This is bridging off the Charlie Kirk thread because I thought it was actually strange that we didn’t have a thread on this topic, or even a single post acknowledging the existence of Brian Thompson or Luigi Mangione until that thread. It happened a while ago now, but the trial is ongoing and the whole affair is something worth talking about, so better late than never.
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In October, another diary entry reads, “1.5 months. The investor conference is a true windfall. It embodies everything wrong with our health system, and-most importantly-the message becomes self-evident. The problem with most revolutionary acts is that the message is lost on normies.” He then goes on to explain his reasoning for not targeting the health care industry through a bombing, writing that “innocent” lives would be unaffected by his attack.
. . .
Mangione allegedly gunned down Thompson on a busy sidewalk as Thompson walked toward a Manhattan hotel hosting his company’s investors’ conference, authorities said. The suspect appeared to be driven by anger against the health insurance industry and against “corporate greed” as a whole, according to an NYPD intelligence report obtained by CNN.
The previously unreported writings lay bare Mangione’s plans to target the insurance industry. Prosecutors argue in the filing that his actions motivated a barrage of threats against health insurance workers and made them worry for their safety.
Thoreau was a champion of reform through non-violent means.*
Martin Luther King Jr. was expressly a follower of Thoreau (and Ghandi)
on that point. Man-O-Man
It was striking to me what the condemnations of Thompson’s assassination said. The general pattern was something like “Violence is never the answer!”, followed in the same breath by apologetics like “violence to combat any sort of corporate greed is unacceptable” (Biden’s press secretary), Ro Khanna (Democrat Rep. from California) with his yes-but response “There is no justification for violence” and the killing doesn’t surprise him because “We waste hundreds of billions a year on health care administrative expenses that make insurance CEOs and wealthy stockholders incredibly rich while 85 million Americans go uninsured or underinsured”. Similar apologetics implying that the assassination was justified from AOC, and Senators Sanders, Warren and Ron Wyden.
This is the reality that we live in today. The associated polls following Thompson’s assassination demonstrate a serious mental illness spreading throughout the nation: support for force over reason, as a means of getting whatever you want.
Emotional reactions are the opposite of reasoning. Unfortunately, OO embraced emotional response some years ago by enabling emoji responses, the most heinous of which is the laughing face favored by our local laughing hyena. It should be shocking that when UHG posted about Thompson’s assassination, that received over 100,000 laughing heads. It should also be shocking that the Wikipedia entry starts a paragraph with “After Thompson’s death…”: no, he didn’t just “die”, he was assassinated. It was a deliberate political killing, that is what defines an assassination. But it is hard to be shocked these days.
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Yes, David, it would have been better to write “after Thompson’s killing” or murder or assassination. Sometimes the more vivid is the more truthful. And exactitude is always better.
I have noticed also a seeming shrinking of intelligence in public discourse. There are so many partisans of this or that issue who want to seize on any public event as a way to get in a word for their oblique cause, which for their mind is most important issue. In the late 1960’s, when I was in college, had a member of the SDS shot a member of the YAF, the ensuing discussions certainly would not have been over whether the Left or the Right was more murderous; or whether all firearms should be federally registered or removed from private ownership or awarded every citizen. It would have been about good and evil and the criminal mind and protection and love for all the innocent and precious all around one. (During the years I was there, we had protests, but no violence, on our campus.)
2 hours ago, Boydstun said:
I have noticed also a seeming shrinking of intelligence in public discourse.
I think this is an effect of cancel culture. Although a few intelligent people are canceled, a great many more fall silent because they don’t want to get canceled.
The posts I value most highly are the ones that say something interesting that never even occurred to me. When I joined X, I started seeing those kinds of posts again, for the first time since back when I was on Usenet. I guess such posts have been “high risk” recently. (There’s also a lot of garbage on X, too, just like Usenet… but X allows me to follow who I want and mute what I don’t want. It takes continuous sorting.) I worry that X could change, or be forced to change, and it makes me think how subject such things are to the direction of the political winds.
