Evan drowns a good point in his own drama. I've moderated against him on a Stack Exchange site before and it's tedious how far he can push the limits. He knows the rules, the process, what's expected, and he knows how lowly moderators react when they the system alerts them to infractions. It's no surprise he's earned himself [another] suspension here.
But as a moderator, what the company is doing here is ridiculous and a seemingly flagrant abuse of license. If you take contributions under CC-BY-SA, you damned-well keep the attribution unless the contributor wants to be disassociated from it. If you don't want to be associated with a contributor, delete the account, and the content.
You can't pick and choose.
I kind of gave up interacting with StackExchange in a moderation/power user role after the repeated drama episodes where they kept disrespecting the community's input. I don't even remember what the individual drama cases were, I just got tired of feeling slighted. Your point about the willful license violation seems like it's along the same lines.
They're in the same position as Reddit: they have a bunch of cats to herd whose labor they depend on (not enviable) but every once in a while they do something capricious and arbitrary as a company and make everyone angry.
The straw that broke this camel's back was they edited and rewrote an answer I had posted, but left my name/avatar beside what was no longer my words. That was too much for me. I wouldn't mind if they did something like "(MOD EDIT: alternate info)" or removed it if they thought it was incorrect, but I can't be having my face and name next to words I never uttered. I've never experienced that type of mod behaviour anywhere since.
Completely rewriting it is against the rules, you should have reverted that or taken it to meta. They're supposed to post a new answer instead, if they think it deserved that much of a change.
Can you link to the post in question? An edit is credited to the person doing the edit. You can inspect it. Do you claim it was done differently and there's no evidence to that in the revision history of the post?
TBF having others edit posts is pretty key to SO. It's how, for instance, the site handles those still learning English - editors try to parse what the person meant and reframe the question or answer accordingly.
I've made drastic edits in the past... but the goal was always to capture the intent of the writer. From your anger it sounds like someone, a mod, went way beyond that?
> TBF having others edit posts is pretty key to SO. It's how, for instance, the site handles those still learning English - editors try to parse what the person meant and reframe the question or answer accordingly.
Right. Editing a message should be for stuff like typos, markup, bugs in example code, etc.
Soon we'll have LLMs rewriting answers en masse for..... reasons?
Can't you still delete it or edit in the explanation that it's not actually your answer anymore?
Depends.
Delete - yes, if it's not the accepted answer or locked. But deleting highly-upvoted answers is generally discouraged.
Edit - Probably not. Editing to correct it might be possible if it's not locked but editing to add such a disclaimer would be problematic.
The best course of action would be to request disassociation, so that it's not attributed to them any more.
If you delete or edit a highly voted answer, the moderator undoes it and bans you. Happened to me.
You make it sound like "they" is stackexchange inc. Don't you just mean another user of the site, just like you can edit other posts? The feature that always shows who last edited a post and what changes (byte for byte diff) were made if you click on it?
If it's against the rules, like a meaning change rather than a correction, you can report it. I don't see how simply leaving your name next to it and leaving the site helps anyone nor lets the person who did it even know they made a mistake (without link, from experience moderating the edit queue I can only assume good faith by default since the overwhelming majority of the edits I reject are made for understandable reasons; one of my reject reasons is conflicting with the author's intent btw, and there's no qualification about the author needing to be correct)
Edit: I'm not sure this needs a disclaimer at all since I'm a normal user but, to be clear, I have no affiliation with Stackexchange. I posted answers mainly on the IT security site and one of them blew up the karma points, giving me access to some of the moderation queues on that specific site. I was always annoyed how slow these things are handled so I started looking at those queues on occasion, and that's basically all moderation I've ever done. No special instructions from, communications with, or particular love for the company that operates the site. I just feel that the parent comment misconstrues how the software works if it wasn't actually the company that made the edit in a hidden way (I only know of that happening for things like switching http to https)
> so I started looking at those queues on occasion, and that's basically all moderation I've ever done. No special instructions from, communications with, or particular love for the company that operates the site.
The idea is supposed to be that you've been on the site long enough to learn what a valid edit is by the time you get access to those queues, and it's tested by having already-handled edits mixed in to your queue. IIRC if you get it wrong it tells you what you should have done.
Yes? Not understanding what you're trying to say with that
The guidance you're saying isn't there does exist, but you're only exposed to it when you screw up.
Yes, instead of removing attribution and keeping the content, if Stack Overflow doesn't want to be associated with the user they should just delete all of it.
And pray Jon Skeet stays on the straight and narrow.
I know my fame and legendary repute may lead one to believe otherwise, but I hate drama. I probably hate drama more than anyone else on the planet. We should _just_ focus on the facts when I post. And on the facts, I know for certain that we're always on the same page and in agreement, so long as you're right. And you're normally right.
So let's put the drama behind us.
IMHO you are absolutely in the right here but yearly ban might do you good. This level of engagement with a single corporate site is not healthy for anybody. I know it's unjust (all life is), hurtful and evokes all negative emotions but sometimes you need to be hurting a bit to get out of local minimum in your life that sucks your time and resources by just being not terrible enough to leave.
Besides SO viewership drops like a stone since LLMs became a thing. Soon it'll be an open-air museum rather than a staple.
Else-recent-SE https://gist.github.com/hopeseekr/f522e380e35745bd5bdc3269a9... and https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1hwg2px/stacko...
From the attached .csv
Year Month NumQuestions 2025 1 2967 2024 12 25566 2024 11 26832 2024 10 30428 2024 9 32376 2024 8 36010 2024 7 42219 ... 2017 12 142102 2017 11 165479 2017 10 166236 2017 9 158760 2017 8 173592 2017 7 175909 ... 2009 12 36729 2009 11 37204 2009 10 34009 2009 9 28969 2009 8 28104 2009 7 27731
It's the implicit tyranny of building or contributing to public commons owned by corporations beholden to ideological individuals, investors, or advertisers, or to government jurisdictions with particular intrusive laws and policies. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to force a company to maintain publication of content it doesn't want to host... it can simply delete users and content whenever it chooses, but typically doesn't for reasons of goodwill and/or reputation. Youtube deletes millions of people's comments and videos daily because an AI algorithm disagreed with them by virtue of sentiment analysis and decided their combination of words was not allowed. At some point though, people around the world will demand a digital "Bill of Rights", even if the content, processing, and/or publication is happening on the systems of for-profit corporations... it's either that, or enough people must leave forums that have a history of one-sided, unfair, and/or unethical (while maybe legal) practices.
>enough people must leave forums that have a history of one-sided, unfair, and/or unethical (while maybe legal) practices
One problem is that it's often invisible and inscrutable.
I've made comments on youtube that have not shown up. I know I've heard Louis Rossmann complaining about this as well.
At the time, it felt like there was a technical problem with the site not accepting my comment. But after reading your comment, in hindsight it absolutely feels like I was being AI-moderated.
Had I known, I would be more inclined to decide whether or not I want to further engage with a site that silently deletes my posts.
The digital bill of rights should definitely include some kind of mandatory feedback on why posts were moderated, ESPECIALLY if it was done using AI.
"You can't pick and choose."
Perhaps you can if the licensor is incarcerated and unwilling to enforce the license.
I have no experience with the writer of this post, but:
> You can't pick and choose.
Yes you can, when your goal is to stir the pot.
The argument isn't over what is possible for the powerful. It's about what is right and just.
"Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small"
At this point, do they even need human moderators? Can't they just remove them with AI to save cost?
What cost? Moderators are volunteers, not employees. The closest thing to paid moderators are the Community Management team but they only step in occasionally.
Of course, people, whether criminals or not, should be attributed for their intellectual contributions but there is a bigger point here which people do not say enough:
The criminal justice system already wields the responsibility of punishing criminals. Let the convicts go through due process and do their time. The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.
I would like to piggyback on this sentiment to call out a common feeling in the US (and probably elsewhere).
When people are facing jail time, they are usually told to expect to be brutalized in prison by the other prisoners and guards.
Putting additional punishment in the form of abuse (physical, mental and sexual) and then putting the onus of that additional punishment on a vulnerable population is a recipe for disaster.
Prison is the punishment, anything on top of that is a crime and a lot of people turn short sentences into life by targeting other prisoners with certain crimes.
This culture of retribution runs deep.
Sounds to me then that it’s working as designed.
This is not mentioned nearly enough. I think it’s rooted in the idea that people must be either great or awful when being both is a very real possibility.
> when being both is a very real possibility.
Another possibility is that being a good or bad are not inherent properties of people -- but only properties of actions. Bojack Horseman explains it well.
> That's the thing. I don't think I believe in deep down. I kinda think that all you are is just the things that you do.
and
> There's no such thing as "bad guys" or "good guys." We're all just...guys, who do good stuff sometimes and bad stuff sometimes. And all we can do is try to do less bad stuff and more good stuff [...]
Don't wanna argue too deeply into philosophy. But I definitely think there is a certain moral code embedded in you by your early childhood. That moral compass on how you navigate life.
It's "deep down" but not some unchanging, inherent aspect of "you". You just need more work to tackle it, and probably with help, not alone.
But yes, "good" it "bad" absolutely doesn't work when evaluating a single individual life.
Solzhenitsyn had it right that we are all capable of good or bad actions:
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
This view too, is naive. There absolutely are bad guys. There absolutely are good guys. Bad people still occasionally do good things; Good people occasionally do bad things.
Fred Rogers was unquestionably a good guy. He still made mistakes, and was very upfront about this. He made mistakes from the bottom of his heart trying to do the right thing but not always having the information (or patience to gather and process) to make better decisions, but he absolutely always made decisions trying to, even when advancing his own interests, take others into account.
Unfortunately, there are people who make decisions always with the intent to hurt others. Many of the actions that they take are individually neutral or good. It's hard to get anything done if you don't do some cooperation in society. It's quite probable that even for the most awful people, if you count unweighted they've taken more good actions than bad - but the magnitude of their evil is much higher.
Most people are neither. Most people are stupid and selfish but trying not to do too much bad. Bojack gets this, but somewhat misses the other implication - that being good and bad is learned and practiced, and that you should learn from and practice the ways people who are Good at being Good people,
Interesting perspective, and it's hard to disagree with the idea that there are people who are more outliers than some others on either end, which is just a natural result of any distribution, though I think another angle to this topic is how "good" and "bad" are always relative. Throughout human history, somebody who is regarded as a visionary, saint and savior by their own in-group might well be regarded as the biggest evil by another group of humans. Some simple examples would be somebody like Columbus or Genghis Khan. Those are extreme cases of course, but the same applies on various scales.
People will judge you as good or bad. I think that's the extent of my agreement. I'll use a common joke as my perspective here:
"I built bridges for 20 years and no one ever called me Joe the bridge builder, and I paved roads for 20 years and no one ever called me Joe the road paver. But I fucked one goat..."
Human judgement can be fickle and outright vain at times. If there's an idea of outright good or evil, I don't trust any human (let alone society) to cast a proper judgement as such.
Love Bojack Horseman.
A certain owner of an electric car company comes to mind.
Which also raises the contrapositive; just because you are good at one thing (or even a handful of things) doesn't mean you're good at everything.
> The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.
Well said.
Agreed, we kept the Reiser filesystem namesake and attribution in the kernel even after his murder. Didn't adversely affect the project or the views of Reiser himself.
> The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.
Why should the rest of society be forced to continue associating with someone?
How are you “forced to continue associating with someone” who is arrested and cannot use their online accounts? What exactly does that do to you? And how does Stack Overflow keeping all the posts but removing the name protect you in any way?
>how does Stack Overflow keeping all the posts but removing the name protect you in any way?
Well that's just a violation of the license they attribute posts to
>Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
That's not even a moral argument. They just broke the contract they signed up to.
They shouldn't be "forced" to continue associating with someone; they should not change their position on whether or not they should associate with said person based on this situation.
That sounds abstract, but such concepts already exist. If you have a restaurant, you are allowed to refuse to serve someone who happens to be a member of a race R, but you are not allowed to refuse someone _because_ they are a member of race R.
> they should not change their position on whether or not they should associate with said person based on this situation.
This sounds like you forcing them to adopt your views.
Maybe people are just very fickle these days, but last I checked: "someone posting on your server" is not association. Site owners put in that one article precisely so that cannot be the case.
But this does break the CC license by unattributing content but not deleting it, so that's bad.
I don't know if people are different these days, but we certainly have taken the concept "all relationships are voluntary" too far. If we had a society where people associated with each other only when there was personal gain to be made, that would not be a very nice society.
By participating in an online community, you have entered into a social contract to interact with others.
Do you feel that you are being forced to post here, or read comments and responses from other humans?
> you have entered into a social contract to interact with others.
An entirely voluntary social contract. I'm not required to read a specific person's posts and can chose not to based on new information I'm told about them.
Yeah, and I don't need a person's name erased to choose not to read something. Especially when it's not me manually blocking them.
I agree and would add this related and famous example:
https://boingboing.net/2023/06/10/noted-mathematician-ted-ka...
> obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.
That is the privilege of corporations....
Yet, my ex co-worker who has been convicted of murder and is serving life without possibility of parole has his account untouched [0]. It's surprising because his case was all over the news and tabloids.
Not so Fun fact: a second coworker, from the same company, different crime, has also been convicted and is serving 14 years. (Victim died when police shot the wrong person). His stack overflow account is still up.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/968075/gareth-pursehouse
This must have been a helluva company to work for.
That must be Internet Brands, of WebMD fame, then?
Wait til you see how they asked employees to comeback to the office... https://www.vice.com/en/article/dont-mess-with-us-webmd-pare...
This happens all the time.
ReiserFS retain its name when Hans Reiser is convinced of murder.
There is no reason to remove one's name or close their account when they are convicted of a crime.
>Victim died when police shot the wrong person
You dont have to use passive language like our media.
Ah yes. php of course
He needs a filesystem named after him too.
MangioneFS / LuigiFS ?
I've been considering writing a distributed filesystem which makes shell pipelines easier to share with others (e.g. stronger guarantees that they'll do the same thing when run elsewhere).
Luigi, in the Mario bro's sense, goes through a lot of pipes. Perhaps I'll call it LuigiFS.
Why "PHP of course"?
But did your co-worker see massive online support for the murder, with loads of people arguing it was justified and good for society? He may have been "all over the news", but was it glowing, positive coverage of the murder?
Be honest, the coverage of your ex co-worker's crime was not comparable to Mangione's murder, was it?
So you need to be famous to get banned from the internet?
Not just famous, but causing users to publicly support the murder and voice support for future murders too. Again, the central point is that most murder is condemned by the public while this one is enjoyable a disturbing amount of support.
I bet companies are getting uncomfortable with just how many of their users are supportive of murder, and how much it's going to increase TOS violations for incitement to violence. Do you think advertisers want their products next to threads fawning over a murderer and saying more need to be shot?
>causing users to publicly support the murder and voice support for future murders too.
Sounds like society's problem, not SO.
Put it another way, how many people would be checking on Luigi's account On SO in this way without this streisand effect it caused by banning the feww dozen users up voting him? How many people before this even knew Luigi had a SO account? How many of his posts talk about justifying murder?
If denying "fame" was SO's goal, they failed tremendously.
> Do you think advertisers want their products next to threads fawning over a murderer and saying more need to be shot?
Find those threads before we start worrying what may happen retroactively. Luigi had a manifesto, but it's not like he pasted it all over the internet as some sort of deliberate plan to gain social media clout.
There are quite a few people legitimately named Adolf Hitler. We don't ban them for their assossiation to a more famous Adolf.
> Sounds like society's problem, not SO.
When Stack Overflow starts losing advertisers because they don't want their products appearing next to posts calling for CEOs to be murdered, it becomes their problem too.
You repeated your statement without answering my question. Where are these CEO murder posts? Do you think Luigi posted a manifesto on SO?
You can barely answer questions correctly without getting them removed unless you're high rep. You think an off topic response will last more than 2 minutes?
But the point is, removing all those comments is still work. Not too many people are sad that a terrorist isn't getting attribution for his SO posts. Personally, if it save the moderation team just 10 man-hours of work I'd consider it a positive tradeoff.
Stack Overflow's rules for bounties [0] discourage promotional bounties but do not state that bounties cannot be given to the same user or on the basis of the user as opposed to a user's answers.
Stack Overflow failed to enunciate their own rules (or - let's be honest - imagined new rules after the fact), blamed you for breaking non-existent rules, sent you an obviously mostly copy/paste suspension notice (the bit about secondary accounts seems bizarre and non sequitur), and gas-lit you with the imaginary claim that you cannot vote on a post you already voted on which for whatever reason hadn't been logged.
FWIW also a high-rep SO user and had to create a burner account in case there's retribution. We shouldn't have to hide ourselves just to talk sanely.
SO is right to try to protect the bounty system from unintended uses, but not to make rules up on the fly and enforce them heavy-handedly and retrospectively, suspending someone for breaking non-existent rules.
Stack Overflow should make rules for bounties and make them crystal clear and unsuspend you. Can they admit they're wrong - will they do this? Of course not.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty#:~:text=Users%20may%20....
