That is astonishing. Imagine being this guy’s grieving family, and finding out that 9 out of ten people are going out of their way to let everyone know they’re glad he’s dead.
Probably, in their minds, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I’m not trying to defend him, since he clearly was doing something wrong, and the world is almost certainly a better place without him in it. But holy shit. Even when Nixon died, a lot of people tried to come up with nice things to say about him.
Even when Nixon died, a lot of people tried to come up with nice things to say about him.
They shouldn’t have. Simply being dead doesn’t make you a good person and washing away crimes because they’re beyond personal shaming ignores the benefits of establishing that you can do things that will forever taint your name and legacy.
I said the same thing when Rush Limbaugh died. If you never did one thing to make me respect you when you were alive, suddenly being dead isn’t going to change your score. It’s just going to make you dead and hated instead of alive and hated.
I dunno. I think as a dead person he will hurt a lot less people than he did while he was alive. So that’s a personal Improvement for him. But you know what they say. Never speak ill of the dead. He’s dead, good.
Y’know to an extent I get the whole “but he was a father and husband!” angle
But how many thousands of parents and children died so this man could get another yacht? How many of them died slow, painful deaths from awful illnesses that could have been cured or prevented while he didn’t? He, along with all his executive friends, was a mass murdering psychopath. There is zero moral difference between committing murder with a gun and committing murder with the stroke of a pen.
Completely agree, zero sympathy in my case for anyone in this man’s orbit. That’s not to say I find them culpable, I simply do not care, at all, I find it irrational to the point of absurd to care about them. This man’s actions are some of the vilest crimes against human life, inflicting so much misery and death on so many, purely for the basest greed. People often say the fight against the insurance companies is worse than the (terminal!!) cancer. Let that sink in.
Meanwhile, this guy’s family led, and will lead, lives of extreme privilege, forever.
Lemme put it this way - if there’s any kind of cosmic balance sheet, even be it just the pedestrian moral reckoning of we humans…the limited suffering of anyone in this guy’s life as a result of this…in comparison, I mean it’s a fuckin rounding error. Nothing.
Another thing is how most of media talks about his wife and kids, failing to mention the wife was estranged and they already were separated. The kids are adults too, so the Picture they paint is highly misleading. The reason seems. … manipulative.
Huh, weird! It’s almost like they see some value in trying to rehab the least sympathetic crime victim of maybe our whole lives!
They damn sure aren’t telling stories people want to hear, we’ve echoed pretty loudly, from about every corner of the Internet, something to the tune of “lmao fuck that guy”.
Apparently he and his wife have been living in separate houses, so there was some mind of problem there. The ones I feel sorry for are the kids. They look to be mid-to-late teens, so they likely have a poor understanding of exactly what their dad’s company did, and they certainly have no standing to change things - and they’re the perfect age to be spending lots of their time on the internet.
They wake up one morning and their dad’s been shot and literally the entire internet is celebrating? That’s absolutely brutal.
Yeah, I thought about that after I said it. It would stand to reason if his sociopathy in business also corresponded with some sociopathy in his personal life and people around him had experience with it.
Imagine being this guy’s grieving family, and finding out that 9 out of ten people are going out of their way to let everyone know they’re glad he’s dead.
Do you give this same consideration to other people who get shot? What if he had been the kingpin of a drug cartel - would you still be saying ‘Oh, won’t anyone think of his family!’ if the police raided his meth lab and he got shot?
The example I prefer is Bin Ladin. The United CEO killed more people than Bin Ladin. Bin Ladin was just a drama queen and made his killings a lot flashier. Does someone care so much for the rule of law, on such a deep principled level, that they objected to Bin Ladin’s extrajudicial execution? If there is such a rare and gentle soul that they were willing to be offended that even Bin Ladin didn’t get a fair trial, then I will be willing to listen to that person’s objections to celebrating a murderous CEO’s death.
Personally, I am not that good a person. And I am glad that both Bin Ladin and this CEO are out of the picture.
The fact that you only remember one of their names should tell you that you don’t have a valid comparison. If Thompson was as bad as Bin Laden, you’d remember it.
$10 says you and everybody else in this thread didn’t even know this dude existed 2 days ago.
Everyone knows Bin Laden because his name was plastered all over the news for months on end. People have been angry at United Healthcare for a lot longer but it was always a faceless corporation. This event has put a name to that corporation and a focus for that anger. If the media covers this like they did Bin Laden I guarantee everyone would remember his name.