If free speech has such an effect, consider what a free market would be like. Products available for purchase that never even occurred to you, solving problems you had gotten used to and didn’t even realize were solvable.
What worries me most is that there are young people out there who have lived in the existing system their entire lives and therefore do not know what I am talking about, and therefore would have to support capitalism and freedom on a strictly theoretical basis because they have never been allowed to see its benefits for themselves. So any description of the wonders of capitalism would be as detached from the reality they know as a Christian’s description of Heaven is. (Just like Newton’s Laws and some chemistry and materials science allow the construction of fighter jets, which would have amazed the scientists who discovered those principles. If fighter jets disappeared, few people would be able to look at the scientific principles and imagine that such things are possible.)
Some of the most consistent advocates of capitalism and freedom came to the USA from Communist countries and therefore saw both sides, and Ayn Rand was among them. But there are few people who understand the theory and see the difference in practice.
There are plenty of others (e.g. Muslims) who immigrate here and want to remake the USA to be just like the place they came from. If they reject reality on principle, they will be unimpressed by real prosperity or by the ideas and systems needed to realize it. Instead they will impose their false principles and destroy everything. Then they can claim that there’s no evidence that capitalism or freedom work (because they have destroyed that evidence). This is how people get stuck in a dark age.
16 hours ago, necrovore said:
I think this is an effect of cancel culture. Although a few intelligent people are canceled, a great many more fall silent because they don’t want to get canceled.
The posts I value most highly are the ones that say something interesting that never even occurred to me. When I joined X, I started seeing those kinds of posts again, for the first time since back when I was on Usenet. I guess such posts have been “high risk” recently. (There’s also a lot of garbage on X, too, just like Usenet… but X allows me to follow who I want and mute what I don’t want. It takes continuous sorting.) I worry that X could change, or be forced to change, and it makes me think how subject such things are to the direction of the political winds.
If free speech has such an effect, consider what a free market would be like. Products available for purchase that never even occurred to you, solving problems you had gotten used to and didn’t even realize were solvable.
What worries me most is that there are young people out there who have lived in the existing system their entire lives and therefore do not know what I am talking about, and therefore would have to support capitalism and freedom on a strictly theoretical basis because they have never been allowed to see its benefits for themselves. So any description of the wonders of capitalism would be as detached from the reality they know as a Christian’s description of Heaven is. (Just like Newton’s Laws and some chemistry and materials science allow the construction of fighter jets, which would have amazed the scientists who discovered those principles. If fighter jets disappeared, few people would be able to look at the scientific principles and imagine that such things are possible.)
Some of the most consistent advocates of capitalism and freedom came to the USA from Communist countries and therefore saw both sides, and Ayn Rand was among them. But there are few people who understand the theory and see the difference in practice.
There are plenty of others (e.g. Muslims) who immigrate here and want to remake the USA to be just like the place they came from. If they reject reality on principle, they will be unimpressed by real prosperity or by the ideas and systems needed to realize it. Instead they will impose their false principles and destroy everything. Then they can claim that there’s no evidence that capitalism or freedom work (because they have destroyed that evidence). This is how people get stuck in a dark age.
“Cancel culture” is nothing new, only that disparaging name is new. In the 1950’s, when I was a child, a person certainly would not have publicly said that they were a homosexual. Public means of communication at that time was radio and newspaper. If someone were thought to be a homosexual, they would not be hired, they would likely lose connection to their family, they might be attacked or put into a mental institution. The first State legalized homosexual relations in 1962, and the method by which it was legalized was not by an open focus and debate over it, but by sneaking it into a broader reform known as Uniform Code of Criminal Justice. Those days to the 1950’s were plenty of “cancel culture”.