From the SO help center (https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-up):
When should I not vote up?
Posts should be voted on based on the content in the post rather than the person who wrote it. Voting for specific people, whether you know them or not, can negatively impact our ranking system. Here are some examples of common cases that should be avoided:
In cases where voting patterns appear to be targeted, the votes are likely to be reversed, either by automatic systems or manually following an investigation by the staff, which will cause a loss of reputation earned from these votes.- Repeatedly upvoting several of a user's posts to say "thanks" for one great answer. - Repeatedly upvoting posts created by people you know because you know them – often friends, family, or coworkers. - Targeting a specific user with votes for any other reason.-----
The rules around abuse of the voting system are by necessity somewhat fuzzy, you can't enumerate all the possible cases clearly. And bounties are even more fuzzy as they can be similarily abused, but users still have a lot of freedom in deciding how to use them.
Usually misuse of bounties would likely just result in the mods warning the user and undoing the bounties, exactly because this is an area where the rules are not necessarily clear to users and the boundaries are somewhat fuzzy. But Evan Carroll certainly knows how the system works and is a user with a very extensive history on SO. Suspensions and especially suspension lengths are heavily influenced by previous behaviour. A year-long suspension means this is at least the third suspension for that user according to the guidelines given to mods for suspension lengths.
Just to be clear though, if I find a user because they gave a great answer to my question and then I look at their other answers, *am I allowed to upvote them on the basis that they are great answers?*
Edit: Just adding so no one reads anything into my post, I have not read any of the SO posts in question and this was more of a question to trigger thought about what appears to be a poorly reasoned application of a policy.
For whatever it's worth, I've done that before and haven't noticed them being undone. But then, neither did the auhtor of the article so who knows.
What I find glossed over is that the article quotes Stackexchange saying that the author would have gotten the same demotion anyway, just that now someone opened their profile and was like "oh hey an unhandled flag, wonder what that's about" and looked into it. The system being quick for once doesn't make it retribution in my mind, which is the conclusion they draw. If they'd say "probably the punishment was worse because of the context at that point", I could have followed the logic because it doesn't say anywhere how they got to 1 year demotion (it's not a ban, another exaggeration afaik: they can use the site like anyone else just without reputation/karma privileges, is what it says at least), which seems like a lot for what they did, but that's not the argument made
I wouldn't worry about it. It's generally not something that gets noticed.
This probably got noticed because it set off some automatic warning that caused someone to look into it.
Three 500 rep bounties awarded to a single user in two minutes to answers that were from 2015 is a bit unusual. Users can only offer 3 bounties at a time and the maximum value for each is 500 rep.
The reputation history for the account can be seen here - https://stackoverflow.com/users/4616250/user4616250?tab=repu...
Opening the December 10th and 11th sections shows 1590 reputation was removed - that's 1500 for bounties and 9 upvotes, some on the same posts. Three of the votes on the 10th were within the same minute with one two minutes later - that's not much time to actually judge the quality of the posts.
Additionally, just reading the answers, they don't seem to be particularly good answers - certainly not worthy of huge bounties.
Considering the age of the posts (2015), quality of the answers (low), and the rapidity of voting (high)... well...
I don't think you have anything to worry about.
>(or - let's be honest - imagined new rules after the fact)
StackOverflow has been sending that exact email ("the motivation for doing so needs to be anchored in the merits of the post, not the person who wrote it") for at least nine years. It's not a new policy.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/314073/moderator-in...
A warning would have been absolutely sufficient, at most a very short term ban but given there was no harm being done currently and the rules weren't even clear no ban is justified.
I am aware of vote fraud and it's ok that SO warns/suspends if one engages in it. In this case it arguably does. However it needs to be a proportionate response to the action, and not done as retaliation.
I'm also a fairly high reputation SO contributor (in current rankings top 150).
This specific user has a very long history on SO and the rest of the network. You have to assume that this history might have played a part in the decision to suspend instead of only warning.
No real reason to assume that.
1 year suspensions are not handed out for first offenses. The guidelines for mods are to give escalating suspensions for 7/30/365 days, so this is most likely at least the third suspension for this user.
This case could be different. Do you know he was suspended before? It makes sense that they'd want to ban him for a year if this is retribution. It all checks out. The email doesn't mention a previous ban which I'd expect to be mentioned if it was a factor.
This specific user has been suspended multiple times on different sites of the SE network. I don't know exactly how often.
Let's move this away from Mr Mangione's direct example and consider what appropriate policy should be where serious crime gathers attention.
Somebody publishes their thoughts contributing to how the world should be in their view on the internet. We all do that, me here.
They are then accused and arrested for a horrible crime. Murder, for example. This garners their thoughts a great deal more attention than they would otherwise get as now they are (in)famous.
No removal of publication until conviction.
Is there now an incentive to advertise your views by committing crime to attract as much attention as possible? Easiest way is to make it as horrific as possible.
I am thinking extremist racists will take those rules. More than one of them. More than once.
So now we're somewhere pretty uncomfortable. I think it wrong to suppress Osama Bin Laden's screeds recently removed from the Guardian online, however much I loathe him and everything he stood for. So what about some neo-nazi mass murderer? Or the copycat? Or the following ten? Is that really so hypothetical that we can't see a body count with it? Is this alarm-ism? I hope so, I genuinely do and have no hidden motive here.
I'm not buying that this situation has easy policy nor that whatever is done results in something we are going to be fully comfortable with.
One outcome may be very much worse for many more people than another, so thinking it through fully is really needed. Something I am yet to make much more than this vague start.
Online publishing policy seems like a relevant framing.
This has video-games-cause-violence vibes. People don't become mass murderers because they read a comment on the internet.
Marc Lépine's manifesto (he walked into Montréal's Polytechnique and killed 14 women and shot several more, he was blaming them studying and feminism for his not getting accepted) is treated as gospel on incel forums. Many acts of incel/misogynist terrorism have been committed by people who frequented such forums. Ideology is not videogames and does have an impact on people's actions. You can look at the whole history of the 20th centuries' wars for another very obvious example.
I don't need others to decide what ideology I need to be protected from for me. I'm much more concerned about the ideology of the people who think information control is justifiable.
Others are responsible for their own actions. Don't impose information control on me because others do stupid shit.
>I'm much more concerned about the ideology of the people who think information control is justifiable.
Indeed. That's only to justify blatant censorship. Reading books doesn't cause people to kill other people. If someone kills someone after reading a book, that person already had huge issues and was on the edge to kill already, and instead of a addressing the issue by investing more in helping those with mental illnesses, we take the dumb cheap and easy way out of blaming books, video games, forums, incels, toxic masculinity, etc.
Everyone is quick to blame incels but nobody asks why do men become incels in the first place and how to prevent that by addressing the causes and not the effects.
The truth is our current society has a disproportionate lack of safety nets and help available to males and male issues, when compared to females, hence why there's 10x the rate of suicides and homelessness for males vs females, and is also one of the reasons why men have statistically been going more conservative and right wing in the last decade or so. Yet nobody talks about this or wants to do anything to address this and just resorts to shaming men who draw attention to this as incels and "far right" and calls it a day.
When society takes away young men's communities (previously it was the church) and purpose in life, their prospect of building a family, good job (men used to be able to support a family by bolting bumpers to Fords in a factory) and owning a home, and demonize them for the sins of their fathers (patriarchy and male Privilege) while depriving them of any help, it's no surprise they become radicalized against the society that hates them and that void gets filled by manosphere bros who tell them it's the fault of the Rothschilds and that all women are hoes.
"Won't someone think of young men!" is a point that won't travel far because the world is owned and ruled by men, young and old. Of course, most men are poor and powerless in comparison. So they (we) rage against those we do have some power over.
Changing healthcare and the culture is necessary. Because healthcare is only effective when men are willing to accept it, not cling to harmful ideas like "only the weak take meds / do therapy / cry / talk about their feelings / avoid violence".
But it's also like trying to stop shit rolling down hill. Ultimately we need to stop the source of the problems and limit the damage of those that slip through the cracks. And the manosphere and machismo culture are part of the problem, not innocent symptoms.
Said another way, the problem is multi-faceted and there is no silver bullet.
>the world is owned and ruled by men
These kind of extreme statements just help to feed the divide. Sure in one sense it's a true statement, but it is a very small minority of men that actually have any of this power or wealth you speak of. Why should the rest, including the marginalized men who are worse of than many women (in terms of suicide, working dangerous jobs), not be defensive as a response to such claims? It is completely irrelevant to them that Mansa Musa was the richest person in the world and a man long before they were born. It is completely irrelevant to them that the president of the united states is a man. They don't stand to gain anything from that.
Focusing on class is a much more fruitful endeavor because it unites the groups that are actually harmed instead of dividing them. Anything else plays into the hand of the elite, and if I was them I would be laughing at you for taking the bait of continuing this culture war.
Fair point, and I tried to call that out elsewhere in my comment. Though IMO it's not entirely a class problem. Males as a gender do have certain tendencies that require (more? different?) nurturing to avoid antisocial outcomes. (I say this as a male who has struggled with antisocial behavior and seen it in my peers.)
That says something about you and your peers, but nothing about "all men are bad".
I've not said "all men are bad". I've said the manosphere and machismo culture are bad.
>"Won't someone think of young men!" is a point that won't travel far because the world is owned and ruled by men, young and old
If you demonize all current generation men in such a reductionist radical fashion, because of a handful of bad apples of men from previous generations, why are you surprised men now become radicalized against women and against society demonizing them? If someone would hate you and discriminante you based on an immutable characteristic like gender, wouldn't you be upset and vocal about it and look to vote for someone who promises to be on your side? How can we punish a group of people today for the original sin?
>Because healthcare is only effective when men are willing to accept it
Most men aren't in the luxurious position to be able to refuse care that's not even offered to them in the first place. Hence the 10x more homelessness and suicide than women. If you're a woman in risk of unemployment, homelessness or suicide, you have dozens of decent options of help available for you both public and private. If you're a man in the same situation, you have much fewer and of lower quality options or even none at all, or worse, a lot of "help" available for men is just telling them how they're priviledged and they need to shut up and man up and stop bitching about it.
You can't tell me with a straight face there is no gender discrimination and anti-male bias here.
>And the manosphere and machismo culture are part of the problem, not innocent symptoms.
No. The core problem is societal anti male bias and discrimination which you pointed out yourself in the first phrase. The manosphere is not the cause, it's the release valve of the pent up frustrations of an entire generation.
Who is demonizing all men?
Since when do women have more job opportunities than men? Certainly not true in most of the US and certainly not for the same pay.
Society isn't anti-men. Society very clearly fears men, as both males and females should. Because men are -- as a group -- far more dangerous than females. There are many societal controls to counter act that danger. Until the rich no longer exploit the weak, and leave them powerless and without adequate healthcare, AND male culture becomes more pro-social and willing to accept help, things won't improve.
>Since when do women have more job opportunities than men?
It's not about raw absolute numbers but DEI policies in companies and some gov jobs, have made plenty of good white collar jobs restricted to only women or giving priority to female candidates at the expense of competence, which is legally speaking just gender discriminations with a PR spin on top. You are not allowed by law to discriminate job candidates by immutable characteristics like gender.
>Because men are -- as a group-- far more dangerous than females
Treating men, and individuals generally, as a group based on statistics is just discrimination legally speaking. Imagine saying that society should fear black people because they are more dangerous because statistically speaking they're more likely commit more crimes than whites. That's the same kind of discrimination. Are you ok with this?
>Until the rich no longer exploit the weak
What does this have to do with the life of average men? 99,99% of men individually, are not rich and powerful enough to cause oppressions at societal level. Lots of global oppression is happening due to capitalist corporate greed which are a collective hive mind, at which many women are also at the helm on boards and help enable this oppression. It has nothing to do with gender.
>AND male culture becomes more pro-social and willing to accept help
Please share what help are men getting and refusing. You're creating this narrative around "male culture this" and "male culture that" not backed by any facts.
> Treating men, and individuals generally, as a group based on statistics is just discrimination legally speaking. Imagine saying that society should fear black people because they are more dangerous because statistically speaking they're more likely commit more crimes than whites. That's the same kind of discrimination. Are you ok with this?
Let’s take this to an extreme. Is there any point at which such discrimination becomes acceptable?
Hypothetically, if it was known that 99 out of every 100 people who have a specific tattoo are predatory, violent muggers, should people not fear and be particularly cautious around that entire group?
Assuming, solely for the sake of argument, that instead of a tattoo the indicator is a particular race, but the numbers are the same, does that change anything?
You're using the same reductionist retoric Nazis used to genocide Jews, or that Bolsheviks used, or that Comunists used or that... you get the point.
What negative thing could you possibly generalizate about 99% of men that's the cause of societal issues and warrant mass discrimination against them?
You also haven't answered what help men are receiving but choosing to refuse. I realize I'm wasting my time since you're not arguing in good faith so I'll end the discussion here.
>You also haven't answered what help men are receiving but choosing to refuse. I realize I'm wasting my time since you're not arguing in good faith so I'll end the discussion here.
I am not the person you were talking to before. I don’t have to answer questions you didn’t ask me…
You argue against things you disagree with, you don't suppress them. When you suppress them, you just turn them into mystery religions.
Also, incels don't need a manifesto to learn how to hate women. The reason they were looking for the manifesto is because they hate women.
Perhaps the issue with "the Internet enables self-learning" is that people just read the arguments they like and dismiss the ones they don't like; however perverse it is, there's some merit to an authority figure/your friends in a classroom saying "you're wrong" -- but then again, in the Taliban-ruled areas of the United States they teach that evolution is a lie.
I can see how a manifesto saying "the truth is, women are [bla bla bla], therefore [bla bla]" can make sense in a superficial level (and gives twats like Jordan Peterson an air of intelligence), and can be persuasive to incels.
Of course suppression isn't the answer either.
The movie Natural Born Killers apparently inspired several mass shootings (most notably, Columbine)
Even if media (social or otherwise) can influence people to commit violence, does that justify censorship?
"Inspired" seems perhaps too strong a word for the connection.
Can you say that, had Natural Born Killers not been made, there would have been no Columbine? I contend that it would have happened anyway. If that movie didn't exist, they would have found another movie to imitate, or even one of the other things they were interested in, such as DOOM or whatever. Correlation not causation.
Sure, you could remove both Natural Born Killers and DOOM and KMFDM and whatever else, but then they would have moved to something else. You can't ban everything just because some sick people might enjoy it.
How many mass shootings have been inspired by the bible or the quran, or The Catcher in the Rye?
Nope, wrong cause direction. Do people never become mass killers to get attention? Does giving mass killers more attention, making them famous affect anything, maybe encourage more?
"No" is a reasonable response if you can support it.
You know what the actual biggest difference between countries with large amounts of mass killings and those that don't is? Gun control.
Luigi Mangione's comments on stack overflow don't even register in terms of violence caused.
These kinds of removals are simply attempts at information control by the elite, and -- assuming you're not part of the 1% -- you're playing straight into their hand.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." - Karl Marx
Mexico has virtually 0 legaly owned firearms. Total gun control. Yet they have large amounts of mass murders.
Guns being illegal without being enforced isn't gun control. That much should be obvious.
It is enforced. No one legally has guns.
Legality and enforcement are orthogonal concepts. They should align, but sometimes they don't and you get an unenforced law.
Obviously, less people's behavior will be changed if there are no consequences to doing the illegal thing.
Gun control implies the need for enforcement, because you need to act on something in some way to control it. A piece of paper with some words on it (which is what an unenforced law is) can't act on people by itself.
That's not the point. If everyone has an illegal gun, that's a law not being enforced and mass murder is all-but guaranteed.
Only the cartels have guns, it's what enables them to use them against those who do not and it is why they can commit such atrocities unimpeded.
How does the last part follow from any of the previous parts?
> Luigi Mangione's comments on stack overflow don't even register in terms of violence caused.
This is completely and totally true.
Totally irrelevant in terms of what policy /should/ be and one of the reasons to move it away from one example because what fits one example may not be generally applicable. I have not and do not stick up for S.O.
Marx, yeah nah I don't think he's helpful here or indeed anywhere.
Marx is incredibly helpful in most things as long as you realize that he managed to identify the right problem (which I referenced by the quote), not necessarily the solution; and that his proposed solutions have never been properly tested, and that his ideas for the solution to the problem were -- just like Nietzsche's ideas -- bastardized by terrible people for their own gain.
You don't have to be a communist to realize that Marx was instrumental in giving us the labor movement, including unions which most people who haven't been indoctrinated over generations with red scare tactics will realize where good things and important mechanisms against overreach by the powerful.
There has never been a case where removing primary sources results in a more enlightened understanding.
>Is there now an incentive to advertise your views by committing crime to attract as much attention as possible?
I guess. That would be really stupid though. This isn't a burner account. You get to do this maybe once, and it doesn't always work (some user upstream has 2 ex-coworkers on SO to no fame. Accounts still up).