If Thompson was as bad as Bin Laden, we’d have been talking about him already. It’s not like United anonymized their CEO position or anything, there’s been a face to the corp the whole time. It’s just that nobody cared.
I get that people are glad he’s dead. But be realistic; he’s a piece of shit, but he’s not fucking Bin Laden. Gross indifference to suffering patients and flying planes into buildings are both despicable acts, but on two completely different orders of magnitude.
See, that’s an additional problem. Companies like this absolutely kill significantly more people than one religious cult leading terrorist did. And the CEOs, and C-Suite as a whole, are to blame for those deaths.
It’s like theft, everyone is scared of their house being broken into, and the media loves pointing to street criminals as the real person to watch out for. But, by and large corporations steal significantly more from their own employees (wage theft) than street criminals ever do, not to say anything about white collar criminals and how much they steal and how absolutely bonkers Justice is biased there too in comparisons to street criminals.
The reason Joe CEO isn’t a recognizable name is because corporations don’t want to demonize their own, they want you afraid of your desperate neighbors and those they’ve ‘other’d (minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+), not the rich. The media will always make you afraid of the others and the lower class, instead of the ones that are actually killing you; the %1.
Companies like this absolutely kill significantly more people than one religious cult leading terrorist did. And the CEOs, and C-Suite as a whole, are to blame for those deaths.
Which is why we should hold them accountable, instead of offering them an easy way out of facing any consequences like this numbnuts vigilante did by granting Thompson a swift and early death.
The whole point of a corporation is so that the people involved don’t get held personally responsible when bad things happen. It’s virtually impossible for them to be held accountable with our current laws.
You can’t win against the corporations when they own the politicians and courts and their behavior is ignored or condoned. Thats why this is absolutely a moment where the C-suites will see some fear of consequences.
How many people do you need to kill before you’re worse than Bin Laden? At least Bin Laden had legitimate grievances with (some of) his victims; this guy was killing thousands every year for money.
If being against vigilante killers puts me on the “wrong side”, then go ahead and start putting up a fence along that line, because I’m not crossing over it.
Thompson was a piece of shit, but now he’s never going to face consequences. Maybe you’re okay with that, but I’m not. I’d rather see him rotting in a cell while all his belongings are stripped from him and given back to his victims. Giving him a get-out-of-jail-free card is the farthest thing from justice, IMO.
I’d rather see him rotting in a cell while all his belongings are stripped from him and given back to his victims.
That was never even an option. Everything he did was legal. It was completely morally bankrupt, but there aren’t any crimes to pull him in on, nor was there anyone who would do it. The system is broken.
He did face the consequences, but his fellow executives who were just as much to blame haven’t and likely never will. This isn’t a solution, but it is a warning sign that things are approaching a tipping point. Historically when things get this bad and the “peasants” start pulling out guillotines and scaffolds things have gone very badly for both the ruling class and many of the ones leading the executions, but in the wake of such things there is some improvement. This is a significant warning to politicians and lawmakers that if they don’t do something soon to address the rampant corporate greed and rapaciousness this sort of thing will start becoming more common and eventually the mob will be coming for them as well.
$10 says you and everybody else in this thread didn’t even know this dude existed 2 days ago.
You’re gonna lose that bet. As soon as my mom started working for UHC I knew which evil fuck was the CEO of the worst healthcare insurer in the country. Their own employees refer to it as the Walmart of healthcare, and it’s lived up to that description in every comparison imaginable. I’m not surprised at all that someone decided to take doing something about it into their own hands.
The problem with capitalism is there are thousands of bin ladens running around and we’re not aware of the misery they inflict, because it’s normal. This guy is a hero for reminding us of that.
I think what I meant is pretty self-evident. Read it again, and lose the knee-jerk reaction where you assume that I was saying, “Oh, won’t anyone think of his family!” I was just saying it was a mindfuck.
Probably, if the head of the cartel got shot, his family would be shattered but they wouldn’t think it was shocking to hear everyone cheering for it. This guy lives in a world where he thinks he’s doing everything he’s supposed to be doing. He and his family probably thought he was really doing good, and everyone else should be getting on his level. Maybe not. I have no idea. It was just a mindfuck for me thinking about it.
That is astonishing. Imagine being this guy’s grieving family, and finding out that 9 out of ten people are going out of their way to let everyone know they’re glad he’s dead.