“Cancel culture” is not an explanation for such a decline of intelligence in public discourse. More likely, I would suggest, is that by modern means of press, like this one here, it became easier for more of the population to state their views publicly. When I was a child, you needed to write a paper letter to your Senator (which I did) or to your newspaper. Going through that process might well have encouraged more thinking going into the content.
The important thing is that we have under law a free press. This became fully the reality only around 1960, with the case NY Times v. Sullivan. Until then criticism of officials was still being suppressed by threat of easy law suit. Before that, back in merry Ole England, the King had been shutting people up by capital punishment by public gruesome executions. There is a great book about this: THE EMERGENCE OF A FREE PRESS by Leonard Levy.
It strikes me as a historical mistake to associate immigration of Muslims into this country with any peculiar ambition to impose that religion on others or to oppose a capitalistic economy. The Puritans had the ambition of a closed religious society. Religious tolerance came to the American colonies through the Carolina project. Locke had written into the compact of that enterprise a clause, with argument, for toleration of different religions in the same area. That is why many people who had taken refuge in Amsterdam from persecutions in Europe immigrated to Charleston, SC, and why there is such a diversity of old churches and an old synagogue there today.
Is Dearborn Michigan the new Charleston , or just Michigan with different Puritans ?
Just now, tadmjones said:
Is Dearborn Michigan the new Charleston , or just Michigan with different Puritans ?
Charleston’s really boring too so probably that. Weird question.
Stephen was pushing back on criticism of Muslim immigration as characterized as ‘purposeful non assimilation’ and he gave historic examples of different motivations for religious communities to emigrate.
To my mind the question as posed follows naturally from his comments.
1 minute ago, tadmjones said:
Stephen was pushing back on criticism of Muslim immigration as characterized as ‘purposeful non assimilation’ and he gave historic examples of different motivations for religious communities to emigrate.
To my mind the question as posed follows naturally from his comments.
My bad. I hadn’t read his comment yet and assumed yours was some weird comment towards me since I’m from Michigan.
11 minutes ago, tadmjones said:
Stephen was pushing back on criticism of Muslim immigration as characterized as ‘purposeful non assimilation’ and he gave historic examples of different motivations for religious communities to emigrate.
Your claim was not merely a charge of “non-assimilation”. We’ve had that quite understandably all through. In the nineteenth century, there were immigrants from Hanover, Germany, to Hannover, Kansas. Etc. etc.
On 9/16/2025 at 1:19 PM, Pokyt said:
My bad. I hadn’t read his comment yet and assumed yours was some weird comment towards me since I’m from Michigan.
I am going to go out on a limb and assume your assumption is geared to any comment of mine and not an assumption you have regarding me and random people from Michigan , yeah ?
Now that it is in my attention that you are from Detroit , what is your opinion of your state’s status as an Arab Muslim ‘hub’ ? Strengthened from diversity? Enriched with the presence of an identifiable culture? Is the broadcast call to prayer accepted as a welcome of sign the ever melting pot ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39TTKjDM6hM
I don’t know what Hammoud is referring to specifically, but it sounds like he has a prior history with the speaker which motivates his assertions, and not simply as a response to the objection to the road sign. I’d have to know what the speaker was saying outside of mosques to evaluate that.
The objection isn’t enough of ‘context’ , gotcha insert winky face here
2 hours ago, tadmjones said:
The objection isn’t enough of ‘context’ , gotcha insert winky face here
What did grammatically correct sentences ever do to you, that you shun them so?
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On 9/16/2025 at 8:57 AM, Boydstun said:
It strikes me as a historical mistake to associate immigration of Muslims into this country with any peculiar ambition to impose that religion on others or to oppose a capitalistic economy.
Lebanon, Iran and Great Britain might be worth looking into.
Christianity in the West has for the most part been (for lack of a better term) Westernized. It’s been neutered so that, today, it no longer attempts to rip up the furniture or set antisocial women on fire. Judaism has been neutered too, although that probably happened a long time before Christianity was.
