is that all three groups can and almost always do exist within individual people. When you post on Lemmy like you're currently doing, you could maybe lay claim to the role of a rebel, if I were being generous. But when you go to work, you're wearing the hat of the oppressor. When you pick up your prescription and pay the copay to your health insurance company, you're a collaborationist. When you go to college and graduate with a BA, you're a collaborationist.
This entire argument stems from my refusal to reduce a man to his occupation. It would be nice if human beings could be divided into neat little boxes of different types (rebels/oppressors) and we could deal with them accordingly. Unfortunately, the human condition is not so clear cut, it's frequently messy.
Furthermore, even if we were to ignore all of the nuance that I just pointed out, and go with a rough estimation, there's a second major problem with your approach. Namely, it's impossible to understand who is playing which part until the dust has settled. Was Thomas Jefferson an oppressor, a rebel, or a collaborationist? I would imagine his contemporaries would have considered him primarily a rebel due to his prominent role in the American revolution, while modern audiences might consider him an oppressor due to his extensive slave holding. Conducting business dealings with Napoleon Bonaparte seems like the work of a collaborationist.
Point is, even with historical perspective and knowing how events turned out, it can still be difficult to understand the roles that certain people played in society. How much more futile a task to attempt to categorize people into groups without the advantage of knowing the outcome of their actions. You might as well be throwing darts with a blindfold on, that's the level of accuracy you're going to get with that approach.
The assignment of moral culpability is reliant on the ability of a person to make a choice. When I pick up my prescriptions, that has no impact on whether or not little Billy gets his heart operation. No choice I could make would impact that, except through my political activity or, failing that, through some sort of violence.
I don't believe in free will, so this argument is kind of moot for me. But if I did, I would argue that there is almost always a choice you can make that can impact something, even if it's nearly impossible to identify what that specific choice is. In other words, there is always something you can do, but as a human being it's extremely difficult to identify what that something is, partially because we aren't as clever as we pretend to be and partially because society intentionally obfuscates the choices that we do have.
Of course, not believing in free will also moots many of the traditional ethical perspectives, but for most purposes I find deontological ethics to be a relatively reasonable viewpoint. I think the important thing to remember about utilitarianism is that there are very strict limits to our ability to measure the consequences of our actions. We are not intelligent enough to predict the butterfly effect of our actions, so attempting to assess the consequences of certain actions is quite the tricky task. Deontological ethics simplifies things to a level that we can engage with more easily.
Politically speaking, the kinds of reforms required to fix our healthcare system are far greater than anything ever achieved without at least a credible threat of violence.
I beg to differ, just look at the New Deal. When the Great Depression happened, American society did not descend into lawlessness and anarchy. The American people did not resort to murdering the robber barons who had gotten us into that mess. They elected a progressive candidate in FDR, who enacted massive legislative reform that far exceeds the level of reform needed for our current Healthcare system.
Nonetheless, you are not wrong in your assessment of the current situation. It certainly is dire, and I don't hold much hope for a similar solution as occurred back then. But it's worth pointing out that it really did happen through political means less than 100 years ago in this country.
It's also worth noting that FDR is exactly the kind of person that the current mob would be putting on the list of assassination targets. He would be a very easy target as well, with the polio and all. The current social climate would literally eat FDR alive and he would never get anywhere near the presidency. He was the epitome of an old money, American aristocrat. And yet he did more for the working class than any president before or since. I wonder how many people had that on their bingo card in 1930.
There is no plan of action that gives us a violence free route to an equitable healthcare system for at least the next 50 years. Violence won’t be sufficient on it’s own, but it will be necessary. Public support for this shooter actually decreases the amount of actual violence that might be otherwise required.
This is where you lose me. You can't know these things. You can't know the future 50 years in advance. You can’t know the overall impact of this event until it actually unfolds. And pretending that you do is the classic way to convince yourself to do and support horrific things in the present day.
Hope and determination are great, but aren’t worth much without a viable plan of action.
I'm working on that. I already know that assassination probably isn't going to be a huge part of a viable plan of action.
We have tried all the “right” things for decades and have only lost ground. Maybe it’s time to move on to the “next” thing.
Have we? We've flip flopped back and forth between Dems and Republicans for the past 50 years, there hasn't been any clear, indisputable mandate from the American voters as to what the government should be doing. We as a people cannot agree on a path forward, so we continue to languish.
I don't even remotely believe that history is over, I intend to advocate for massive social restructuring. But I also understand that attempting to brute force things is foolish and counterproductive.