Alternatively, there's 2 situation in which this can be gamed against other users
1. Your name is common and now all John doe's in X sector are accused of being murderers.
2. A non-obvious account has a sabetour try to associate the account with a murderer. You can't do much to disprove it outside if doxx yourself. Lies pile on and you're banned wrongfully.
The internet is still semi-anonymous. We literally cannot be a judge of stuff like this.
>So now we're somewhere pretty uncomfortable. I think it wrong to suppress Osama Bin Laden's screeds recently removed from the Guardian online, however much I loathe him and everything he stood for.
I think that's where the subtetly of this situation kicks in. This isn't about banning people, and honestly banning Luigi would have gotten less attention on this story (but still some). This is ultimately a private server and they can ban you for whatever they want.
But this was So having their cake and eating it too. They simply erased the name. To use The guardian example, this is like remove Bin Laden from the site, but his comments about whatever (be it trivial opinions on economics or threats of terror) stay there just fine on the site. I Don't see who wins here. The actual ideas are on your site, but you just swept the name under the rug.
On top of this, this goes agiandt the CC license of comments. You can remove a comment, but you can't unattributte an existing comment.
> what appropriate policy should be where serious crime gathers attention.
Not making it public in the first place. Why do i (in EU) need to know that a child killed its schoolmates in US ?
> Why do i (in EU) need to know that a child killed its schoolmates in US ?
To remind yourself why it's such a good idea to keep voting in politicians in favour of strict gun controls?
I have a feeling school shootings would collapse if they weren’t reported on.
It would no doubt have an effect, but availability of firearms is probably the biggest factor. School shootings in my country (where gun ownership is strictly controlled) are almost non-existent, but definitely reported on when they occur — probably more so for the very reason they are so infrequent.
This is probably optimistic - they're a meme, kids don't need to see reporting about new school shootings to get the idea that shooting up your school is the way to go, it's something communities are quite naturally propagating amongst themselves - but it seems super clear that they wouldn't have become a meme in the first place without repeated breathless scandalising reporting.
If they do so with a political point eg "you should care as much about children in ...." Maybe that point has some considerable support too. Should that be suppressed too? Maybe it should. Uncomfortable.
The point raised about removing the attributions of Luigi Mangione is valid and important. I don't sympathise much with the authors whining about being suspended for upvoting Mangione's post, just because they were Mangione's.
>I don't sympathise much with the authors whining about being suspended for upvoting Mangione's post, just because they were Mangione's.
That's a bit hard to prove, no? How often does anyone look at the names of who posts what?
I read Luigi's answers on his SO account. They are awful. Granted though, he likely wrote these answers when he was about 16 years old.
With that said: his content is on there under the presumption of CC, it should remain.
What a bonkers move by stack exchange.
The new username: "user4616250" is ringing a bell... Didn't 4chan used to give everyone names like anon4616250? It's got real V-for-vendetta vibes.
I don't know if it's in any way relevant, but IMDB has the movie "The perfect weapon" under that id (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4616250/)
Or it could be a reference to the Portuguese patrol ship Viana Do Castelo, which has that very registration number! I think there are so many numerical ID schemes in use that you'd be able to find something relevent for any large number.
Perhaps, but can you find something more relevant than The Perfect Weapon?
Wait... so you telling me they CAN moderate the content?
I'm not sure what got you thinking that they couldn't
> And, I’m one of the largest producers of content on the network (by any measure I’m in the top 0.1% of members)
I mean... wow. This is not the point of course, but the point is obvious and public sentiment towards SO seems to be quite unanimous. And, to be fair, I suppose 0.1% of SO is quite a lot of people, but still. I don't think SO will do well behaving like that.
There is a certain irony in this, given that such behaviour (demonstrating that rule of law applies only to the peons) is what has so inflamed the public in support of Mangione.
Don't mistake public support for memes.
This is the reason why Kamala was predicted to win. In reality, the "I don't care which candidate is in the office" was the top choice this recent election.
There are actual statistics about this past memes though.There were conservative personalities dogged down in trying to reject Luigi.
I get your point. But the key difference is that "giving support" is a lot different than getting out to vote (which pains me to say). Statistically, 58% of those young people voting for Kamala didn't even bother going to the polls.
The worst spreader of this was the justice system though. You escalate crimes so high in a hug profile case, of course it will spread like wildfire.
I would argue the 2024 election was quite the opposite.
> More than 155 million Americans voted in 2024: 156,302,318 to be exact. That’s the second largest total voter turnout in U.S. history in absolute terms. It is also just the second time that more than 140 million people voted in a presidential election.
Don't use absolute numbers here, that's lying with statistics.
The correct metric would be relative turnout and that doesn't support your claim:
> In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900
So, turnout was still really high but not literally the highest in 120 years. Who's talking about lying with statistics again?
This is all worthless anyway. We don't use the popular vote to determine presidency. Reports show That turnout among youth was lower than 2020, but still really high in battleground states. That tells me the youth already lost faith of their vote counting.
People can care and think the two candidates with a chance to win are too bad to endorse with a vote, leading them to stay home and spend their time more wisely than in what they might consider to be a farce of democracy.
They may also live in an area where their preferred candidate has no chance of winning, making their vote a waste of time.
Of course it makes a difference to vote for what you actually want, no matter if they win this time. If you don't have an appointment at the euthanasia office and you (or someone who can vote in your name) is in good enough health to reasonably go, I can't (currently) think of an argument why it wouldn't be worth one's time to vote for who should govern you
Speaking of relative: since the term "landslide" has been thrown around in the direct aftermath of the election quite a bit, it's interesting to note that nationwide, Trump only received 1.5% more votes than Harris.
This is especially telling in the light of the numbers you just gave on voter turnout.
But this time he _did_ win the popular vote, in contrast to the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.
Both sides received significantly less votes than previous election. One side just happened to drive better turnout. That is all.
The enthusiasm gap was entirely on the Democrat side this past election. Donald Trump won considerably more votes this past election than he ever has. There are also a significant number of prominent former lifelong Democrats that switched to being Trump supporters. Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., and Elon Musk come to mind.
> Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president. That is the second highest vote total in U.S. history, trailing only the 81,284,666 votes that Joe Biden won in 2020. Trump won 3,059,799 more popular votes in 2024 than he won in 2020 and 14,299,293 more than he won in 2016. He now holds the record for the most cumulative popular votes won by any presidential candidate in U.S. history, surpassing Barack Obama. Running three times for the White House obviously helps.
Again, these absolute numbers are misleading due to population growth. See my post up the chain.
Quite astonished to see Elon Musk being used as an example of someone whose views are worth following. If someone goes from e.g. Red Cross employee to ever more worrying statements and eventually outright racism and misinformation, I'm worried what happened to them (some disease?) more than thinking "ah crap, the racism party was right after all, let me go and vote AfD now"
The relative turnout is always going to be more interesting given that population growth means you'll almost always soon exceed your total turnout within a few election cycles:
> In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900. Nonetheless, turnout in 2024 was still high by modern standards. The 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon (63.8 percent) is the only other election in the last 112 years to exceed 63 percent voter turnout. If you are wondering, the election of 1876 holds the record for the highest percentage voter turnout: 82.6 percent. That was one of America’s most controversial and consequential elections—and not in a good way. It was also an election in which more than half the adult-age population was ineligible to vote.
In the case of Mangione, some stats proved his support reached the real world. If I remember correctly, something like 43% of <30s approved of his crime.
https://stratpolitics.org/2024/12/unitedhealthcare-poll/
31% positive for those under 45, 8% positive for those above 45.
41% negative for those under 45, 77% negative for those above 45.
Not the majority, even for younger people. And remember, this is just U.S. opinion; people in other countries might view this differently (likely even more negatively).
Not an American, so I don't really have much say in it. But, if 31% of your younger population is thinking that assassination was justified... That's tens of millions of people. I would be wondering why, and how that is even acceptable. It's definitely showing how it can't be categorized as black/white issue.
Yeah, this isn't an election. 31% of your people supporting anything that is traditionally unjustifyable is something at least worth looking into.
Look at the website for that polling company. It is bizarre. None of the people on the people page have the company on their LinkedIn pages. Seems to be astroturf.
Edit: look at the photos of the people… AI generated perhaps?
Ah, thanks, I forgot the real numbers. That's still tens of millions of people supporting an assassin, which majority or not, should tell you something about this country.
A lot of support. A fundraiser for his defense is already north of 220k. See https://www.givesendgo.com/legalfund-ceo-shooting-suspect
Ok, show me a non-peon who shot a man in broad daylight and on video and didn't face the law afterward.
Edit: I mean on purpose, obviously. Drunk driving hardly counts. (Nobody gets in a car drunk with the intention of hurting anyone, they are usually just trying to get from A to B.) Accidents don't count. We're talking about a comparable action here, something that meets the legal definition of murder and which was also not prosecuted. Deeds from war probably don't count because it doesn't meet the definition of murder under law (although, many war crimes and misdeeds abroad are punished) and soldiers are peons. Cops killing people on duty don't count because they aren't doing it unprovoked (when they do, it is usually prosecuted as murder), and they too are peons.
Also, to the people complaining about the edits, sorry I can't reply to 50 comments all saying about the same kind of stuff. I keep hitting the rate limit.
There has been worse, such as the affluenza case. I don't think peons get away with running over a bunch of people and then claiming they didnt know better because they grew up too rich.
Probably the most common is drunk-driving "accidents"; cases for those seem to vanish all the time.
If you lower the bar that far from premeditated homicide, then you will get lots of 'peons' that got away with slaps on the wrist too.
They ad up though. How many DUI murders are equivalent to a single premeditated murder?
But yeah, people in these positions rarely need or want to directly kill someone, they have other means to achieve their goals.
Yet many financial or other white collar crimes are usually never prosecuted or result in a slap on the wrist.
Obviously they are not the same as murder but still the impact ads up. Defrauding or ruining thousands of people or crashing the global economy is not that far off.
Then you have police officers regularly getting away with outright murder and facing no consequences (of course that’s a different class)
Right! It was an accident, not murder! Even if they were drunk. And high. And on Valium. And doing 70 in a residential neighborhood. And on a restricted license from a previous DUI...
...Doesn't mean they meant to kill someone! Completely different crimes.
Dick Cheney comes to mind.
Cops do this all the time
Seems like a thing that happens on trips abroad (war crimes)
CIA officer Allen Lawrence Pope flew a B-26 bomber targeting civilian merchant vessels in Indonesia as part of an operation to overthrow the Indonesian president by weakening the economy and inspiring local discontent. He personally claimed to have "enjoyed killing Communists". His plane was shot down, and he was eventually returned to the US, where he continued to fly planes for the CIA.
Does this count? Or is the government allowed to indiscriminately kill civilians whenever and wherever they feel like it?
Kyle Rittenhouse probably? Has technically faced the law afterwards but to what result.
> We're talking about a comparable action here,
denying healthcare that they already paid for.
Why do you think a group called itself "black lives matter"?
The thing here is, the non-peon has other means to get the same result, just caring about if he did it or not does not make the situation less worse - same intention, same severity.
Not a conspiracy-theory fan or anything but this basic power distribution is obviously skewed for people who are rich(er) and that's a fact.
The way killing someone while drunk driving is excused by many is abhorrent.
Although I agree that drunk driving is unacceptable, I doubt those doing it intend on killing someone and thus not what parent is asking.
Bug issue is we have more than enough research and awareness that you can consider drunk driving a "choice" not just some unfortunate accident. You're not relieved of all mental cognition when you're drunk.
Technically, Dick Cheney did shot someone in the face, now if it was an accident or not, who knows.
As someone else mentioned Duck, I’ll add all the questionable police shootings that gets a slap on the wrist as the Police can be seen as the enforcers of the upper class / c-suite
> Edit: I mean on purpose, obviously. Drunk driving hardly counts.
What?!
An edit amounting to "not like that" in the first 40 minutes after asking for examples. Grand.
Absolutely blows my mind that, in 2025, anyone can treat getting in a car drunk and causing death as anything less than premeditated. Motonormativity strikes again, I guess.
While this isn't a good thing, the fact that it was Luigi's account would've maybe caused some people to upvote his answers and questions just as-is now and thus would've artificially inflated his account's points. Thus, maybe freezing his account would've been a better thing to do (if possible to freeze upvotes/votes too)?
Well, here comes Barbara.
Just a hunch that this could be a mistake of an overzealous community mod that thought that the nick Luigi Mangione was a troll... and that Evan Carroll is the best troll on the Stack Exchange network and he pushed the situation as he does and simply had the opposite effect than he thought he would ("Evan Carroll is flamebaiting again? There's no real problem, give him one year suspension" instead of "Oi, did someone make a mistake here here?")
Of course, I can be totally wrong but I've seen these things happen (I've been both a mod and a core dev at Stack closely working with the community team 8 years ago)
You can't be the best troll, if you never troll: I never troll, ever. But other than that. Luigi's acct wasn't renamed by a community mod, from Zoe and as quoted in the article
> I can confirm SE, Inc. were the ones to clear his name. A reason was not specified anywhere obvious. Mods have been given explicit instructions not to touch that profile. While this particular incident may be limited to SO, the implications of this affect the entire network
I see this as a trade off for moderation. The question for this could be rephrased as "which takes less moderation?" Option 1 is moderating the votes, voting reversals, and bounty reversals... or changing the user name so that it's less visible?
The tools for doing the moderation of personal votes and reversals and whatnot are blunt and clumsy and time consuming.
The tools for doing the "change the account name" is similarly blunt and clumsy, but much less time consuming.
From a mod perspective, it isn't necessarily "what is right or wrong" but rather "what do I have time to do? ... and if I don't have time to do this, what are the outcomes?"
There is a lot of "the tools for doing (diamond) moderation haven't been built out well" combined with "the stance of Stack Exchange Inc (I specify it this way to distinguish between Stack Exchange the community) has been inconsistent on social issues in the past." Running a social network (but not wanting to admit its a social network, and sometimes denying that it is, but having engagement metrics like a social network) with a diminishing paid moderation team combined with taking stances that haven't been run past a lawyer before a proclamation or actions being taken... and then as often as not going back on (or not following through with) those actions or proclamations...
And we've got problems. The actions themselves may not be of Stack Exchange Inc's direction actions this time, but the underlying confusion and lack of communication of clear policies (and lack of enforcement of the clear policies), or the tools to allow for less blunt actions... well... we've got problems.
I don't see this getting better as Stack Exchange Inc has taken very little action to increase the paid moderation team or take responsibility for the content that is published on their sites.
ReiserFS stayed around in the Linux Kernel for years after the murder he committed. Yes I know that Hans is not the sole developer.
People keep rediscovering the streisand effect. Nothing would have happened if they hadn’t done this.
Having read the article it seems to me that scrubbing his name from the site was an act of vigilantism, which highlights the danger of vigilantism.
There's even ghibli fan art of Luigi: <https://www.instagram.com/totorotuesday/p/DD9oL9oTm3V/?hl=en>
I have a feeling this action will only have a Streisand effect.
Personally I didn't know he was on Stack Overflow until I saw this. Had the mods left it alone I suspect it wouldn't have become more than some minor news or comment.
This case is such an interesting crossroads. He has such insane support — I went to two improv shows this past week where he was the crowd choice for a topic and the shows received insane applause. But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.
I don’t know what SO should have done (well, probably not ban someone for asking questions, assuming we have the full story). But it’s so fascinating to see how companies have no playbook to work off of.
“especially against nonviolent offenders”
Following the murder, I was thinking about how much non physical violence there is, that isn’t usually seen and judged as violence. Things like denying healthcare, shutting down companies and laying off people to benefit private equity investors, forcing people into bankruptcy, losing their homes, charging overdraft fees, etc.
The people behind that kind of violence can hide behind the layers of indirection.
"The people behind that kind of violence can hide behind the layers of indirection."
>[B]ureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. *We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions.*
Neil Postman, Technopoly (Emphasis mine)
Extremely pertinent in the age where civilians are routinely slaughtered by AI targeting systems.
“Social murder” is the term
> Things like denying healthcare, shutting down companies and laying off people to benefit private equity investors, forcing people into bankruptcy, losing their homes, charging overdraft fees, etc.
These things are objectively not violence. Violence isn't a word for "things that harm people", it very specifically means direct, purposeful physical harm. Don't distort the meaning of words for rhetorical flair.
This is the same 'get out clause' that the antagonist in the Saw films uses: "I didn't harm those people directly, I only created the conditions under which they would be harmed."
The WHO defines four types of violence: a) physical, b) sexual, c) psychological, and d) deprivation. Denying healthcare feels incredibly close to d) and — semi-indirectly — involves a bit of c) and a) too.
> These things are objectively not violence.
Semantics cannot possibly be 'objective'.
Definition 3: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/violence
Distorting the meaning of words is how these people justify their actions. Not giving them what they want? That’s violence now! Thus justifying retaliatory - or even pre-emptive - violence.
Structural violence[1] and institutional violence has been concepts in academia for ages, even if you don't like it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence
By your strict definition of violence (direct harm) Hitler would walk free because he didn't personally gass the jews. Luckily we had trials[2] to determine that we still hold indirect perpetrators responsible.
Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive. "I only want ever nice things to happen, and bad things happening to people are violence". I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
Nobody argues against that, but United Healthcare had a denial rate of more than 30%, which is the highest among the major health insurance companies in the US. Coupled with the fact that they make profits off of those denials, it's hard not to call this non physical violence with the aim to generate more capital for share holders and executives.
> In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
Again, absolutely agree. But it can be argued that doing so without any regard for individuals, their history with the economic unit and personal circumstances, is non-physical violence. Look at e.g. European employment laws for how this can be mitigated (not without some drawbacks ofc).
> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.
> I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
You put up with these because the US is a violent society with little regards for individual lives. Great for entrepreneurs and people with access to capital, not so great for much of the rest.
The alternatives have of course their own share of problems, but don't act as if the system is the only reasonable one.
> Nobody argues against that, but United Healthcare had a denial rate of more than 30%, which is the highest among the major health insurance companies in the US.
As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies. That's a simple mathematical fact: a finite set of numbers has a maximum number. You need to do more legwork to show any actual wrongdoing on anyone's part here.
> In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.
This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
> This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
That depends, amongst other things, on how much interest you charge in the interim. Payday lenders makes lots of money off of people who a) cannot afford their loans by any reasonable metric and b) default on those loans.
No. Whether you charge large or small interest, you never want your debtor to go bankrupt, because it means cessation of the interest payments.
If you think payday lenders care one iota about debtors going bankrupt after collecting multiples of the original loan amount in interest, I cannot help you.
Of course they care, they’d rather the debtor never go bankrupt, so that they can keep collecting. Do you understand how loans work?
I get that you have an ideological position to defend and, based on your other comments in this thread have either an inability or an unwillingness to cede any ground. So while, yes, I do understand how loans work, I do not have any further interest in talking to you about payday lenders. Have a nice day.
> As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies. That's a simple mathematical fact: a finite set of numbers has a maximum number. You need to do more legwork to show any actual wrongdoing on anyone's part here.
This isn't correct. Mathematically (as you say), you can have all health companies have a denial rate of 0%.
Realistically it's impossible, but you did say mathematically.
This is pedantry at it's finest, but at the risk of adding more... Wouldn't the mathematical maximum be 0 in that case?
Correct! I was more-so addressing the following statement, not necessarily the mathematical maximum one:
> As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies
If OP was going to start leaning onto "mathematical fact[s]" to support their argument, they should probably be accurate as well. Specifically there will be "multiple" health insurance companies with the highest denial rate (0), not "a" company.
> This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
Weren't you just calling someone's comment "exceedingly naive"?
The poor and financially vulnerable (ie, most Americans) are at a systemic disadvantage when dealing with debt, bankruptcy laws, and the justice system. They are preyed upon by all sorts of people offering debt, at a higher rate than ever before, anywhere.
Not to mention government bailouts, which really changed the game with regard to balancing risk.
This is an insane comment what you wrote.
I live in a European country with public free healthcare. Sure, you pay a portion of your income towards healthcare, so it's not really free etc. etc. If you don't have income, the state pays it for you.
There isn't any denial of healthcare. I never heard about anything like that. Sure, there are limits on availability of healthcare, particularly if it's some advanced or expensive procedure. For example, there is a place where they do radio surgery on the brain. There may only be one such place in the country (it's a small country). If you need that kind of procedure done, obviously there is a waiting list. And certainly some of those on a waiting list must have died.
But there is no denial of healthcare per se with someone making a decision to deny healthcare.
I live in a Nordic country and the state-owned insurance provider often denies healthcare, much like health insurance companies in the US.
Denying healthcare doesn't necessarily mean "leaving someone bleeding to death on the street" but rather refusing to provide certain treatments or medications. This issue isn't unique to the US. Granted, the healthcare system in the US is, in my opinion, significantly worse but claiming that healthcare denial doesn't happen elsewhere is simply incorrect.
In the US they deny treatment that is considered essential by their own doctors. I know you were saying the same thing, but your comment seems to minimize the difference.
I'm confused, you said that there isn't any denial of healthcare where you are, but then described very clearly and explicitly how some people are denied healthcare, and they sometimes die as a result. Maybe you understand the word "deny" differently?
the big point you are missing is the denial of paying for treatment after it has been applied.
in germany (and probably most other european countries) you can be denied treatment if it is deemed unimportant and it is known that insurance does not cover it. you will never be put in a situation where treatment is applied but then the insurance doesn't pay leaving you with the bill unless you were made aware that the treatment is optional or you specifically chose a treatment that you could not be sure would be paid. payment for any treatment that is not optional can not be denied. if there is uncertainty you can also ask your insurer in advance, and they must give you a binding response whether the proposed treatment will be paid or not.
most importantly the doctors must inform the patient in advance if the treatment is insured or not. if they don't tell them that something is not insured then they can't demand payment from the patient.
you will never face a surprise bill.
Because you mentioned Germany and surprise bills...
My partner suffered a medical episode while we were traveling in Germany. Bystanders called an ambulance which turned up and checked her out and asked her to be taken to hospital for more tests.
She/we elected to not go with them.
To our surprise, about 6 months later after we returned home (to Australia), we received a letter in the mail (in German) that said we owed something like $500 for the ambulance, I forget the exact number.
How does that line up with "you will never face a surprise bill" in Germany? Or is it because we are foreigners?
We never paid but I sometimes wonder if something would happen should we return to Germany.
it's most likely because you didn't have insurance at all. if you had travel insurance you should have forwarded that to them. (but see below about calling an ambulance that is not needed)
if you don't have insurance you have to pay for everything of course. the surprise in your case comes from the unusual situation that the people who called the ambulance didn't know that you had no insurance, or more likely and you weren't even aware of how your situation is going to be handled.
it's unlikely that anything will happen if you return since the ones issuing the bill would not be notified in any way that you entered the country.
it is also possible that you could have disputed the payment since you didn't call the ambulance yourself (and i assume didn't ask anyone to call them). on the other hand if you had insurance you should have gone to the hospital because apparently insurance doesn't pay if an ambulance is called but not used. so actually, you didn't receive a surprise medical bill, but a bill for calling a service that was not needed (and potentially inconveniencing someone else who might have needed the ambulance, but now had to wait).
however, if you didn't ask anyone to call the ambulance then the bill is inappropriate because the law here is that if you call an ambulance but you don't need it, you pay, but if someone else calls the ambulance without you asking them, and it turns out to be unnecessary, then nobody pays.
since i lived in china i also don't have insurance in europe, so when we were visiting and needed treatment for a burn we had to shop around different hospitals to find out which one charged the least. costs for an ER visit ranged from 80€ to 250€ if i remember, and later we found a special hospital that was funded by a charity for the uninsured were we could go for after care for free. that works because the number of people without insurance is extremely small. mostly foreigners who somehow fell through the gap.
I think you understand the word "deny" differently.
Accepted but didn't happen in time doesn't equal denial.
Of course it does. The patients wanted care early enough to save their live. They denied them that care. Hypothetical care after death is worthless.
Whether they denied that care by not paying for it (which means people could have gotten that care if they would have had the means), or by limiting the amount of care in a period of time, doesn't really matters for the person who didn't get it.
Why do you think the healthcare resources (number of beds, hospitals etc) are limited? Why isn't there a second hospital?
By the way, would they have paid for an operation in a different country if space would be available there? No? So they denied that healthcare.
Except it just doesn't, denial of claim has a very specific meaning, there's no reason to go all philosophical.
I'm sure there's plenty of cases where United health approved the claim and the patient also didn't get treated in time, it doesn't count as a denied claim.
This sub-thread is about denying healthcare. Not about denying claims. In fact, denying a claim (i.e. payment for healthcare services) has the moral implications discussed here mainly if not only because denial of payment is tantamount to denial of healthcare.
Ah, so it's the system that's bad. Can't do anything about it, only shrug and follow orders. Somebody else would have switched the gas chamber on anyway.
It’s impossible for all instances of these things to constitute violence. I do, however, find the idea that they are sometimes akin to violence very enticing. Can you argue that? Can the actions of a stereotypical slumlord, one behaving within local law and never physically touching one of his tenants, potentially constitute violence? If not, how are you defining it?
What are stereotypical slumlords and what have they done?
Just a wikipedia definition of slumlord https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slumlord#Operation
Running a shitty business, even an exploitative one, isn’t violence.
> Running a shitty business, even an exploitative one, isn’t violence.
You know, it just hit me: the issue here might just be a semantic one, where people feel the need to lump very unacceptable and wrong actions into the category of "violence," because of the consensus belief that violence is almost always wrong.
There are things that are as unacceptable and wrong as violence but are not violence.
I really don’t think it’s that simple. The violence we’re talking about might be most easily defined as a particularly extreme form of coercion, one which causes deep trauma and/or physical harm. Doesn’t this capture the nature of a lot of violence? Isn’t it also evident that this wouldn’t always require physical contact by the aggressor, or even a single, tangible aggressor at all? I’d argue, for example, that whether or not hitler personally pulled the trigger on holocaust victims, he absolutely did violence against them. The level of indirection doesn’t preclude this.
We can define violence as “that guy hit that guy,” and leave it at that and you’d be right. I think this alternative view is a recognition that a lot of other behaviors look very similar in how they work, like when the slumlord chains the emergency fire exit and a family burns alive because of it (an extreme example, but I do recall reading about a case along those lines). I feel like calling that sort of thing violence perpetrated by the slumlord is accurate to everyone but the pedant. It captures the essence of the behavior to me, this bringing about of great personal harm through either malice or sociopathic apathy.
> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
It is when the care is necessary; when the denial is part of a strategy to goose profits.
There are similar issues with the other statements you made.
> Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive.
Frankly, your comment strikes me as willfully blind.
> It is when the care is necessary
So when the insurance denies coverage, and so the doctors don't work for free on the case, and the patient dies, are the doctors perpetrating violence too?
> are the doctors perpetrating violence too?
No, the politicians who insist on keeping this medieval practice in place are.
In your contrarian urge to defend some of the worst of the status quo, you forget the insurance company's whole role is to pay for medical care.
I suggest you read up on this. IIRC, it was UHG's practice to deny claims indiscriminately to increase the personal burden of accessing medical care. Because, you know, if people pay their premiums to the company but it doesn't pay out, it makes lots more money for the shareholders.
It's weird how you seem to consistently elide motivations even when extremely relevant.
An insurance company's "role" is to distribute risk, not to "pay for medical care" without question. The perversion of what constitutes "insurance" in the US medical industry is the fault of our legal system and tax code, and the insane cost of medical care (which is ultimately the root cause of most of these problems) is down to the medical cartel (also legally enforced).
> The perversion of what constitutes "insurance" in the US medical industry is the fault of our legal system and tax code
The ACA's public option was killed by a Senator who had a lot Health Insurance industry backing and support.
> It is when the care is necessary; when the denial is part of a strategy to goose profits.
Denying claims does NOT increases profits, in the US it actually decreases them. Read more here if you like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642405
There are systems that cannot deny life saving care, and where everyone is necessarily insured.
It’s facetious to compare those to a system where 30 million have zero coverage and the rest are systematically denied life saving care as a profit making mechanism.
And yeah letting someone die when you could help them live is violence. When it’s baked into the rules it’s called systemic violence.
There are no systems anywhere in the world which don’t deny life saving care. All systems make life and death decisions. British NHS, for example, will generally deny life saving care, if such procedure will cost more than 30,000 pounds per quality-adjusted year of life you’re expected to gain as a result of the procedure.
Again, my point is that denying healthcare is not automatically something wrong or evil. This is something that must necessarily happen, and so the details as to why some healthcare was denied are very important. You can’t just say that someone being denied care is basically murder, like some people here, or point to some percentage of denied claims and pretend that this is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. No, you need to actually do some legwork, and the haters of murder victim are not interested in that, they just want some release by dunking on a literal scapegoat.
I mean it seems you’re dunking on a strawman yourself. Like if I said Denmark virtually denies no life saving claims, and when it happens it’s due to edge cases, you’ll insist just because it occurs it’s indistinguishable from a system where it happens systemically and regularly?
Name one.
I believe that healthcare is deliberately limited by insane policy. Contrary to opinion insurance is not the problem. It’s doctors charging exorbitant fees.
We allow this because we let them scare us into voting for strict education.
But the reality is education could be fixed to cut the price by probably 80% - making the much smaller insurance amount negligible.
I hate to say it but pinning it on a ceo doesn’t seem right. His job was to ration a scarce resource. But why is it scare? Because the authorities thru the police force puts an end to unlicensed people regardless of their skills.
I was talking to a friend/acquaintance. Her dad was a doctor did all kinds of innovative surgeries on animals. But wasn’t licensed. She said he’d be called in by doctors to do surgeries all the time because he was the best.
But he wasn’t licensed. So California shut it all down.
The price of healthcare is 5x because we let people go to jail without a crime. If they went to jail for reckless I e untrained practice of medicine i understand. But seriously right now the problem is lack of supply that has to be rationed.
Thank you for your comment, I thought that there's nobody left here who understands this.
> Thank you for your comment, I thought that there's nobody left here who understands this.
Dude, plenty of people understand that. However, it's no good playing the circular pass-the-buck game, where the insurance apologists blame the doctors for everything, then the doctor-apologists blame the insurers for everything, everyone blaming someone else for everything, ad nauseam; with the end-result of the status-quo being defended by mentally exhausting everyone.
Bro the numbers don’t lie. Look at the average income of doctors and price of medical equipment. Then look at % profit of insurance.
Insurance makes 20%. Doctors and suppliers make 5x what normal people make.
So the problem is with the laws preventing folks from becoming doctors.
I’m gonna fix this, it’s actually so easy, just need people to trust me.
I’m really good at this kind of stuff I just hate dealing with people because the average person is so certain the world can’t get better.
> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare.
And a healthcare system enabled by UHC will deny healthcare at a rate 3 times that of the rest of the industry.
So is every other insurer "under-denying" healthcare?
Or is UHC choosing to deny healthcare more than it needs to?
> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
Insurance is the reason that these debts are so exorbitant in the first place.
Do you really think the ER trip and a few tests cost the hospital eighty thousand dollars, and UHC, magician negotiators that they are, managed to talk the bill down to $4,000?
And yet the hospital will charge you, the uninsured, $80K. Yeah, you might be able to negotiate it down some, but not like that.
The US is the only country in the world where deathbed divorce is a thing, so families won't be burdened with medical bills[1].
But I feel like you'd find that immoral, too.
[1] Lack of legal obligation to the debt (even beyond this, to family members in general) won't stop the hospital calling your family and heavily beating on you to pay the bill of your recently departed, even if you had no financial responsibility, using everything from appealing to a sense of pride, to outright deception and claims that they can sue for the unpaid bill.
His case shows that people do not believe that their society is a just one. If the high class do not act on this signal, they leave space for further radicalization and even more disruptive actors will utilize the discontent. Currently, they are attacking the symptoms in the new version of "beatings will continue until morale improves".
>His case shows that people do not believe that their society is a just one.
Exactly this. That was a watershed moment, I think.
If we actually lived in a "just" system, when people are executed for murdering a single individual, which many people have been, we would certainly execute people for things like, say, losing billions of dollars in pensions for the elderly with greedy mathematical trickery.
In a just world, hundreds would have been executed for the financial crimes of 2008.
"Justice" only exists when there's threat of punishment. It isn't enough to have the moral high ground; you have to have the might and the will to enforce the moral ground on others.
Humanity will always live under systems of "oppression", but it's what that oppression looks like that matters, because there'll always be someone who takes advantage of a system's goodwill, and that must be punished swiftly and brutally, to deter anyone from abusing the system's goodwill.
> vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong.
is it non-violent when they wield the system in a way to cause immense harm to the point where they are prolific killers indirectly and maybe even straight up directly? 90+ percent error rates in the AI that united used to deny claims is a violence. they denied 30+ percent of all claims.
No, violence is violence only when it's physical and direct. For example, mental violence doesn't exist. Verbal abuse does not exist. And in this case, United Healthcare had committed no sin at all, because due to being a non-physical entity incapable of physically interacting with the world, it didn't physically hurt anyone. Therefore it committed no violence. QED.
Since this is HN, I can't tell if that's satire or not.
Bravo!
Yes, it is. If you want another system build it. Murder in the street is never justified, how is this even an argument?
Applying moral and ethical justifications to an event that is fundamentally caused by an ever-widening social rift is pointless.
It doesn't matter if he's right or wrong or justified or evil or a saint. This happened because tensions among non-filthy-rich and filthy-rich people are increasing to a point of non return.
It's a consequence. An effect.
You are not replying to their point. It was not that murder was non-violent, it was that statistical violence is indeed violence. Even if you hold a “denied and go die bankrupt” stamp and not a gun.
No, that is not violence. Violence is not just a word that means "you did something bad to someone".
And causing someone's death is more than just "doing bad" to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence § Access to health care
not to justify murder in the street, but i'm fairly certain you'd be systematically prevented, logistically and businesswise, from building an alternative system.
