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57k and climbing.
That's compared to 2.3k "sad" and 1.9k "care" reactions.
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.
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.
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.
Then we change the laws, because it's completely impossible to hold them accountable when they're killed before a trial could ever occur. Now all his ill-gotten earnings will be given to his already-wealthy family instead of distributed back to his victims and surviving families of his victims.
The rich getting richer isn't justice.
WTF are you on about? Being killed is the ultimate form of being held accountable.
Not in the slightest. He's free. His money is safe and secure. He won't spend a day behind bars. Just because he stops breathing doesn't rectify his wrongdoing. There are still victims of his actions right now who would probably love to have seen him face a trial and be forced to pay back everything he took.
He felt like... what... A minute of pain, before his lights faded out? How the fuck is that justice? If I oversaw the deaths of thousands of innocent people, I could only hope to be so lucky that being shot in the street is the worst punishment I'd face.
Not to rain on your parade, but how do we do that when they're the ones "lobbying" (aka paying) for the laws to be changed? Money speaks, and they can spend a ridiculously large quantity of it without worrying about making ends meet.
Sounds like killing a healthcare CEO isn't the right action for the type of change people are wanting.
It’s not the type of change people want. However if violent retribution is all that’s on offer it makes perfect sense that someone would eventually take that deal and that people would celebrate it.
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.
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.
No, he's dead. He's free from any prosecution, never having to answer for his actions, and all his money gets to stay in his family. Literally the easiest way out, and the only people who benefit from this are people who are already wealthy off of health insurance CEO money.
No, it's a warning to corpos to start hiring security. That's the only change that will happen. They're just going to make themselves harder to reach. Vigilantism rarely ever results in any meaningful change, and even more rarely does that change benefit the victims.
More security won't save them. For a time it will stop these vigilante style attacks, but if that outlet is cut off eventually you'll see large mobs leading the attacks instead and security won't be able or willing to stop them.
Death is the ultimate consequence. His family has kept the wealth for now, but if it gets bad enough that won't last either.
Your problem is you're taking the principled stance of how a fair system should work, but we're well past that point now. The system is broken and rigged. Desperate people when given the choice between lashing out randomly at those responsible or wasting time and energy playing rigged games that don't achieve anything will opt to lash out even if it doesn't accomplish much in the long term.
Things are at their breaking point and it's going to get messy. These sorts of things are just the first cracks along the stress points. If significant changes to reduce peoples frustrations aren't made it will lead to significantly more violent events like this.
The rich should be very scarred right now because there's absolutely nothing more dangerous than a group of people backed into a corner and desperate.
Should whoever did this have done this? No. But by the same token most people aren't going to be particularly bothered by this either. A complete scumbag got murdered and considering the society we're living in now that's literally the only bad thing that could have happened to him. He was never in any danger of facing consequences from his actions through legal means.
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.
You're just mad it wasn't done how you like it. Think about that.
Uhh yeah. No shit? The way I would've wanted it done is one in which the victims get something out of it. Now they get nothing.
They get revenge. Maybe you can't eat it nor you can use it as a medicine to cure your illness, but you can use it to sleep and live better knowing that, one way or another, for some of these people the clock is ticking.
I, at least, have slept much better after receiving this news. And I'm not even American, just a simple European hoping that this trend will be imported from America like many others before it.
(I say imported but we actually are far more advanced than American in this matter. During the 70s there were a lot of terror groups fighting for a better society and what did we get? Social security, a fairer economy and personal rights such as divorce and abortion. After the 90s the situation was so good that these groups disappeared and in 30 years time we're back at where we were before the terror season. Maybe it's time to get back to where our fathers left us)
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.
Here are the latest numbers. I logged into Facebook to contribute.
Damn, put Kyra on blast for no reason lol
not enough?