You are interpreting the word "collaborationist" so broadly as to make it entirely useless. Apparently you would think that every prisoner in a work camp is a collaborationist if they don't immediately cut their own throats. The system we live in is way too all encompassing to somehow fight from the outside. Some level of interaction with the system is a requirement just to survive, and fighting back against the system can require even more participation in that system. You are trying to defend yourself against being called a collaborationist by muddying the waters and making the word functionally useless. When I used the word, it was in reference to the actual rhetoric you are using that is directly related to the conflict between American workers and Oligarchs. The Oligarchs have setup a system where they can kill us en masse with total impunity, but fighting back is out of bounds. You are taking a stance that is entirely unnecessary to take for any other reason but to defend the rules that keep us trapped in a broken system.
This entire argument stems from my refusal to reduce a man to his occupation.
When state catches the killer and puts them in jail, is it reducing them to nothing but being a killer? When we take certain actions in life, that is going to have consequences in how society interacts with us in the future. This creep wasn't just a health insurance CEO, he was by many measures the worst health insurance CEO. He traded other people's lives for cash, and that should have consequences. That's not a failure to recognize the breadth of his humanity, it's saying that actions have consequences.
Was Thomas Jefferson an oppressor, a rebel, or a collaborationist?
Who said that everyone can only fit in a single box? That sure wasn't me, I will point out though that doing away with slavery (to the extent that we did anyways) involved killing a whole lot of slave owners.
I don’t believe in free will, so this argument is kind of moot for me.
I personally think that free will as a concept is inherently nonsensical, and therefore I don't have a position on it at all. I'll call that agreement to that point. However, I'm not convinced that the concept of morality is entirely dependent on the concept of free will. A machine with a faulty mechanism still just does what physics say it must do, but we still call it a malfunction (bad function) and expect it to be modified to work properly. Anyways, I don't really want to delve into a nuanced discussion of moral systems.
I beg to differ, just look at the New Deal. When the Great Depression happened,..They elected a progressive candidate in FDR...
Same war, different battle. That was a strategy that worked, to an extent. However, what works once in war doesn't always keep working. The oligarchs learned from FDR and, when we tried this again in 2020, it failed. American oligarchs have a stranglehold on the media and decades more knowledge in how to manipulate voters. Eventually we will need progressive representation, but a lot is going to have to happen to make that possible again. We might get lucky if Trump's presidency fails in the right ways. If nothing else, Trump is great as an agent of chaos. Maybe he shuffles the deck and suddenly we have a credible electoral strategy, but I'm not counting on it.
American society did not descend into lawlessness and anarchy.
I disagree. The rise of organized crime in the US didn't start with prohibition. It started because oligarch strategies to divide the public on ethnic lines effectively created a bunch of isolated resistance forces. It evolved into something else, but the justification these groups used was always that their group had been unfairly shut out of prosperity. If they weren't going to be given their due, then they would take it. It's more self serving than a targeted assassination, but it was definitely lawlessness and anarchy.
It’s also worth noting that FDR is exactly the kind of person that the current mob would be putting on the list of assassination targets.
So far, exactly one particularly bad oligarch has been assassinated. You are making some pretty wild assumptions based on a single data point. In an oblique way, this reminds me of your point on utilitarianism. We don't know with certainty what any action we take might lead to. Maybe this CEO was going to be the next FDR, or maybe the next Hitler. Maybe Trump will have a change of heart (or grow one) and be the next FDR himself. Anything is possible but, call me a skeptic. This is not a valid way to argue anything.
This is where you lose me. You can’t know these things. You can’t know the future 50 years in advance.
No, but I can know history, and I can see what's going on in the world around me. Wealth and power in this country are both almost entirely in the hands of psychopaths. The psychopaths have a global disinformation machine with effectively infinite funding. The harder we have pushed for change, the more effort they have put into dividing the people into subgroups and convincing them to fight each-other. It's a strategy that works extremely well. It's human nature that the only way to heal those divisions is to give people a common enemy, and that has to be the oligarchs. Moving society is like advancing the plot in a book. You can't convince the masses to do something because it is the smart thing to do. They need a narrative, and assassinations make for an interesting story. I guarantee you that the oligarchs are more concerned about that aspect of this event than anything else. Suddenly all these people across all of their carefully created subgroups are unified in expressing hatred for their actual enemies.
You can participate in the system without a being a bootlicker, boy, take notes ;)
How so?
That is such a lazy bullshit argument. "You have to exist in the system as it is now, so you can't possibly oppose that system". There is a difference between doing what you must to survive in a system, and opposing efforts to reform that system.