Nope. You are free to establish an alternate system if you like. There are medical facilities that are flat rate and cash only, like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, https://surgerycenterok.com/. There are also many cost sharing services, like this one https://altruahealthshare.org. Ultimately you also have the personal option of becoming a physician and setting any rate you choose for your services, including $0.
I guess that means the only reason healthcare in this country sucks so bad is because everyone already likes the way it is!
> Murder in the street is never justified
If a terrorist is running down fifth avenue with a bomb, would it be justified to shoot and kill them? What if the shooter isn't a police officer, but a member of the public?
Oh please, like if it's 1930 and you're walking behind Hitler knowing the future, you probably stab him. Or maybe if you're walking behind Ted Bundy in 1970. At least if you're a future-knowing trolley problem type person.
It's obvious that there are plenty of situations where murder in the streets is justified. Just that we rarely know of them in the moment.
I think the people making those arguments are suggesting not that the murder that Luigi Mangione committed was is right, but that it was good. It is not right by the laws of our nation; it is illegal because it is not right. It is the government's function to investigate and prosecute that crime. The overwhelming popular support for Luigi suggests that there is a collectively-recognized significant justification for the crime. Like Ken McElroy, the town bully who was murdered in 1981, in broad daylight in the town square, by bullets coming in from different angles, and nobody saw a thing.
Hitler was well on his rise to power by 1930. None of us can know who the next Hitler is. We are all familiar with Ray Bradbury and Back to the Future, which told us about how you cannot really know the future or bend it to your will. Furthermore, vigilantism is against the law, and the justice system of the government also has the job of preventing violent uprisings for various and good reasons.
The collective feeling that everybody, and I mean everybody displays, and is clearly being censored on media, is that there is a weighing of the collective morality of the situation which does not add up. This young man has been charged with a multitude of crimes. He has been charged with terrorism. Like, I went to school for international law, and I am going back to my resources, looking at the definitions, and trying to figure out how that fits. To me, a terrorist is somebody who plotted or crashed the planes into the towers. The idea that Mangione's victim, through the decisions of the company, might have caused millions of unnecessary deaths, when there could have been different paths taken, it is an leap, but it is not abstraction that is out of the grasp of many persons who have faced the medical system, specifically with treatment denial letters, on an individual level. By the way, that school that I attended was in another country which gave me free public healthcare during the length of my studies.
New York Penal Law Section 490.25 "Crime of terrorism", which is one of the statues of the second count under which Luigi has been charged, reads: A person is guilty of a crime of terrorism when, with intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping, he or she commits a specified offense.
I do not believe that the Luigi has intimated the civilian population. A shop in his hometown has a portrait of him depicted as Jesus. Luigi did not attempt to target a unit of government; he wrote an explanatory note to "The Feds".
I think that many what many people are saying is that universal, single-payer health care is expected to be a function of government, and in fact something like the opposite is being protected.
I really hope that the District Attorney has the argument for the second count pinned down, or that it is dropped. I think that is where the ethical test for this crime lays.
Strange rationale. By that logic you are also a prolific mass murderer as you have not paid physicians to provide medical care to patients. Indirectly you have killed, well, everyone because you didn’t pay infinite money to provide unbounded medical care for every person who has died.
This is strange logic because anyone who is insured pay for other indirectly - that’s how insurance works: pull the money together so that anyone that will have bad luck of getting sick will use money from that pull. The assumption is majority of people won’t get seriously ill but once ill normally it would be financially devastating.
Related, this in fact what Peter Singer said: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/videos-books-an...
Basically, it is your moral obligation to donate everything you have, except for what little you need to survive. If we put that essay into this context, then not donating would indeed be violence, such as not saving a drowning child just because you don't want to.
> But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong
In our society we don’t objectively consider it wrong, otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular.
That isn't true. Just because we find something entertaining in fiction does not mean we tolerate it in real life.
Batman is quite famous for non lethal vigilante justice. If anything Batman's position is antithetical to Luigi's.
Non lethal vigilante justice is still vigilante justice
I think if Luigi had merely assaulted the CEO to teach him a lesson, and not killed him, then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion nationally. Or at least not to the same level of debate. That (admittedly arbitrary) line is a reason most DC characters like Batman and Superman generally refuse to kill even the most deserving of villains.
Well I suspect the lethality of said justice in this case is quite critical to the judgment of being _objectively_ wrong.
Everyone you listed don't kill people. Very few people consider Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man to be objectively wrong. They consider them to be objectively right, and it's because they're enforcing the law when the police aren't around to do so.
"Law" is just another way of saying, "The bare minimum standard that we as a society will accept."
So when we have a society that sends a drunk driver to prison for 70 years for killing a family of four in a head-on collision, but we don't send people to prison for their lives for gambling with the pensions of teachers, firefighters, etc., for polluting the waterways and the earth itself, of course this is the ultimate, eventual outcome.
The only shocking thing to me about Luigi's case is that it didn't happen sooner.
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Yeah I listed all of those because it’s funnier when people mistake the vigilante justice’ thing for a ‘not killing people’ thing and then I can trot out Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, which was so popular it gets quoted regularly and had four sequels.
Batman, Superman and Spider-Man are not real. And that does matter. It is super normal to watch a movie and sympathize with what would be clearly bad guys in real life.
So yes, batman in particular would be considered bad by most people. He is just another gangster cause quite a lot of damage to the city on the regular. We do not care, because it is made up movie city.
Superman and Spider man afaik do not go around randomly assassinating people, but it is a long time since I watched that.
>otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular.
Batman is the absolute opposite because he goes out of his way to avoid killing villains, even incredibly evil ones like the Joker.
It's not like the Punisher isn't popular.
Let's be real: the original super heroes avoided killing because children were their target market, and unlike with cowboys and outlaws or indians, it would have been unseemly by the standards of the time. Not because of some kind of big point about "just vigilantism."
True. Dexter tv series was also popular - reason they made so many seasons.
A Dexter reboot where the protagonist targets extremely powerful people who commit mass violence within the confines of the law might actually be entertaining
The goalposts were ‘ vigilante justice’ not killing people.
Mangione support is largely isolated to young age groups of certain demographics, according to polling numbers.
It’s actually really interesting to see when people think his support isn’t even a debated topic, when the numbers show most people, especially adults, don’t support his actions.
It's not most people, it's a plurality. There's a large 'don't know' contingent who either haven't made up their minds or don't want to share their opinion. Also, I would expect this data to skew toward younger people because anyone at or above retirement age is eligible for medicare, and thus not impacted by the decisions of private insurers to anything like the same degree.
A lot of folks who are sympathetic to his actions publicly go “oh no murder is bad” while privately being sympathetic.
I’m unsure how that shows with polling, tbh, but it certainly shows up in the discourse.
I know more older adults who just avoid the topic than say it was truly wrong.
Condemning people to death and bankruptcy is violence.
That said, we consider vigilante justice wrong because we believe there is supposed to be actual justice from a functional system. When the system does not function, extrajudicial attempts at justice will become more common. Just like people will poach more in a famine.
Just a reflection, when you say: "especially against nonviolent offenders", I‘m pretty sure that a lot of people see it like this. People will directly die when a treatment is denied and for impacted people this is seen as a violent crime (even if indirect). This case is triggering more support as it has a potential impact on a the life of a lot of people.
> This case is such an interesting crossroads. He has such insane support ... But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.
It's worth noting that in our society lots of other things are also considered to be wrong, things which are done openly every day by some of the richest and most powerful people and organizations in the country.
That's why he has "insane support": the system is broken and has proven itself incapable of policing that other bad behavior.
> I don’t know what SO should have done
Well, nothing.
Unless they have a general policy of scrubbing records of everybody indicted for (but not yet proven guilty of) violent crimes, why do anything at all?
Non-violence...lines get blurred while being cut throat and cold hearted when you do it to thousands or millions of people. I'm surprised the GFC didn't have anything like this given the damage it did.
Why would they (the companies) have to do anything should be the question.
The ”nonviolent” part is interesting. We as a society has many examples of holding such people responsible for ”legal” and ”non-violent” actions that clearly resulted in deaths of lots of people.
Sorry about the rather extreme example and inviting Godwin. But consider for example Krupp (CEO) and Ribbentrop (Diplomat) who were both entirely ”non-violent” people, they personally did not draw a single drop of blod as far as I know. And the holocaust were perfectly legal according to the law at the time.
Violence with the stroke of a pen, killing via a rubber stamp, violence through withholding safety.
There are like 4 pro-Luigi subreddits with 10k+ users.
Reddit is not real life.
> Reddit is not real life.
...then it follows HN isn't. I happen to know they are both real for the purposes of existing and as a meta commentary on topics, since I participate in both. I also don't know anyone who wouldn't give Luigi a pass on a Jury, and these people don't vote the same.
Disregarding the existence of the sentiment, is the kneejerk noise of people thinking they are uber-rational thinkers or arbiters of reality.
I'll assume, in good faith, what your wrote was simply not what you meant.
Bringing justice to the person responsible to hundreds/thousands of deaths and immense suffering is right - was the murder of Mussolini unjust? Hitler's?
If the justice system won't take care of it, there has to come a tipping point, IMO.
> vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.
I guess hiding behind the veil of legality and murdering thousands if not hundreds of thousands if considered worse. Rightfully IMO.
It’s so weird to me that people say vigilante violence is so universally abhorred, when we literally have Batman and the Punisher as major draws at the theatre.
But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong.
What are you talking about? What "vigilante justice"? The innocent victim, Brian Thompson, was murdered by a lunatic. He was not an offender. It was no justice.
By some accounts Thompson was a killer of thousands.
Using such a weasel phrase like "by some accounts" means that there's absolutely nothing standing behind this. If there was any concrete thing Brian Thompson did that was any kind of legal crime or moral error, you'd be able to name it.
My intent was merely to point out that it is a commonly held belief, because it seemed like you were not aware. I didn't want to champion that belief.
But since you've invited me to name the moral error, sure. Accepting a fiduciary responsibility to chase after profits in a context where that very clearly means finding ways to deny people access to healthcare is a moral error. If you can't ethically do a job you shouldn't take that job. At best you're lying to shareholders, at worst you're killing people. The only ethical path is to go find a different job.
There is absolutely no way to run an insurance scheme without denying some people coverage. No system anywhere in the world, public or private, accepts every single claim. You must deny some claims, there's no way around it. This means that according to you, there's no ethical way to run health insurance system. I disagree, I think we need insurance to exist, and given that someone needs to run insurance, I don't think that taking such a job is inherently a moral error.
It's really just for-profit health insurance systems that I think can't be made ethical. If you have to deny some claims based on resource availability, that's an uncomfortable necessity, but we can do insurance-like things without asking people to balance human life against shareholder greed.
It seems pretty obvious that opting into a position where you'll have to do that might make you unpopular with the humans.
What is "resource availability"? In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined? Is there no person involved making a decision that causes the amount of available resources to change? Think about it. Consider, for example, politicians who set the healthcare tax rate. If they set it 1% higher, there will be more resources available. Does it mean that by not doing so, they deny care to some?
I strongly encourage you to think very carefully about this. Once you do, you'll find that there are no simple answers: you'll always have limited resources, and you'll always have to deny care to some people, and in fact it will always include some people personally making the call to deny care to some people. Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
> In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined?
You would generally count them. Like, if you have three people in need of a ventilator and you only have two ventilators, then one person is getting denied a ventilator today.
> Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
That's true, and I don't have a problem with it. Tradeoffs have to happen. What I have a problem with is incentive structures that attribute greater success for the people at the top when they create outcomes that involve more death for the people at the bottom.
Plenty of systems which actually exist don't congratulate leadership for reducing quality of care.
OK, but why is there only two ventilators? Who made this decision, and based on what? Try to think a couple of steps ahead.
Presumably somebody involved in deciding budgets, a politician perhaps, or somebody with a rather political role in the hospital. Whoever they are, in most cases they're balancing ventilators against test kits or against hiring more doctors or against letting people keep more of their paychecks, or all kinds of other things which might indeed be more important for the patients/citizens/etc...
There's no fundamental reason why they have to be in a position where screwing the people who receive the care would ever be considered the ideal option. But that's how it is when you have a group of shareholders who have no stake in the quality of care. Thompson opted into a conflict of interest which need not exist in order to provide insurance.
More likely they balance the need to increase healthcare taxes against their chance of being reelected.
Sure, and that's not exactly comfortable (maybe "reelected" shouldn't be a thing, idk). But if the people reelecting you are also the patients then the particular conflict of interest I'm worried about is not present.
Yes, that's why NHS is so well funded. Oh, wait, it isn't.
Government-organized resource allocation is, more likely than not, bad to very bad.
True, and we need to get our shit together about that, but it's not an apples to apples comparison. A government allocates 100% of the available healthcare funding towards healthcare outcomes. A corporation (in the US) allocates 80%. You can tolerate a sloppier slicing if you're starting with a bigger pie.
You are right, BUT: Those denials have to follow contractual terms. I know a local (Europe) real world example where a friend of a friend (insurance company area manager) literally was told "this is your sum of money on claims that you can accept in this quarter, it cannot go above that". Which either you get lucky and make the quota, or you screw people over and hope they don't sue. And since we live in a world where the company wants "a little more" each year, well.. I don't see how this ends well.
The same problem does not apply to our social services (including health insurance) as they dont have to make profits at all costs.
I think you need to specify this more.
In most insurance fields, it would be possible to only deny false claims. Take insurance of your house. The rates could be calculated that they can pay out all real damages to the full amount. Because the maximum damage amount is limited.
That's not true for health insurance, because the total possible damage (cost of treatments) is almost arbitrarily high, so that you cannot pay everything for everyone.
I don't want to defend the US system here. But it's not a problem that any country really solved, and one could argue about advantages and disadvantages of the different systems all day long.
The line is on why you are doing the denying. Are you doing so because providing the healthcare is literally impossible, or are you doing so in order to make more money?
I’m standing behind this.
I think that Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. His actions as CEO put profit before people and caused many people’s lives to be lost.
What actions? What did he do? You're just repeating empty phrases to smear the murder victim.
> UnitedHealthcare in particular denied coverage for post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization. In 2019, the insurance provider’s initial denial rate for post-acute care prior authorization requests was 8.7%; by 2022, it had increased to 22.7%.
Buck stop with him; between 2021 and 2022 he did that. Being the CEO and all.
And what's the crime here? What's the moral error? Can you elucidate? I hope you're not trying to argue that insurance should not be allowed to ever deny claims?
I think you understand very clearly what point is being made, and are just pretending not to get it.
My understanding is that people are twisting themselves into pretzels to blame the murder victim for something, but they have extremely hard time finding anything explicit to point to, so they just throw allusions, hoping that the reader will complete the bogus argument in their head.
Here, for example, the parent poster brings up some statistic that some very specific category of insurance claim denial went up in some period. The allusion is that this is nefarious, and is a result of some specific action by the murder victim. The reader is supposed to interpret it this way. Of course, there's absolutely zero evidence for any of these claims, and when you lay it down like that, it sounds pretty stupid without anything backing this up.
It's a general category (all claim denials) and it did not go up, it more than doubled; as you are probably aware, it's far, far above the industry average. Also you're misusing the word 'allusion' which means 'to refer to something. You probably meant 'implication'.
No, denial of “post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization” claims is a narrow category, it’s not all claim denials.
Just goes to show you how incompatible your morals are from others, I suppose.
Why not, I pay them. Do you pay your phone company to not provide service?
Of course, there are plenty of places and circumstances where my phone company does not provide me service.
You don't see a moral error with a health insurance company going out of their way to more than double the claims they deny, not because it's ethical or necessary but because they find ways to do so legally and the motive is profit?
Perhaps you're not well equipped to evaluate moral errors in the first place.
The only potential crime that article lists is allegation that the murder victim failed to disclose some material fact to the company investors. Are you saying that Luigi Mangione killed Thomson on behalf of the stock holders, who lost money by holding UnitedHealthcare stock?
Your comment is pretty clear example of the attitude around the case. People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision, and so when they are murdered, they will twist themselves into pretzels to somehow justify that they had it coming.
Yes, but if there were a crime, then there'd be a legal remedy, so any vigilante action would be unjustified.
That something harmful is legal or effectively legal is a necessary requirement for a vigilante action to morally acceptable.
Wouldn't the moral acceptable way be to try making the harmful thing illegal?
And if people in their majority, in their stupidity or cleverness, reject your argument, isn't then vigilante action deeply anti-democratic?
I suppose it depends on how you view things and what tradition you're from.
I have a very old-style view, where courts provide systems that substitute for private vengeance and thus become legitimate by being willing to hear complaints of harm, so from my point of view, if a court hear the matter, the affected person can take whatever measures they wish, which of course has important consequences in cases of legal immunity-- when my view is taken, legal immunity is something one desperately wants to avoid having, because whoever has it must contend with private vengeance.
> People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision,
No, People hate CEO's making greedy, selfish, unnecessary decisions that cost lives and cause suffering.
Be honest.
Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe. Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some, because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty, and only then try to find reasons why.
> Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe.
