Murder is never the answer. Murder is not a healthy response to corruption. But it is healthy for people to fear that if they kill people for greed, they will be unsafe. ... [T]he assassination of Brian Thompson is a wake-up call, a warning that if we don’t solve this problem politically, we may not have a choice about whether it’s solved with violence.
This week's featured post is "The ball is in Trump's court".
This week everybody was talking about the guy who killed the guy who killed people
On December 4, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on the street in Manhattan. When I wrote last week, a manhunt for the killer was underway. It was probably a far more extensive manhunt than would happen if you or I were murdered, because this is America and some lives are valued above others. The Black Lives Matter movement has called attention to one end of that spectrum. This is the other end.
Wednesday police caught the guy the were looking for. The arrested suspect is Luigi Mangione. He left a short note explaining the attack, which I have not been able to find a full text of. The Economist reports:
What could have inspired the killing? Mr Mangione’s short note suggested a calculating desire to wreak revenge on America’s health-care system. America, he correctly noted, has the most expensive health care in the world, but life expectancy has stagnated. “Many have illuminated the corruption and greed” in the system, he wrote. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
UNH's pushback against the support received by the shooter hasn't gone very well. An in-house video distributed to UNH employees leaked to the internet, and was scorched by comments from people whose lives have been affected by denied claims.
The most insightful commentary I've seen on this situation is by Cory Doctorow, who published a short story with a similar theme (people killing executives of companies that had harmed them) several years ago. So he had been thinking about this for a long time before it actually happened. He puts his finger on precisely why so many Americans hate health insurance companies in general and UNH in particular (because it is the worst of the lot): They routinely kill people for money.
Doctorow goes through UNH branch by branch and explains how each one kills people for money. And he expresses his general amazement not that the Thompson assassination happened, but that such killings don't happen more often.
I don’t want people to kill insurance executives, and I don’t want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I’m surprised that it took so long. It should not be controversial to note that if you run an institution that makes people furious, they will eventually become furious with you.
America is a place swimming in guns. Disgruntled Americans routinely shoot up venues that symbolize their unhappiness and despair: workplaces, schools, and so on. Why has it taken them so long to get to health insurance executives whose policies kill their loved ones?
The Buddhist corner of my brain reminds me that Thompson was a human being, and that all human beings deserve compassion. He undoubtedly had loved ones who will miss him dearly, and they deserve compassion too. But you know, the list of people deserving my compassion is long right now, and I don't think I'll get to Thompson or his family for quite a while. In the meantime, his heirs should take satisfaction in the millions of dollars he made by killing people.
I also suspect that Luigi Mangione will turn out to be no hero. But in some sense that doesn't matter.
Here's a quote I heard years ago and never traced to its source: Good karma is cost effective. That's a further point Doctorow makes in different words. Maybe executives could spend less on guards and panic rooms if they gave people less reason to want to do them violence. Maybe corporations could spend less on public relations if they didn't raise so much legitimate public hatred. Maybe executives could live freer happier lives with less money if they stopped being such monsters.
When right-wing scum tried to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, Republicans made excuses.
When a lunatic beat Paul Pelosi with a hammer, they made jokes.
And when Trump sent a mob to attack the Capitol, they made up lies.
Don’t lecture us about condemning violence.
Meanwhile, Trump and Vance took newly acquitted killer Daniel Perry to the Army-Navy game.
and bowing to the new overlord
There's some debate over whether Senator Ernst is folding her opposition to Pete Hegseth or just temporizing until the FBI either validates the accusations against him or clears him. "I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources." is only an endorsement if the truth favors Hegseth.
Meanwhile, retired priest Father Nathan Monk analyzes Hegseth's controversial tattoos. J. D. Vance has tried to spin the reaction against those tattoos as anti-Christian bias, but Monk disagrees.
Alt-right accounts often utilize Crusader memes as ways to threaten violence without explicitly stating it. This has resulted in a resurgence of the use of symbols associated with the Crusades by Christian Nationalist groups, including the Crusader's Cross and the phrase Deus Vult. ... If [Hegseth] were a Roman Catholic, I think it would be hard to place him in the hate speech category, because there is a complicated history with the Jerusalem cross. It might have been a symbol he was accustomed to or had some major significance. However, that is not the case. These are not symbols of his Protestant upbringing or linked to any history or heritage, past or present, but symbols of the Crusaders that are heavily being used by Christian Nationalists to promote violence and hatred. ...
This isn’t a case of his faith being called into question but his beliefs of supremacy, superiority, and sovereignty being actively called out by other Christians who are tired of the Prince of Peace yet again being used as a weapon of war against the very types of people Jesus called us to love.
ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump, which they probably would have won. At the very least, Trump would have been deposed under oath, which I'm sure he was anxious to avoid. In the settlement, ABC will pay $15 million to a "presidential foundation and museum", pay another million for Trump's attorney fees, and issue an apology.
Knowing the history of Trump and charities, I expect a big chunk of the $15 million to wind up in his pocket.
I'm trying to put my finger on what's happening with this great capitulation to Trump -- ABC News, Chris Wray, the Democrats signing up to work with DOGE, Mark Benioff, etc. It's like you can feel the air going out of an entire social order.
Big tech companies lined up to give $1 million each to Trump's inaugural fund.