Following World War 2 the precise opposite has happened to Islam. It has not moderated its interpretation of its scriptures to fit in with a secular society; it has gone from being fairly mild to increasingly more radical and fundamentalist with each passing year. Look at pictures of countries that actually were Muslim-majority (unlike Lebanon or Iran) prior to World War 2. They’ve been steadily going further and further into the deep end ever since then.
Yaron Brook has an excellent series of lectures on YouTube detailing why this happened. The short story is that after being repeatedly humiliated by Western military forces, over and over again, the Muslim world decided that the reason for their military inferiority was not technology, discipline, productive capacity or tactics but radicalism. They currently believe that they will be given dominance over the rest of the Earth if they simply Muslim harder than anyone has ever tried to Muslim before. The longer story takes somewhere around six hours to listen to, but it’s certainly worth it.
That obviously does not apply to every single Muslim, without exception, but there is a thorny problem there that’s worth paying attention to.
import from the thread that’s supposed to be about Charlie Kirk
On 9/17/2025 at 9:30 PM, Jon C said:
And is the woke here in the room with us right now?
Don’t laugh. It’s about to be.
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By way of your own analogy, if a physicist was assassinated because the murderer didn’t like the way physics departments operate, then saying “this victim was a great person simply by virtue of being a physicist and the murderer hated the good for being good” is making some fairly dubious assumptions.
Well, there are two claims involved here that I sort of mushed together yesterday. “The victim was a great person simply by virtue of being a physicist” is one and “the murderer hated the good for being the good” is another.
The second one is probably the easiest to tackle first. They’re all going to kind of bleed into each other a bit but analyzing the motives and reasoning behind the people screaming “free Luigi” (and above all of Luigi himself) is probably the simplest starting point.
On 9/17/2025 at 5:07 PM, necrovore said:
I disagree with that. We shouldn’t have to refuse to identify the truth, just because some idiots use it as an excuse to get violent. We have to recognize the problem, and show that capitalism is the proper solution.
I know. I was hoping (in a rather irrational way) that I wouldn’t need to say anything more than “that’s Communism” but you’re right; a full analysis is needed here.
I’m sorry, @tadmjones.
On 9/11/2025 at 11:20 AM, tadmjones said:
The CEO of a blood soaked rent seeking organization is of higher worth than a principled advocate.
This is a moral statement, and there are two main parts to pay attention to about it: “rent-seeking” and “blood soaked”.
“Rent-seeking” means extracting money out of somebody without providing any value in return. It reflects the usual Marxist perspective on landlords (which pretends that there is no connection between a person and their property, and thereby reduces “my landlord’s house” to “a house” and “the person whose house I’m living in” to “the asshole I pay just to live in a house”) but applied to any arena of production.
Obviously, in a free market nobody could extract money from anybody without providing some sort of value. Even if the value was simply “you are my child and I value your happiness”, that is still a value. And the fact that insurance companies have voluntary customers (even health insurance companies) proves that they do provide something for somebody - if they didn’t then nobody would pay them, and they would cease to exist. We don’t live in a truly free market; there are weird regulations in place and all kinds of subsidies going on, but that doesn’t currently change the underlying logic here.
And if one simply stops and spends ten or twenty seconds to ask “why does anybody purchase health insurance?” the value they provide immediately becomes obvious.
Some people know that they have certain chronic health conditions which they can only afford to pay for with the surplus of money they will receive from health insurance companies - and the fact that they could not otherwise afford their medical bills immediately tells you who is getting more money out of whom in THAT exchange. Others are basically healthy but want to know that they or their children can immediately be treated for whatever issues may arise, without going bankrupt over it.
And despite the undisputable fact that health insurance companies do provide immense value to millions of Americans, every day, (and they do allow people to pay the bills required for their very survival, by giving certain customers FAR more money than they could ever hope to receive from them!) we still call them “rent-seeking”.