That's fine. I think you exemplify the attitude that lead to Thompson's murder and will lead to many more similar incidents.
> Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some,
If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.
> because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty
The most basic of reasoning shows he has some moral guilt, just not legal guilt.
P1 - He was the head decision maker
P2 - Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
C - He ultimately approved of that decision
If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.
You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place. Let me repeat: any system will deny some claims, so denied claims are not prima facie evidence of anything wrong.
Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened. Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong, but also changes in denial rate do not even need to correspond to any decision or change in policy, but may instead result from changes of external factors.
He ultimately approved of that decision
What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious. There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation. Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
> You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place.
Honestly this is a pretty bad faith argument. They are denying at a significantly higher rate than their competitors, their internal policy focused around denying, and enough people are getting screwed over that a murder was committed.
But yeah, sure, assume this is all business as normal and not at all morally wrong to make your argument if you must.
> Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened.
Basic. Reasoning.
If claim denials triple during a time when a particular CEO is in place, that CEO would have had to have something to do with that.
> Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong,
They are on this scale and when the denials are bad faith. I can't prove that to you unless their documents get leaked, but that's for legal matters. For moral matters, the evidence supports that the difference from the drastic increase were indeed bad faith denials.
> What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious.
Exactly, because he was CEO.
> There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation.
He was CEO.
> Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
He was CEO. He oversaw a company going out of their way to deny claims even if you want to play devils advocate and pretend to be ignorant and deny that.
What he did was far more evil than a single murder, and what you are doing in defending the system that caused someone to feel that they had to murder it also more evil, the system that allows for shitty health insurance companies to cause so much pain and suffering. THAT, is evil.
> moral error,
The moral error is by refining and endorsing a company policy that went out of it's way to cheat people out of their due insurance, killing significant amounts of people as a result and ensuring suffering for even more.
Our legal system can't really address this, not until the electoral college gets disbarred or red state voters realize rejecting socialized health care hurts more than it helps.
Until that happens. things are going to get worse and people are going to get frustrated and start acting out. It's what happens when you have such a broken system.
Talking about "we don't do that in society" is ignoring the problem at it's core. You can't expect people to just obey the rules and respect law and order when it clearly isn't working for them or people they care about.
No one will have concrete answers until discovery during Mangione’s trial. That is, if United doesn’t find themselves their own Jack Ruby.
What discovery? Are you suggesting that the defense in the murder case will be able to do any kind of discovery on UnitedHealthcare? How would that even be possible?
Justice isn’t confined to the law. Nor to any one person’s opinion.
Everything Brian Thompson did was legal, which is not the same thing as being "innocent."
Unfortunately it seems like a lot of the patriotic stories us Americans were taught in school were to violently overthrow your unjust oppressors (not to mention film). Not surprising that his story resonates with some of the public.
The good guys in Star Wars were based on the Viet Cong.
Dirtbag move to keep his content but erase his name
This is SE's modus operandi, protest their choices around AI training, policies, etc., by deleting your content and you'll get your account locked and your posts reinstated because you're "hurting the community" and that is more important than your (now non-exclusive) right to your own words (and by non-exclusive, I mean SE's wishes about what to do with your own words matters more than your wishes).
> This is SE's modus operandi, protest their choices around AI training
All of StackOverflow is already scraped and archived, so this is not a good argument, as you are actually just hurting StackOverflow while helping AI companies
Maybe my goal was to hurt SO in protest of their decisions?
Just like those who edited every Reddit comment to a blank string before deleting them all.
My account was locked for deleting my own comments. I sent them a GDPR request to delete my comments. They ignored it. I posted on meta asking if they followed GDPR. It was deleted and I was banned from meta.
Actually, I don't think this is covered by GDPR, but if you are European (which is implied by the fact you invoke GPPR) you can and should file a GDPR complaint to your local DPA.
> It’s important to grasp the severity of my suspension: suspending a professional resource for one year will create a hardship for me
Why? You can still get information from there, they're stopping you from working for free for them for some time.
You can't ask a question. And even if you could start a new account, you wouldn't have thousands of rep points to spend on bounties, so the answers won't be as good or quick.
For people out of the loop like me (the article doesn’t mention it): Luigi Mangione is an American man who was identified as the suspect in the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
account renamed and not even convicted yet .....
The slow walk on the pier is an example of the upcoming ?revenge? by the ?establishment?
The power of a name alone... given his StackOverflow contents aren't relevant to his murder. Damnatio memoriae again?
I'm not even on the Luigi is a hero bandwagon at all, but this is weird.
"Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself." -Hermione Granger
In case any other Harry Potter nerds come along and worry their memory is completely failing them:
Albums Dumbledore says this in the books. Hermione only has this quote in the movie adaptations.
Wouldn't call myself a nerd, but I was so confused thinking "isn't this what Dumbledore said to Harry when asking about Voldemort?"
Guess it just shows retention of books overrides movies, given that I've consumed both.
>JK Rowling Airbrushed From Pop Culture Museum’s Harry Potter Display For “Transphobic Views”
https://deadline.com/2023/08/jk-rowling-airbrushed-from-pop-...
Your Wikipedia link is very useful since it clarifies that Damnatio memoriae refers to exclusion "from official accounts".
>Today's best known examples of damnatio memoriae from antiquity concern chiselling stone inscriptions or deliberately omitting certain information from them.
>The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions through which the physical remnants and memories of a deceased individual are destroyed.
Certainly not exclusively from official accounts. Not sure what your point here is?
Why the scare quotes?
The quotes are from the article's title.
In the 20th century, people theorized about how the transience of digital space will create a mutable history.
We've been living with that now for a few decades. It's still a problem.
Not really. SO probably doesn't want to be dealing with this stuff at all.
Then they should have simply done nothing.
Can't do nothing, as his account was being treated as a shrine. I don't think they want to be the Luigi Magione Shrine website either.
As Evan points out in TFA, this has happened before.
I'll add that it has happened more than a few times.
Past response was to shut down inappropriate behavior in the now (folks rambling on about the person in comments under some programming question, etc.) and let the temporary interest die out on its own.
This time... The response seems to be inviting the Streisand Effect.
boldmovecotton.gif
> Can't do nothing, as his account was being treated as a shrine.
So what. He gets a few upvotes. What's the harm for the users, or the platform?
And? I don't see that as a reason to break CC license.
If you're gonna expunge someone, don't half-ass it.
Is it legally feasible to fork StackOverflow and create a competing platform using the same content? Or is the license just window dressing to provide contributors with the feeling that they could do that if they wanted to... but not really.
Legally? yes. The users own the content, SO only has a license to do as they please and users have already given CC license to anyone (that is the nature of copyleft after all).
Is it feasible to build a community that will contribute, and also get the search traffic[1], and be economically viable, particularly in the post LLM world? I don't think so.
In today's world with gen AI, the drive to contribute and maintain suck knowledge stores is simply not there, SO itself is facing a > 60% drop in new questions even as far as 2 years back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984742 (2023).
The tech itself is pretty trivial, even distributed and truly community operated like Wikis are, content creation will be the biggest challenge and i don't see the strong community motivation to maintain knowledge bases like this anymore.
[1] Search engines will negatively penalize the domain for just hosting duplicated content without any extra intent to stifle a new player etc.
>Is it feasible to build a community that will contribute, and also get the search traffic[1], and be economically viable, particularly in the post LLM world? I don't think so.
To be honest, it's more feasible than ever because of LLMs. I imagine more and more grassroots for "human communities" will be advertised as those weary of LLMs tire and migrate. Having systems guaranteed to be humans will be a selling point. Not guaranteed to surpass SO, I imagine it will get a sizeable community.
The downside is that, short of a very fast updating anti-bot captcha, users will more or less need strict identification to enter. Either via a premium payment or showing real life ID. Very unpopular models in the US. we'll have to see if the hate for AI overrides the will to give up anonymity (at least on the backend) or putting their wallets where their mouths are.
I think it’s a seriously good idea. I believe they could create problems during the content scraping phase but considering that Internet Archive has most of the content already, I don’t see how they could legally prevent such a move if you’re careful with their trademarks and other intellectual properties like logos and look-and-feel.
There are many sites that rehash popular questions from Stack Overflow and other Q and A sites. I regard the scraped content as search spam. Of course, there isn't the same ideological motive behind it. I imagine that SO retains some kind of IP rights to their content.
Completely legal. But in public opinion, you won't be able to attract any users away from the real site, and your site will be indistinguishable from all of those content scraping SEO spam sites that get heavily penalized by search engines.
tbh I'm surprised stackexchange still has employees. I thought all that value was already extracted by LLM scrapers and they're well on their way to becoming another quora.
The tone of this blogpost is over the top. I mean...
orThe *erasure* of Luigi Mangione The saga on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, *and how tech always serves the ruling class.*
We're not talking about the Department of Defense, or the Catholic Church. StackOverflow is just a popular Q&A website. Since it's popular with the software development community, it's of some importance - not enough to merit using the tone of Woodward and Bernstein or John Rawls.It’s important to *grasp the severity* of my suspension: suspending a professional resource for one year will create a hardship for me. And, I’m one of the largest producers of content on the networkTo your point of: "... suspending a professional resource for one year will create a hardship for me. And, I’m one of the largest producers of content on the network ..."
https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=answ...
Evan is only suspended on Stack Overflow. Compare https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll and https://dba.stackexchange.com/users/2639/evan-carroll ... or for that matter any of the other parts: https://stackexchange.com/users/42701/evan-carroll?tab=accou...
Likewise, the "largest producers" ... https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=answ... and https://stackoverflow.com/users/124486/evan-carroll?tab=ques... would bring that into question.
Even on the site with the highest rep... https://dba.stackexchange.com/users/2639/evan-carroll?tab=an... the most recent answer was August 12th. The next most recent answer was October 1st (of 2023).
The self-aggrandizement and over the top tone does not do any favors for taking the content seriously.
I find it funny the post explains what stack overflow is (which I know) while not explaining who Luigi Mangione is (which I don't know).
Luigi is accused of last month's high-profile murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.
What was it in 1984? Memory holed?
Now you can Fahrenheit 451 everyone if they go against the established order.
Why is the title of the post changed? I thought that's against the guidelines.
I don't know if this is valid, but thr guidelines do state that you can slightly editorialize any title that comes off as clockbait.
The rules only apply to the little people.
Given the mismatch between public sentiment and the reporting on all things Luigi Mangione, the establishment is really scared. Trying to scrub him from the internet is really sending a signal that we can influence the c-suite as a class the way Luigi Mangione did, which is incredibly stupid - they are ultimately inviting more murder.
Indeed. It's like they are stomping on a burning bag of dog poo left on their doorstep: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/01/most-wanted-ceo/
Warning on this link: visitors from HN will get served a nasty image instead of the article for some reason. Copy paste if you wanna view the article.
Nasty image? This is poetry.
Perhaps it's both? In any case it's intended to shock visitors from this site. Maybe we need that from time to time in our comfortable bubbles.
If somebody's getting "shocked" by this, then it's having the intended effect as far as poetry is concerned. It's important reminder to what HN is, really, even though I would expect it to largely fall on deaf ears. Reminds me of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Interesting. I suggested to dang some years ago to implement rel=nofollow, he did for jwz, but it seems like that's not enough anymore?!
It is nofollow, but wouldn't "noreferrer" be more relevant?
Frustrating that we lazily have to still copy-paste jwz.org links in 2025.
(DNA Pizza was one of my favorite things about living in SOMA in the before days)
Only 17% of all U.S. voters think the killing was "acceptable" or "somewhat acceptable", topping out at 41% among young voters, according to Emerson.
I think I would have checked the "unacceptable" box if I took that survey.
At the same time, I can't disagree with the fact that at this point I'm not sure what else will force a change to our absolutely depraved health care system. Every time I think it's as bad as it can possibly be it gets worse.
I also hope Mangione gets at least one mistrial due to jury nullification.
I might have checked acceptable, even if I'm not sure if it is. Just to steer the result to the direction that conveys the message.
Nullification means acquittal with no retrial, not a mistrial.
Fair enough, I mean that I hope at least one juror is willing to return a verdict of not guilty based on their desire to achieve jury nullification.
- [deleted]
It was 41% approve, 40% disapprove. All the polls are filled with massive numbers of "don't know" people that I think is likely going to be filled with people struggling with cognitive dissonance. How can one oppose murder, but not feel particularly upset, to say the least, about this murder?
The same way people justify killing in wars, regardless of how justified they feel the wars are.
The "enemy" combatants are of course just operating within the parameters of their laws. Nevertheless, war is seen as a battle between two competing powers which discard human lives in their struggle.
This is a different type of war being fought now. Brian Thompson didn't create the system, he was just a high-ranking agent.
Luigi declared war against the system, and people feel so strongly about the necessity for that system to be defeated that they can simultaneously support the resistance (even if the resistance had no choice but to play by its own rules) and recognize the tragedy in a death and the associated impact of that.
It's similar to how a lot of people feel about the Palestinian resistance in their struggle for liberation from the profoundly evil system of violence which has been victimizing them for years and killing them with impunity.
> All the polls are filled with massive numbers of "don't know" people
Not the case. The "neutrals" were only a few %, while 68% said "somewhat unacceptable" or "unacceptable".
No, they weren't. In the 18-59 age group, they made up about 20% of every response group. Even in the 60+ group it was about 10%. [1] And in the YouGov poll [2] that surveyed all Americans instead of just voters, and also asked the question in a less leading way found 37% "don't know" amongst all Americans.
The Emerson poll quite disingenuously chose to frame the typical "don't know" as "neutral", which is going to be interpreted as a value position - not the lack of a formed position, which their poll completely lacked. Their questions and answers were poorly framed if the goal was to actually query public sentiment and not just get a desired response.
[1] - https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-pol...
[2] - https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51189-presidentia...
"Only"?! That's 1 in 6 people. A terrifyingly high number, regardless of your stance on insurance companies.
The young voter thing seems weird to me.
Consider these facts:
• A significant majority of Americans are medically satisfied with their health insurance provider.
This should not be surprising because a large majority of Americans have only ever used their health insurance for things routine checkups, routine lab tests, common infectious illnesses like colds and flus, minor burns and cuts and other physical injuries, routine diabetes care, routine high blood pressure care, and vaccinations.
Those are all things where almost all of the time any insurance company will cover without any hassle or pushback.
• Older people are generally more likely to have medical problems beyond the kind described above, medical problems where insurance companies do start pushing back on coverage and treatments.
• The older you get the more likely that becomes.
What I'd expect then is that sentiment in favor of killing insurance company officers over the medical decisions of that insurance company to be higher in older people and lower in younger people. But it appears that reality is opposite of that.
> A significant majority of Americans are medically satisfied with their health insurance provider.
Before some life changes that mooted the point, I lived in fear of needing serious medical care, and as far as things go I'm more privileged than most.
> What I'd expect then is that sentiment in favor of killing insurance company officers over the medical decisions of that insurance company to be higher in older people and lower in younger people.
I don't know man, having the loved ones around you get literally killed by the dollar the insurance companies took from them and wouldn't give back sounds like something somebody too young to be beaten down by reality would feel enraged by. The loving heart can only take so much damage before it starts to break.
I just think that it's a bunch of people who developed with their empathy under attack before their emotional armor fully formed. Abuse begets abuse and we see an abused public lashing out. Extremely tragic, but nothing especially mysterious about it.
I'd guess that most people that responded "somewhat unacceptable" really wanted to say "somewhat acceptable" but without directly admitting that they semi support the act.
Or, perhaps because people actually think that murdering people is not acceptable.
Which in that case they would just answer "unacceptable".
"Somewhat unacceptable" is logically equivalent to saying "Somewhat acceptable".
Polls are only as good as the pollster. Watch how “popular” Kamala was in polls because it was the “right” thing to say.
Most people (including rich boomers) I know are at minimum ambivalent to Luigi with many actively supporting him. But if asked on record they would deny it.
Presidential polls were "inaccurate" by only a few %, which is to be expected. But to be so inaccurate that >50% support for Luigi is reported instead as only 17% would be staggering and unprecedented, requiring nothing short of fraud.
Kamala did quite well in the election, it was close. In hindsight I don't think there was any particular evidence the polls were inaccurate. Poll-watchers like fivethirtyeight.com predicted that the election was a coin toss (with the toss sliiightly biased towards Trump up until their final forecasts from what I recall) but whoever won the coin toss would probably achieve a comfortable victory. That is pretty much what transpired.
> In hindsight I don't think there was any particular evidence the polls were inaccurate.
One notable exception was The Des Moines Register poll the day before the election.
Then why the disparity with private polling.
If you want me to refer to private polling you're going to need to hint which poll you mean. I'm working off public data which was pretty accurate on aggregate, there weren't any surprises on election night which was something of a https://www.xkcd.com/1131/ moment.
Eyeballing https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/ it looks to be in 1-sigma territory or maybe just venturing in to 2-sigmas.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/kamala-harris-advisers-internal-p...
Leaks of the Biden polling had trump getting 400 EC votes. Public polling is a PR exercise to convince you how to vote, the intention is to deceive.