His 2017 inauguration was rife with corruption, ultimately resulting in a $750K settlement with the DC attorney general.
This is one small step in the Orbanization of America:
Yesterday I pulled overt references of queerness off my site, my very successful store that sells my books that have queer main characters. Because a few days ago, Meta emailed saying my advertising on their platform will be restricted - my site was categorized as "sexuality and gender identity."
I don't necessarily blame Novae Caelum for doing this, because this is the new world: If you want stay in business, even the business of writing novels with queer characters, you need to trim your sails a little. Stories like this won't ever rise to the mass media's attention, but there will be thousands of them.
and you also might be interested in ...
A heartbreaking story in yesterday's NYT: Jaime Cachua is a 33-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant who came to Rome, Georgia before his first birthday. He has no memories of Mexico, is not in contact with any relatives there, and speaks Spanish badly. He is married to an American citizen and they have 7-year-old twins who are citizens because they were born here. By all accounts, he is a productive member of a small-town society.
He’d lived all but the first year of his life in Rome, a riverside town of 40,000 in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. He was a customer service specialist at the local car dealership, a worship team volunteer at church and the host of family barbecues in his neighborhood cul-de-sac.
But Rome is Trump territory, and if Trump keeps his promises, Jaime will be deported to a country where he knows no one. Rome is represented in Congress by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who says she can't wait for the mass deportations to start. Jaime's closest friends, even Sky, the man who considers Jaime a surrogate son, voted for Trump.
Jaime's conversations with Sky are surreal in the way that so many conversations with Trump supporters are: Sky simply doesn't believe that what is happening is happening. Trump just wants to deport all the bad Mexicans, and Jaime is a good Mexican. Of course he'll be fine. Sky never explains how he thinks millions of people can be deported "very quickly" while paying close attention to the nuances of each case.
Another situation where the implementation details will matter is the 1-6 pardons Trump keeps promising. Are we talking about people who got swept up in the crowd and walked through doors already broken down? Or about the people who broke those doors? Or the people who battled police to get into a position to break down the doors? What about planners like Enrique Tarrio or Stewart Rhodes, who were convicted of seditious conspiracy?
It's important to remind people that none of the 1-6 convicts were sent to jail for supporting Trump, which has never been a crime and shouldn't be. They were convicted of breaking specific laws.
Similarly, they weren't convicted by the media or by Democrats. They were convicted by juries of their peers, who heard evidence from both sides and unanimously decided that they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
South Korea failed in its first attempt to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, who briefly declared martial law two weeks ago, but Saturday they got it done. 12 members of Yoon's party flipped against him, and that was enough for the needed 2/3 majority of the Parliament.
The spotlight will now move to the country’s constitutional court, whose six justices must vote unanimously in favor to uphold parliament’s decision. Yoon will now be suspended from office while the court deliberates. It has 180 days to rule on Yoon’s future. If it approves the motion, South Koreans must elect a new president within 60 days of its ruling.
A new government is forming in Syria, after the previous tyrant escaped to Moscow. NBC News analyzes "How Syria’s Bashar al-Assad fell so quickly". It will be a while before we really know what to think. Many Americans were optimistic back when Fidel Castro overthrew Cuba's previous tyrant or the ayatollahs replaced Iran's Shah.
Paul Krugman has retired from his NYT column, but he has shifted his energy to a Substack blog "Paul Krugman wonks out", which is more focused on his specialty, economics. In this post from Friday, he points out that Trump's desire for both a trade surplus and foreign capital coming to America violates arithmetic. The number of dollars in foreign hands is finite (i.e. dollars can only be created by the Fed in the US), and foreigners can either buy US products with their dollars or invest them in US assets. They can't do both with the same dollars.
President Macron has appointed a new French prime minister, Francois Bayrou, following a vote of no confidence in the previous government. Bayrou has a deep hole to dig himself out of. He first needs to assemble a new cabinet that draws majority support in the French Parliament, and then get a new budget passed.
and let's close with something big
Lots of people have advent calendars this time of year. But nobody has one as big as Gengenbach in Germany.
The Bible tells the story of Jesus' birth, and many elements of traditional Christmas celebrations originate there: a manger scene, wise men, shepherds, angels, and so on. But nothing in the Bible anticipates Christmas as a holiday, let alone one with gatherings of the extended family and huge feasts. (Mary and Joseph spent the first Christmas in a stable far away from their relatives. I doubt they ate well.)
In particular, the Christmas-anticipating season of Advent is wholly non-Biblical. It seems to have originated in Europe in the fourth century. Advent calendars first appeared in the 19th century in Germany. They were still catching on in the US when President Eisenhower was shown opening one with his grandchildren in 1953. The first chocolate-filled Advent calendars appeared in the 1950s.
But Germany still does it best: Every year, the town of Gengenbach turns its entire town hall into a giant Advent calendar.
Every evening, they raise the shade of another window to reveal a new picture behind it, just as the owner of an Advent calendar unfolds a flap to procure a candy — or these days, a lipstick or a spice sachet.
"It's quite spectacular because everything gets dark and then we have a spot on the window and then it's like a little bit of a curtain that goes up," said Michael Foell of Gengenbach's tourism bureau. "Everyone is just watching with big eyes and mouths open."
No comments:
Post a Comment