Probably, in their minds, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I’m not trying to defend him, since he clearly was doing something wrong, and the world is almost certainly a better place without him in it. But holy shit. Even when Nixon died, a lot of people tried to come up with nice things to say about him.
They shouldn’t have. Simply being dead doesn’t make you a good person and washing away crimes because they’re beyond personal shaming ignores the benefits of establishing that you can do things that will forever taint your name and legacy.
I said the same thing when Rush Limbaugh died. If you never did one thing to make me respect you when you were alive, suddenly being dead isn’t going to change your score. It’s just going to make you dead and hated instead of alive and hated.
I dunno. I think as a dead person he will hurt a lot less people than he did while he was alive. So that’s a personal Improvement for him. But you know what they say. Never speak ill of the dead. He’s dead, good.
Y’know to an extent I get the whole “but he was a father and husband!” angle
But how many thousands of parents and children died so this man could get another yacht? How many of them died slow, painful deaths from awful illnesses that could have been cured or prevented while he didn’t? He, along with all his executive friends, was a mass murdering psychopath. There is zero moral difference between committing murder with a gun and committing murder with the stroke of a pen.
Completely agree, zero sympathy in my case for anyone in this man’s orbit. That’s not to say I find them culpable, I simply do not care, at all, I find it irrational to the point of absurd to care about them. This man’s actions are some of the vilest crimes against human life, inflicting so much misery and death on so many, purely for the basest greed. People often say the fight against the insurance companies is worse than the (terminal!!) cancer. Let that sink in.
Meanwhile, this guy’s family led, and will lead, lives of extreme privilege, forever.
Lemme put it this way - if there’s any kind of cosmic balance sheet, even be it just the pedestrian moral reckoning of we humans…the limited suffering of anyone in this guy’s life as a result of this…in comparison, I mean it’s a fuckin rounding error. Nothing.
Another thing is how most of media talks about his wife and kids, failing to mention the wife was estranged and they already were separated. The kids are adults too, so the Picture they paint is highly misleading. The reason seems. … manipulative.
Huh, weird! It’s almost like they see some value in trying to rehab the least sympathetic crime victim of maybe our whole lives!
They damn sure aren’t telling stories people want to hear, we’ve echoed pretty loudly, from about every corner of the Internet, something to the tune of “lmao fuck that guy”.
Apparently he and his wife have been living in separate houses, so there was some mind of problem there. The ones I feel sorry for are the kids. They look to be mid-to-late teens, so they likely have a poor understanding of exactly what their dad’s company did, and they certainly have no standing to change things - and they’re the perfect age to be spending lots of their time on the internet.
They wake up one morning and their dad’s been shot and literally the entire internet is celebrating? That’s absolutely brutal.
Imagine instead if they’re like “nah, yeah, I get it, I get what you mean, he was kind of a dick”
lol
Ted Cruz’s kids hate him. There’s some good videos of them doing it at functions in public.
Yeah, I thought about that after I said it. It would stand to reason if his sociopathy in business also corresponded with some sociopathy in his personal life and people around him had experience with it.
Do you give this same consideration to other people who get shot? What if he had been the kingpin of a drug cartel - would you still be saying ‘Oh, won’t anyone think of his family!’ if the police raided his meth lab and he got shot?
The example I prefer is Bin Ladin. The United CEO killed more people than Bin Ladin. Bin Ladin was just a drama queen and made his killings a lot flashier. Does someone care so much for the rule of law, on such a deep principled level, that they objected to Bin Ladin’s extrajudicial execution? If there is such a rare and gentle soul that they were willing to be offended that even Bin Ladin didn’t get a fair trial, then I will be willing to listen to that person’s objections to celebrating a murderous CEO’s death.
Personally, I am not that good a person. And I am glad that both Bin Ladin and this CEO are out of the picture.
The fact that you only remember one of their names should tell you that you don’t have a valid comparison. If Thompson was as bad as Bin Laden, you’d remember it.
$10 says you and everybody else in this thread didn’t even know this dude existed 2 days ago.
Everyone knows Bin Laden because his name was plastered all over the news for months on end. People have been angry at United Healthcare for a lot longer but it was always a faceless corporation. This event has put a name to that corporation and a focus for that anger. If the media covers this like they did Bin Laden I guarantee everyone would remember his name.