I dunno. Given the public polls seemed to be accurate in hindsight that just suggests Harris' internal polling was off. They were the C-team that were losing to Trump with Biden and struggling to match his raw charisma with Harris' campaigning. Maybe their pollster wasn't very good or they didn't do that much polling? We can't really assess what was going on inside the campaign in that way.
C-suite are minions themselves but it scares the higher ups. Even Trump almost got taken out. It was damn close.
[flagged]
Please don't do this here.
> Given the mismatch between public sentiment and the reporting on all things Luigi Mangione, the establishment is really scared
Polling numbers (actual gauge of public sentiment) show a net disapproval for Mangione: https://stratpolitics.org/2024/12/unitedhealthcare-poll/
If anything, the news media has been trying to push the Mangione debate and controversy at every chance, like the above article that was selectively written to highlight demographic groups that showed higher approval of Mangione first.
Thinking that “the establishment” is a collective of all major companies that act in unison is conspiratorial thinking. Don’t think for a second that the news media wouldn’t hesitate to push and profit from the controversy.
> Polling numbers (actual gauge of public sentiment)
Polls have never been faithful of actual public sentiment on any political subject since the end of times. People will not give their true opinions in polls on any subject that could be perceived as complex. Also it is actually very hard to have a good representation of the entire population of your country.
Just take the crosstabs of the survey you linked: about the 2024 election vote, in this survey, 70% of people polled are negative toward trump. The 2024 election results gave almost 50% of the popular vote to trump.
My point is only that this poll do not bring any valuable information here, just like any poll. The public sentiment toward Luigi Mangione seems favorable in appearance, but twitter is not representative of the US population either. So, who knows?
>in this survey, 70% of people polled are negative toward trump. The 2024 election results gave almost 50% of the popular vote to trump
This isn't surprising, as you don't have to like someone to vote for them. Especially in a two-party system. Trump is uniquely disliked by many Republicans, but those voters still prefer to have a Republican in office rather than a Democrat. It's "hold your nose and vote". The (center-)left even developed a slogan for it: "vote blue no matter who".
Polls have not proven the most reliable in recent times. I can tell some folks avoid him as a topic, but I've yet to see anyone I know in any socioeconomic class or age group seemingly do anything besides avoid acknowledging him, express support, or express support with some kind of caveat.
You live in a bubble, even in the real world. In fact, your real-world bubble is usually stronger than your online bubble. Just because your bubble shows support for murder doesn't mean that most people do.
> Polling numbers (actual gauge of public sentiment) show a net disapproval for Mangione:
Do you trust those polls?
If you flood the world with enough polls, you get ones saying what you want, especially if you pay for them
As cleverly demonstrate in this famous scene from Yes, Prime Minister
Owen Jones "the establishment and how they get away with it" points to the _evidence_ for the conspiracy without providing the mechanism. The existence of an establishment (in the conspiratorial sense) is rather like gravity - hard to deny but who knows how it works. Just saying..
What can you tell me about stratpolitics.org and how you came across this poll?
It's been widely discredited as the company that released it seems to have come out of thin air with no history and has a patron account:
From a brief look at their "people" page, it seems like they're all involved with chapters of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). If anything, this suggests against foul play, as their incentive would be to denigrate for-profit healthcare and overstate support for Mangione.
I am wary of the accuracy of the poll because it was an online one, but it does generally agree with a similar Economist/YouGov poll.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracist, I absolutely do not believe any polling number from established institutions here.
I can believe it to some degree. Believing that what the killer did is wrong, and being unsympathetic to Brian Thompson's death isn't mutually exclusive.
They don't even need to do anything especially conspiratorial, I would expect those polls to have substantial anti-Mangione bias by construction.
Many people will want to avoid being on record as supporting a murderer, for fear of any consequences down the line. I know polls are almost certainly anonymous, but you need to trust the pollster to actually abide by that. If you have even an inch of worry, it's easier to just not answer (or answer insincerely) and move on.
This entire song-and-dance from executives, media, platforms, and the general "status quo preservationists" over the last month in response to Luigi is priceless.
They seem to have a high desire to place any disrespect they can on what seems to be an otherwise revered political activist in recent times; and it's only further fueling the discussion, and in all likelihood - probability for successors.
They would have been smart to play a leveling field, to treat Luigi's act with an element of absurdity, which would cause everyday people to question if their relatability towards Luigi was warranted or even made sense. Instead, they played a hand that the fearful would - because they are, and only validated the vigilante's narrative - because it is.
Administrators reflexively lie. They are committed to preserving whatever institution employs them, not to any objective standard of truth or behavior. I have lost count of how many times I have highlighted such behavior over the alst decade.
I find it hilarious that they can't even keep their power in check to save it for when it would REALLY matter... but they just cant help themselves, they love to execute the control as quickly as it is available even though this leaves a trail of erosion.
An obvious worldwide trend of complete speech control, right in the open for all of us to follow and see. Instead of just waiting a bit longer... until there was no way to stop it (maybe its already too late?) But i feel like this is too soon to pull this trigger, we still have time to stop using all these large platforms that aren't even vital to our lives, to make open and peer to peer alternatives
Me as well, but instead highlighting their lack of commitment to morals and integrity; rather than standard of truth or behavior - equally valid take, mind you!
Lying to preserve an institution is like playing Jenga: eroding the foundation in order to scale up the tower.
Fantastic metaphor - I'll definitely be using that.
Hypothetical - is it possible for someone to set up an ethical health insurance company that just takes in premiums and pays out for care? If people despise the current companies so much why can't we just start a new company, maybe as a public benefits corporation that by charter has to act ethically?
So the fun thing is that's already what happens! It's part of a law passed with the ACA called the Medical Loss Ratio rule.
I've come to discover that most people really do not understand healthcare insurance at all.
The true driver of increased costs is Dr's and Hospitals. Not insurance.
The rule might have made things even worse, since now total costs have to go up for their profit to go up.
Contrast this with a non-profit which has no incentive to increase profits and thus no incentive to increase costs.
I agree that these conversations mainly reveal to me that many people don't understand the economics driving costs in US healthcare, since they are so willing to carry water for private insurers.
> since now total costs have to go up for their profit to go up.
And yet, they deny claims, despite that denying a claim reduces their profits.
> to carry water for private insurers.
Because insurance it utterly irrelevant to the issue. The problems in the US lie at the Dr/Hospital level, not the insurance. Procedures simply cost too much, having the government pay for them will just makes things worse because government always overpays for things.
You want to solve things? Make medical tuition free, and remove ALL caps on number of doctors (especially difficult with residency, but it can be done). Then reduce rates for services.
Someone should start a fully integrated company: They educate you, find you a residency, and hire you. In exchange for free tuition you agree to work for lower rates. (There will need to be some details to work out obviously, since you can't force people to work.)
Whatever their reasons for denying claims, capricious denials is the main complaint people have about insurance, so it doesn't really feel any better if it doesn't actually increase their profits. Out of curiosity, why do you think they deny claims of it has nothing to do with profitability? Is denying claims just fun?
It's actually comical to claim insurance is irrelevant.
Billions of dollars of middlemen creating makework inserted into the process surely adds no costs, and is completely irrelevant to how much it costs. The waste generated in hospital billing departments is free, since people famously love working for billing departments and will do it for free. Commercial real estate for healthcare company buildings is also free, and so are the salaries of all the people that work for them. Not to mention their role in creating price opacity, allowing prices to rise unchecked and having different prices for different payers, also has no effect on prices. The stress that patient dissatisfaction (or outright getting fucked) causes providers is also completely free and causes no waste.
This rule magically solved all incentive misalignment in healthcare and everyone clapped.
It's a shame that these people don't read, because if they did they see just how often the rich and powerful were murdered during the gilded age. From Wallstreet to St. Petersburg everyone from Emperors to titans of industry was assassinated by those with nothing left to lose. It's almost like income equality is there to keep them alive and to keep another world war from breaking out.
But that _have_ learned. They are systematically making violence a taboo the way sex was in the past.
If all people think violence is wrong and immoral instead of just against the rules they have written ("laws"), then they can keep writing rules that suit them even more and more without any pressure against it.
Except almost every blockbuster movie, rap song and mainstream video game romanticizes and heroizes violence.
When people say "staring daggers", do you think they are actually trying to stab someone?
Yes but try to apply the same rules to real life and people will laugh at you.
How many times do you see the hero having to choose between killing the villain and leaving him to the legal system (not justice system) to give him a lesser punishment?
This whole story was started by the fact that countless people have begun to revere Luigi Mangione as a Robin Hood-like folk hero. Whatever taboo put in place against violence seems to have failed in this case.
Yep, if you boil the frog too fast, it will notice.
Resorting to violence over other non-violent means to resolve disputes is often a symptom of weak institutional capacity, and one could argue that this instance of violence is such a symptom.
It's a tug of war between institutional capacity (people's inability to act) and injustice (people's willingness to act even if they will face negative consequences).
I have a theory for a long time that "democracy" as a concept is pushed so strongly in the West not because it really favors people nor for its effectiveness but because it nulls political assassinations and delegitimates them. Thus it is an extremely good system for the rulers.
A system with fewer assassinations is a better system, if all else is equal. Unfortunately, all else is not equal.
Democracy should be an alternative to violence: Instead of murdering the next Hitler, you can just vote him out. Unfortunately, this only applies as long as it works. American democracy has not worked for a very long time.
Not just vote him out, that solves all his future murders. Depending on when he was votes out, he still needs to be punished for all his past murders.
> taboo the way sex was
Was it? the puritanical views in some western social groups is hardly how the whole world saw sex, even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class.
>"even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class."
Same with violence! Not too much institutional change made for gang violence between 13-21 year olds in Chicago - as long as they're in the same class.
Any society that stigmatizes violence is soon overtaken by one that doesn't.
The west is in terminal decline and will be replaced by a cult from the middle east. This is the third time this has happened.
The only annoying thing is that I'll need to learn Arabic. English was bad enough.
Do you think assassinating arch-dukes was being sold as virtuous back then either? Especially by the churches which were the moral arbiters of the time?
Plenty of people were still in favor, clearly.
The difference is in the past most discourse was by mouth - impossible to censor and eavesdropping was costly because you needed a person to do it.
These days more and more discourse is online
- heavily censored by platform rules which are much more strict than laws, partially because it makes the moderator's job easier to err on the side of caution, partially because it teaches people to self censor which then extends into real life
- censorship can be automated and even invisible (shadowbanning, fake degradation of QoL, ...)
- eavesdropping is also automated and omnipresent
The real danger of AI or LLMs these days is not they machines will want to kill us but that powerful people will use them to mass-profile everyone and stop any dissent from spreading.
Do you think China will have a revolution and restore democracy? How? How will people organize?
And every currently democratic state will be the same - democracy only needs to fail once and it will be almost impossible to restore.
---
EDIT: Even word of mouth is in danger, sufficiently powerful organizations are or will be able to access microphones near you. Or cameras for lip reading. Again, en-masse, automated by AI.
By the Serbian orthodox Church?
https://images.app.goo.gl/dqHBEnQvy2hc6RHD8
This is them blessing the troops to go kill the Austrians a month later.
It was a blessing for a defensive war. Serbians didn't "go" anywhere to attack Austrians. It was the other way around. But I guess you already know that. Why did you choose to write "to go kill" when they didn't go anywhere?
Sure, after the declaration of war by the state. The Church (depending on which definition you use) sponsored plenty of Crusades too. None of these actions are ‘rebel against the machine’.
Though that does sometimes happen, usually leading to/in the middle of a civil war.
It's not the first time they've done this. They've consistently done it with Gaza. When they do cover it at all, it's only to paint protestors as terrorists. (Yet the France vs Israel sportsball match was played to a three quarters empty stadium because that many people hate Israe now)
True but I think it just shows that this isn't malicious on their part, like journalists and politicians aren't all uniformly intentionally creating and maintaining a broken healthcare system that murders¹ thousands of people and bankrupts an estimated 650k people a year. It's rather the very natural result of their ideology, if the same people had to rebuilt the healthcare system the end result would be identical.
There is a reason why Bernie is universally despised by all of them, this is the shared ideology, its this unspoken thing that every CNN and FOX news anchor, every nypost and nyt journalist, Obama, Bush, Biden and Trump all have in common. That's why this Luigi situation was so eye-opening to many people, it showed the cracks in the system. None of those people will ever be part of the solution, it's all of them collectively we need to overcome.
Honestly, they are just playing the rulebook of "lets not get into regulartory waters". The reality is that no one on either side really gives a shit that much, as proven by recent elections.
An aspect worth considering: everyone with a large investment in civil society is opposed to murderous vigilantism, and while that includes the economic 1%, the fellow CEOs, the Media Industrial Complex*, et al., it also includes a much more boring demographic: simple, decent folk who are opposed to violence and law-breaking.
The status quo behaviour of Stack Exchange and others is pandering, but it’s just as likely to be pandering to mom and pop as it is to Musk and Murdoch.
* tongue-in-cheek
This doesn't take away from your point, but what defines violence? I recently asked this to someone here but unfortunately did not get an answer [1].
Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.literally 1984
Welp. I guess that's it for the credibility of the SE folks, at least as far as I'm concerned.
It's been an incredibly toxic place for years. I tried to ask questions 2 or 3 times only to be chastised by aggressive power users, or to have my posts immediately closed and locked for being "duplicates", even though they were not duplicates.
After the fourth or fifth time I just gave up. It seems like a miserable experience; I can't imagine why anyone would spend time on SE.
This has been my experience since the last 5 years or so. I find the only responses I get to questions are lazy copy pasted.. "we need more info..", the same "power user" doing this on multiple questions even when the question didn't require more info to be provided. And then when you point this out you get a rude response and action. If you do provide the information, they never return. I don't think they have enough qualified people answering questions.
Is it a glitch of my memory or has the headline been edited? I thought the policy on HN was to use original headlines.
Not a glitch! We edited it. But you're slightly mistaken about about the policy. It is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Note that "unless". The second clause is as important as the first!
"The erasure of Luigi Mangione" is a linkbait headline because it drastically inflates the scope of the article. Therefore we changed it, in accordance with the guidelines, using a representative phrase from the article body.
A lot of terminally online people in these comments are dramatics overestimating popular support for Mangione.
It is certainly remarkable that a murderer has such a high approval rating, but he's still not close to being broadly popular.
> "Americans are twice as likely to view Luigi Mangione — who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — very or somewhat unfavorably (43%) than favorably (23%)."
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51189-presidentia...
23% – Favorable/Somewhat Favorable
37% – Don't Know
43% – Unfavorable/Somewhat Unfavorable
That might as well be broad popularity for murder of all things. That don't know number is wild.
I assume it's because there is simply no need to rail against a murderer because the justice system will take care of that, so most of those against ignore the threads, and the few that put their heads up get down voted by the passionate supporters which further discourages any discussion.
I think Mangione is more popular with the public than Stack Exchange.
This actually had the opposite effect on me; I had no clue his support was this acute among young demographics.
Only 29% of those age 18-29 view a murderer unfavorably, whereas 39% view him favorably and 32% aren't sure. It's break even for 30–44.
The support is heavily skewed by older age ranges (just 5% of >65).
If those age ranges were further broken out by political ideology it seems like it would be overwhelming for young liberals, since the all age "very liberal" has 47% support to 30% disapproval.
If your poll is to be believed, it isn't an online phenomenon at all.
I wasn't claiming that sympathy for Mangione is online-only, but rather that being online too much will skew someone's perception of popular opinion.
Based on reddit, for example, you'd assume Mangione has more than 50% support when in reality he's not even close.
For me, it does beg the question of why Luigi Mangione has so much support in online communities. Is this just another facet of the oft-observed tendency for people to break taboos (in this case openly supporting murder) when they feel they are anonymous?
I really respect YouGov, but I'll play devil's advocate: maybe there is a bias in which members of society are willing to break the taboo. Perhaps older Americans are not less likely to support Mangione, but are just less likely to admit it. On the other hand, it is also consistent with younger people making up a larger proportion of social media users.
Trusting the system that's directly under attack to be honest about the effectiveness and popularity of the attacker of the system...
You know in the legends of Robin Hood, Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham also downplay the threat Robin poses to their status quo.
So you think YouGov is part of the same "system" as UnitedHealth?
I have a sneaking suspicion that foreign agents are pushing the hero narrative pretty hard. Trying to encourage copycats causing chaos.
We already know nation states like Russia will shill both sides of any controversial topic in the US, so you're probably right.
I doubt they're influencing this thread though.
Probably countries with working healthcare systems.
People really need to stop contributing to StackOverflow.
I wonder what will be the next move to airbrush the guy from history. Will Nintendo change the name of Mario's brother?
Is there some entity that enforces Creative Commons? That seems a blatant violation of CC-BY-SA by Stack Overflow.
I can't comprehend the reason for account deletions. I'm sure there are plenty of convicted killers or even worse people with accounts. Why would that matter? It has nothing to do with the service these sites provide.
If you're handsome, even if you kill someone, you're still a hero.
