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@pluralistic
Loved the Clarence Darrow quote. It's been very hard, over the last few days, not to think this was in some way a 'righteous action'.

@pluralistic Fellow Europeans, and especially Dutch , read this and shiver. It shows us in an excellent, balanced essay where commercialised health care will lead us. Greed is God.

@pluralistic

Thank you for your thoughts on how your short story https://prospect.org/culture/books/2024-12-09-radicalized-cory-doctorow-story-health-care/
was birthed, and on what you think now that Luigi Mangione has shot dead the CEO of United Healthcare https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/09/radicalized/#deny-defend-depose .

...numbers bouncing around in my head...32% denial but charging 182thousand percent for a $8 Covid test...

One of my questions: Why, oh why did you and your partner decide to move from Canada to the shithole country USA? Become a citizen even?

One of my thoughts on the societal dynamics that are responsible for this shithole health"care" system to evolve: bad things happen when too many good people pretend shithole stuff were other people's problems, not theirs, when too many people choose non-radicalisation.

I am going through a non-radicalisation wrt climate.
I never really cared about any social "issue" , I mean really deeply care about one and identify with it. Now I do, about climate.

But I decide against becoming the equivalent of Robinson's justly radicalised "Children of Kali" in his climate novel "Ministry for the Future" who shoot down passenger planes. (A nice enough novel but the whole plot is not thought through logically, so I can't really recommend it.)

Despite really knowing the stakes, I decide against tarnishing my conscience with their immoral choice.
And thus, I fear, I am of course, what do you call it, abetting the shithole stuff?
For not radicalising into violence, I am being an asset to that #EconObscene which will ultimately cause my own early and potentially violent death, and the death of our tech civilisation.

I am one of the "good people" who enable bad stuff to happen by not radicalising on time.

Luigi Mangione radicalised into targeted action and his success is already that one health care provider put a stop to their profitable concept of denying paying for anaesthesia.

So by immorally choosing to shoot down one CEO, Luigi has already saved thousands and thousands of people from bad outcomes of not-performed surgeries.
In my book, this makes Luigi a hero. A modern Robin Wood.

But still. I fear the SWAT team at my door more than I fear the 2030s, and excuse my decision – to not start killing our murderers – with a humanist concept of ethics that is not at all applicable in the shithole EconObscene we, my generation, has brought about by not caring enough.