“Blood soaked” is the far more insidious of the accusations, though.
If a child starves to death in Alabama while you are reading this instead of helping them, is their blood on your hands? Did you kill them?
I defy anyone to conjure up an explanation for that allegation which does not rest directly on the altruistic notion that you do not have a right to anything that someone else needs. There is none. If a certain company does not cover some treatment that you need - then don’t purchase their insurance, but don’t ever imagine that you have any right to other peoples’ money. The only sense in which any healthcare company can be said to be “blood soaked” is that it refuses to be a shmoo seeking out some needy person to devour it.
NEED is NOT a moral criteria by which to judge interpersonal relations. That is the criteria of cannibals. And refusing to accept anyone’s NEED as such (need by itself, without reference to any value or benefit for you); refusing to accept anyone’s need as such as a valid claim on one moment of your time or one penny of your property is GOOD. That is morally righteous.
In this one phrase about “blood soaked rent-seeking health insurance companies” we have a flat denial of the basic facts of reality preceded by the accusation that such companies dared to imagine themselves as anything more than means to the ends of the needy.
And that’s just @tadmjones, who didn’t seem to be having the best day. We should also mention Bill Burr, that hack of a judge who recently declared that openly attempting to intimidate people into behaving as you’d like is something other than terrorism, and the antihuman little fucker who actually did it.
I will go back and read this post in a bit , but what I just saw said something about medical insurance coverage being voluntary? I’d rather not waste the effort of reading it again if this not a phrase that got ‘stuck’ in my sight and I need way more context.
On 9/18/2025 at 7:16 PM, tadmjones said:
I will go back and read this post in a bit , but what I just saw said something about medical insurance coverage being voluntary? I’d rather not waste the effort of reading it again if this not a phrase that got ‘stuck’ in my sight and I need way more context.
Health insurance coverage is voluntary.
For a while there had been a fine for not having any health insurance (it was introduced by Barack Obama with the ACA) but I believe it was done away with in the last Trump administration. And even when there had been a fine - that muddled the issue somewhat, sure, but people were still free to choose between various health insurance companies or to simply say “screw it” and pay the fine instead. I’ve gone most of my life without health insurance as a point of principle. My current boss has offered to let me join their plan for $600 a month, but I’d rather take my chances and the $600.
A company (any company, including health insurance companies) is simply a group of people who work together to make money (which is a virtuous thing to do). As such, a company really only has one valid goal: making money.
There can be other sub-goals which are helpful towards the end of making money (such as having a better product, better customer service, etc) but they are only valid so long as they serve that specific end. Any company which attempts to embrace a contradictory goal has betrayed its reason for existing and become a fraud.
Edit: Yep. 2019, under Trump 1, the fine for not having health insurance was changed to $0.00.
Do you file personal income tax returns?
3 hours ago, tadmjones said:
Do you file personal income tax returns?
I use Turbotax so yes, but it’s mostly automated.
It’s a little Marxist too to be an apologist for medical insurance as a need to prevent bankruptcy instead of a system based more on fee for service with catastrophic financial risk management.
Insurance companies are as profitable as they are not by how well they provide premium payers ‘services’ as ultimately they basically reimburse or direct pay the producers of the goods or services their customer ‘insured’. Their profitability is based on well they manage the pool of monies/funds that accrues from collecting premiums in an amount higher than the amount needed to reimburse or etc.
I doubt any current or future CEO’s of healthcare insurers are rubbing coffeehouse elbows with Lloyds of London.
ps
And you could stretch the analogy and argue that transatlantic shipping insurance as an activity contributed to safer and more efficient vessel design which could a point but agains5 my gist 
2 hours ago, tadmjones said:
It’s a little Marxist too to be an apologist for medical insurance as a need to prevent bankruptcy instead of a system based more on fee for service with catastrophic financial risk management.
Marxism is when thing I don’t like. My table was a little Marxist when I stubbed my toe on it this morning.
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