Actually it's the opposite. If he were "ugly" by society's standards, the difference is that Corpgov would have an easier time burying this because they could rely on programming people through generational propaganda that ugly people are less deserving of compassion or are more likely to be crazy or creepy. Instead, they're having trouble tarnishing his public perception and it scares them.
Look no further than what Christians did to Jesus' image to see the effect in reverse. Now we're allowing the murder of babies and children in Jesus' hometown, because they don't look like the common Western perception of beauty, an effeminate white guy.
Let's leave physical appearance or other trite observations out of it and have a real conversation about the issue at hand.
> Actually it's the opposite [...], they're having trouble tarnishing his public perception and it scares them.
Isn't this basically the same thing I wrote?
Your claim was that him being handsome absolves him of his crime to the public.
My claim is that him being handsome only prevents Corpgov from successfully employing their typical associative propaganda. It's still up to the public to judge him as they see fit.
And the public treats Luigi like he's a new Jesus. That's why Corpgov has a tougher time burying the case. Because he's handsome.
Is the public treating him like Jesus? Regardless, yes, that's what I'm saying, it's inverted.
Given how many fans some serial killers have, that may be the case. But I'd argue that's not what's really going on with Luigi.
I know that there is some kind of background story with motives like revenge, justice, etc, but I don't buy it.
Example: Without googling, do you know who was Thomas Matthew? Why nobody remembers him?
...Crooks? IE Trump Shooter? Or is there a different person just named Thomas Matthew? I'd think there's (a) a significant difference when someone fails, (b) more unity in dislike of the insurance system, and (c) Crooks is weirdly inscrutable in terms of motivation.
Yeah, him. Well, he was killed, hard to perform questioning in his current state. I bet he would be used as a martyr if he would have a prettier face. I bet if the roles were reversed, Luigi would try to kill Trump and failed, and Crooks would successfully shoot the CEO, all attention would still go to Luigi.
But yeah, this is cheap talk, I don't have any proof obviously.
I agree that there's like a true crime fangirl sort that probably goes for Luigi either way just on looks maybe, but I don't think that would really be more than a marginal difference. There are still a fair variety Christopher Dorner shirts in circulation, for example, and he's no model, despite police issues being more divisive than insurance and the whole situation being kind of murky.
You obviously haven't driven behind my Camry (sporting a Luigi plushdoll and bumper sticker proclaiming "PATRON SAINT OF DENIALS").
Nothing but mostly smiles... except from "dad" who warns police might hassle me.
"I'm forty, pops;" I'm now also old, too.
For context, I have zero dependents, dropped out of medical school pre-ACA, and do not carry health insurance (USA, boo!).
tl;dr it seems your attribution on StackOverflow can be stripped without providing any reason.
There may be several good reasons (eg to avoid spending time on cleaning up unrelated to SO issues due to the notoriety of the account) but none was communicated to the community.
The assumption here I'm seeing by some of the naysayers that US Law in 2025 is a good arbiter of ethics, morality or justness is something I'd like to touch on.
I wonder if those people also believe this to have been the case before Civil Rights.
Or even in the slavery era. Slaveholders were just law-abiding citizens! Slaves trying to escape were the scoundrels!
If not, then surely you can see how there's no way that "back then, the execution of US law was awful, but now in 2025, it's wonderful and should always be treated as delivering justice". Come on now. It's just as flawed now, just in different ways.
Which means just like in the Jim Crow era, you can't use the US execution of law as an arbiter of justness, ethics, morals, and what will improve society. Absolutely not.
Everyone who has such tendencies certainly has people they look up to who are murderers. They've definitely voted for them.
Lifted from another comment [1]:
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
I cannot agree with the quote for 2 reasons:
1) That person has respect for justice, not law. These are separate concepts and people need to see them as separate.
2) It reinforces the view that by making yourself a victim (of the state), you are somehow more virtuous than if you avoid punishment. That only works in societies with sufficient inclination towards justice. It will not work under authoritarian rule like Russia or China, you will just end up in a gulag freezing to death or on your town square bleeding out.
Whether an action was just is determines solely by what preceded it, not by what followed. Making yourself a victim is just a practical way to attract more people's attention.
Practicality and morality are as separate as legality and morality.
> 1) That person has respect for justice, not law.
Willingly accepting the penalty means having respect for the actual law that establishes the penalty.
Fair point, i understood the quote differently (as promoting respect for the law even if unjust)
> It will not work under authoritarian rule like Russia or China, you will just end up in a gulag freezing to death or on your town square bleeding out . . . Making yourself a victim is just a practical way to attract more people's attention
Allow me to quote from the Wikipedia page of the Arab Spring:
> The catalyst for the escalation of protests was the self-immolation of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi. Unable to find work and selling fruit at a roadside stand, Bouazizi had his wares confiscated by a municipal inspector on 17 December 2010. An hour later he doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire. His death on 4 January 2011 brought together various groups dissatisfied with the existing system, including many unemployed persons, political and human rights activists, labor and trade unionists, students, professors, lawyers, and others to begin the Tunisian Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
Did Bouazizi make himself a victim, or a martyr? The only reason the Arab Spring fizzled out was due to directed intelligence and military operations supported by the US and Western regime, not more authoritarian regimes like Russia or China.
I have the highest possible respect for self-made martyrs around a good cause. Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, etc. all pushed the needle and eventually paved the way for both white and non-white citizens to share in our nation's bounty.
Is the civil rights movement finished? No. We need more martyrs.
> The only reason the Arab Spring fizzled out was due to directed intelligence and military operations supported by the US and Western regime
Fizzled out due to the same US/Western countries that bombed the pre-existing governments in Libya and Syria?
There are a lot of bad actors in the world, not just the US and Western empires. You can find honest politicians today, but you'd be hard-pressed to find an honest government anywhere.
Solidarity is one of our most important weapons against the degeneration of political systems, and the solidarity of the Arab Spring is what scared multiple governments into suppressing it.
Similarly, Corpgov is not all that scared by the actions of Mangione. What scares them is the public solidarity behind him.
Thanks for mentioning Claudette Colvin.
That is not how I read the quote at all: the respect for the law stems from the understanding that the only meaningful way to change common law is to challenge it, and defend your actions in court.
New just laws are created by injustice. Unjust laws are repealed by injustice. The only vote that matters at the end of the day is the vote cast in lead.
> Come on now. It's just as flawed now, just in different ways
I'm not from the US so I try to avoid having strong opinions on US issues... But is it really just as flawed now? I mean, there's no slavery anymore, there's women's rights, and all races are legally equal (even if in reality it doesn't work out that way). This seems like an improvement, despite massive flaws still existing.
Just to be clear, the answer to this doesn't impact the point I was making, so it doesn't matter for the topic at hand.
But entertaining the question:
Who says there haven't been new flaws introduced since? Note how I mentioned the execution of the laws specifically. There was, for instance, a point in time where anti-trust laws were upheld much more vigilantly, despite the same law being on the books. Laws only matter if the people tasked with upholding them choose to do so. And their effect changes immensely depending on how the people who apply them, interpret them. Both can and do drastically change over time.
But even if you argue that modern laws as executed in practice are "less flawed" than in a certain point in the past, it doesn't really make any difference. Given that reasoning, one would argue that at the time of civil rights it was already less flawed than at the time of slavery. Yet you'd probably agree the civil rights movement was necessary, the laws at the time were flawed, and the vast majority of cases of breaking those laws to further the movement was the right thing to do and positively impacted society.
Now let's talk about semantics. Is a tshirt dyed in RGB (255,0,0) just as red as one dyed in (254,1,0)? There isn't a correct answer to this. When viewed by a person, without knowing the RGB values, they will say both tshirts are entirely red, without one being redder than the other. If you put a gun to their head asking "which one is redder", they'd pick one at random at best. So are they just as red? To a human they absolutely are, to a computer they aren't, but we're here discussing among humans - hopefully!
> Who says there haven't been new flaws introduced since
I'm absolutely sure there have been new flaws introduced since the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.
My point is that those flaws don't seem, to me, to be just as bad as slavery.
A charitable interpretation of OP's statement would be:
You cannot really use lawfulness as a measure of morality, and this is true now just as much as it was back then.
Or a different take could be: moral progress happens all the time, but the law often lags behind, so the delta between our moral ideas and the law is just as big as it has been in the past.
Reminder that slavery is not banned in case you have comitted a crime in the US. See the constitution.
[flagged]
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how bad someone else is or you feel he is.
You may not owe schizo psychos better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
You are correct and I've adjusted the comment since it is not delete-able afaict.
Depending on your situation there is a chance you absolutely should inherit no revolutionary spirit - ie. if you are a part of 1) a wealthy family or 2) the PE game - given this is HN, there is a good chance of that being the case.
I doubt anything would give you a "revolutionary spirit." As such a spirit is almost necessarily violent if it's serious at all.
It's well into January, meaning it's time we stop talking about Luigi and take down the tree. We can start back up again next November. I mean, he is effectively the modern Krampus for our world of badly behaving CEOs, right?
It's a shame there is no context for who Mangione even is, at the linked post or here. People are expected to just know. But not a word. Silence.
Sloppy work, terrible writing.
Nobody could spare one minute to write, "Mangione was charged in the case of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson", or something like it? Is it taboo to even use the words murder or assassination in this context?
This isn’t a news article, it’s someone’s blog. They’re under no obligation to write background for the off chance that their post gets aggregated for an unfamiliar audience.
Don't get me started on articles which dissect the latest tweet by Donald Trump without adding context like "former and upcoming President of the U.S." for those who aren't chronically online.
/s because Poe's Law (Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views)
Seems prudent on the part of Stack Overflow to prevent it from turning into another politicized forum.
I would bet Ross Ulbricht would be wiped clean if he became anywhere near as notorious by name/username.
Stack Overflow could have removed his content. Instead they chose to keep his content and just remove the attribution.
Here is my response to the post on Hacker News.
https://substack.evancarroll.com/p/hacker-news-where-the-bil...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22159031
> HN has a an automated simple proxy for flame-war detection. One characteristic of flame-wars is that people get into a to'n'fro over the issue, and the number of comments balloons. However, no one else is really interested, so they don't upvote the submisson, and the participants can only upvote a submission once, so the number of points doesn't increase.
> Result is that a simply proxy for a flame-war is the number of comments on a submission out-stripping the number of votes.
> A side-effect of that is that if there's a mildly interesting submission that lots of people comment on, but very few upvote, then the flame-war penalty will be triggered, and the submission will sink like a stone, never to be seen again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089
> Scott and I get emailed every time that software trips so we can quickly look at which threads are being penalized and reverse the penalty when it isn't helpful. The only time we don't do that is when we're sleeping.
> We tend to call it the 'overheated discussion detector' these days, since it detects more than flamewars. However, that phrase is more awkward to say than 'flamewar detector'. If anyone can come up with a better name I'd love to hear it.
> Turning that software off is not an option, because HN would be overwhelmingly more dominated by flamewars if we did so. It's not primarily the individual threads that I fear, it's the systemic effects of having them be more dominant. HN exists most of all for the quieter, deeper, more out-of-the-way finds that would be the first to get excluded under such a regime. That would really be an existential risk to HN.
> Incidentally, that last point generalizes. When people complain that we don't do X, for some obvious X, it isn't because we don't value X (e.g. free speech or whatnot). It's because we're worried about systemic effects.
---
Quite simply said, the post and comments got overheated and looked like flame wars and so was pushed off the to have it cool down.
I think your anger is deeply misplaced.
Profiteering on the lives of other people is morally repugnant so it's very natural for human beings to be angry at people who are directly involved and thus bear some responsibility.
The anger is natural but fundamentally it misses the mark.
Given the mechanism of american healthcare there will be millions of denied claims even if all the profit of the insurance would be reinvested and all employees including the CEO would be volunteering.
While that would absolve the CEO from the moral responsibility of profiteering it wouldn't improve the lives of the many people whose claims must be denied because of the mechanics of the heath insurance system.
Given the current system, the insurances must stay afloat and if the bankrupt that will affect even more lives.
Furthermore, hospitals have a different set of incentives which are not aligned with reducing the pressure on the healthcare insurer.
You could say "but the government should not allow that and it should just bail out the heath care insurers that go bankrupt in order to save lives". Yes you could say that.
Would they? Should somebody try that? Should some CEO of a major healthcare insurer be brave enough and bankrupt the company they're supposed to manage just to force the hand of the government to fundamentally prove that healthcare is a public good?
Should a CEO be shot for not risking everything to force the government hand?
Or should a politician get shot because they didn't improve health care when they could have? Which politician? Every politician? Only the top level ones? How time we would give them to make the change? One term? Two terms? Punish them when they retire after not having fixed the healthcare?
Despite all the power that the people have on paper, democracies are only as good as the public discourse that unfolds in such democracies.
Do we really think that we can solve problems as complex as healthcare by shorting at whoever our ape brain thinks is the most proximal responsible person?
It's not like the world isn't full of examples of countries where healthcare is approached as a public good from the ground up. There are plenty of places where you also have private healthcare on top of that.
Why don't you just take the opportunity to push for actual reform. Siding with a murderer is not going to help your cause.
Right, the problem is we have been voting, donating, and protesting since occupy. I need things to change within the time that I am alive. If anything things have regressed, and some really strong feelings (I know this is strange to the beep boops of HN! It's so irrational!) are being expressed right now because people are at their end.
Irrational is tens of thousands / hundreds of thousands over time of Americans losing the game over health issues. What I am getting at here, is if the model is to "let the unproductive ones die" then say so, and we can accelerate getting rid of insurance.
If you're a turbo capitalist, then the real issue is price discovery, insurance companies create false price signal due to the variance in payouts and hospitals mask their pricing. We can blame both sides maybe, but it is clear insurance has some explaining to do before we completely eliminate them. They do not need a third boat. I need to keep my house.
I will also anecdotally mention that NO ONE that I know is against Luigi. Not even once has someone said "well that guy had a wife and kids". It's not personal, it's not about him. In their view, it is a wakeup call because no amount of protesting, voting, and donating has gotten progress in the direction they want in their life time. Not even a sliver of a debate among about 5 different friend groups, 4 of which are not in tech.
Your concerns and your rage are legitimate and I understand them.
But you're also privileged to not be born and live in a country that has been torn by civil war. You're very lucky to live in a part of the world where however hard it's still possible to enact positive change in a civil and peaceful way. Don't throw that away. A violent society is not one that will bring the social justice that you seek.
The public discourse in your country is highly divided and it's no wonder that yelling harder into each ones echo chamber is not achieving any effect. Adding gasoline and sparks to all that is not going to improve the situation but on the contrary its going to entrench the differences even more.
A lot of progress has been achieved in the 70s via true peaceful movements. I don't know why that spirit no longer seems to resonate with people nowadays who just want to flush the baby with the bathwater.
I have the sense that social media is key ingredient in that. The asymmetry of Brandolini's law makes it easy for trolls to drown any peaceful messages and algorithms amplify people's rage.
On the contrary, it's an issue that unites people who would otherwise be political adversaries.
I think people in this thread desperately want there to be less support for Luigi's actions than there really is.
I think you can reach more people if you condemn violence and also condemn injustice.
It's not a zero sum game. It's not either be with Luigi or be with healthcare CEOs. That's insane. Let's not fall into this trap. This mindset will necessarily reduce the reach and thus the possibilities for fixing the issue that's plaguing so many people.
My mindset is that people are tired of the way shit is and are presently more open to violence-based solutions than others are comfortable with. It's a thing that happened, and I don't feel the need to advocate for an opinion, but I do feel a need to inform people that now is their chance to fix it before violence-based solutions are much more common.
Maybe a more concrete example: the peaceful process in the USA resulted in people toasting from a high rise over protestors. Corporations have essentially said "make me", knowing in "a legal process" they will win. Winning to them meaning: you sell your house, liquidate your retirement assets, lose your savings aka better luck next life.
It is that bad in the USA right now, about half the people I know have had a medical bill issue in the five figures between 20-30yo, which stunted their economic growth aka no house, or kids. At least one with a six figure bill. Rip bro.
There is no yelling, the fact is that a corporation can take my surplus at will if I fall off the tightrope here in the USA. That is an existential threat. The reason is so someone like UHC CEO can buy another car, or another boat. You may disagree, but remember, the people we are talking to live check to check or have less than 10k in the bank, working 40+ hours in a normal human job (aka not software).
The discourse is divided on this in the news, but I assure you from corper to bar back in my town there is a sense of "well he had it coming" when understanding the context. Pretty sad right? A "make me" moment made manifest.
The spirit does not resonate because culturally in USA, the peaceful movement is for suckers. Protesting? Suckers. Donating? Suckers. Voting? Also suckers. The end result is the exploiters win because they do not think they have to play, and nothing meaningful happens in your life time. They do not have to negotiate anything, they win via lobby, laws, money, power.
Rage implies hysteria, righteous indignation is a much sharper description, and many people have this axe to grind either for personal or ethical reasons.
Both things can be true, don't give me the war torn country reason. You're right that the peaceful system is better than the alternative, however when the peaceful system can economically destroy you, what is the difference?