If Thompson was as bad as Bin Laden, we’d have been talking about him already. It’s not like United anonymized their CEO position or anything, there’s been a face to the corp the whole time. It’s just that nobody cared.
I get that people are glad he’s dead. But be realistic; he’s a piece of shit, but he’s not fucking Bin Laden. Gross indifference to suffering patients and flying planes into buildings are both despicable acts, but on two completely different orders of magnitude.
See, that’s an additional problem. Companies like this absolutely kill significantly more people than one religious cult leading terrorist did. And the CEOs, and C-Suite as a whole, are to blame for those deaths.
It’s like theft, everyone is scared of their house being broken into, and the media loves pointing to street criminals as the real person to watch out for. But, by and large corporations steal significantly more from their own employees (wage theft) than street criminals ever do, not to say anything about white collar criminals and how much they steal and how absolutely bonkers Justice is biased there too in comparisons to street criminals.
The reason Joe CEO isn’t a recognizable name is because corporations don’t want to demonize their own, they want you afraid of your desperate neighbors and those they’ve ‘other’d (minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+), not the rich. The media will always make you afraid of the others and the lower class, instead of the ones that are actually killing you; the %1.
Which is why we should hold them accountable, instead of offering them an easy way out of facing any consequences like this numbnuts vigilante did by granting Thompson a swift and early death.
The whole point of a corporation is so that the people involved don’t get held personally responsible when bad things happen. It’s virtually impossible for them to be held accountable with our current laws.
You can’t win against the corporations when they own the politicians and courts and their behavior is ignored or condoned. Thats why this is absolutely a moment where the C-suites will see some fear of consequences.
Not being notorious doesn’t make somebody not a bad person.
I’m not defending Thompson. I’m just saying that comparing him to Bin Laden is asinine.
How many people do you need to kill before you’re worse than Bin Laden? At least Bin Laden had legitimate grievances with (some of) his victims; this guy was killing thousands every year for money.
You’ve been on the wrong side of this thread a lot. Perhaps you have a lot to reconsider. You strike me as a kapo.
If being against vigilante killers puts me on the “wrong side”, then go ahead and start putting up a fence along that line, because I’m not crossing over it.
Thompson was a piece of shit, but now he’s never going to face consequences. Maybe you’re okay with that, but I’m not. I’d rather see him rotting in a cell while all his belongings are stripped from him and given back to his victims. Giving him a get-out-of-jail-free card is the farthest thing from justice, IMO.
That was never even an option. Everything he did was legal. It was completely morally bankrupt, but there aren’t any crimes to pull him in on, nor was there anyone who would do it. The system is broken.
He did face the consequences, but his fellow executives who were just as much to blame haven’t and likely never will. This isn’t a solution, but it is a warning sign that things are approaching a tipping point. Historically when things get this bad and the “peasants” start pulling out guillotines and scaffolds things have gone very badly for both the ruling class and many of the ones leading the executions, but in the wake of such things there is some improvement. This is a significant warning to politicians and lawmakers that if they don’t do something soon to address the rampant corporate greed and rapaciousness this sort of thing will start becoming more common and eventually the mob will be coming for them as well.
You’re just mad it wasn’t done how you like it. Think about that.
You’re gonna lose that bet. As soon as my mom started working for UHC I knew which evil fuck was the CEO of the worst healthcare insurer in the country. Their own employees refer to it as the Walmart of healthcare, and it’s lived up to that description in every comparison imaginable. I’m not surprised at all that someone decided to take doing something about it into their own hands.
The problem with capitalism is there are thousands of bin ladens running around and we’re not aware of the misery they inflict, because it’s normal. This guy is a hero for reminding us of that.
I think what I meant is pretty self-evident. Read it again, and lose the knee-jerk reaction where you assume that I was saying, “Oh, won’t anyone think of his family!” I was just saying it was a mindfuck.
Probably, if the head of the cartel got shot, his family would be shattered but they wouldn’t think it was shocking to hear everyone cheering for it. This guy lives in a world where he thinks he’s doing everything he’s supposed to be doing. He and his family probably thought he was really doing good, and everyone else should be getting on his level. Maybe not. I have no idea. It was just a mindfuck for me thinking about it.
Big pharma is next.
His family knew this already. They just didnt care. Obscene wealth will do that to a person.
They were enjoying the fruits of his actions, so I have no sympathy for them.
In all likelihood, they hated him too.