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Speculation [1]

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Date: 2024-12-05  

The man who shot Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, has not been caught, yet, but the messages inscribed on the shell casings he left at the scene -- apparently deliberately -- appear to answer the question of motive: they are from the title of a book about the methods the insurance industry uses to justify denial of coverage.

There is a brief moment in time when "justifiable homicide" -- killing someone who is about to harm your family --- becomes "cold-blooded murder" -- killing someone who has harmed your family. How long is too long, before understandable rage degenerates into unacceptable revenge: seconds, minutes, weeks?

There is also a matter of hierarchy: how many degrees of separation are allowable between the people who set policy and the impersonal / inhuman / inhumane bureaucracy that carries out the policy? Thompson had no personal animus against the man's mother or wife or child... never knew she existed. So who, if anyone, would have been an appropriate target of revenge?

This is something we, as Americans, must live with every day, although we mostly live in denial. The drone that killed a dozen Afghan girls gathering firewood, because they "looked suspicious" in the infrared... what would have been a proportional response, if we assume Afghans are human beings like unto ourselves? Could they justifiably retaliate against the drone operator, the unit commander, the Commander-in-Chief? Would the father of one of those girls be justified in killing me -- just because I’m an American -- not personally but as a symbolic retaliation, the way we kill "jihadists"?

There is no one he can kill that will bring her back -- but the deeper tragedy is there's no one he could have threatened or killed to save her either. No individual is responsible for or able to change "the system" -- the deep state, deep company, deep economy -- that demanded her sacrifice.

So after all the hysteria and froth, all that will be left, will be the bleak irrelevance of the act, because the next CEO will do exactly the same thing, because otherwise United Healthcare will go bankrupt, because the core business model is a lie -- that's the harsh reality behind the Affordable Care Act.

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