The real terrorists are the CEOs and the US government
Terrorist is often a boogeyman label for freedom fighter.
Yep.
This and virtually all countries were founded by people who would fit the definition of terrorist.
How history remembers you is solely on the basis of how successful your “terrorism” was.
George Washington is a very well regarded terrorist in modernity.
History is written by victors, not terrorists
I’ve had this issue in a story I’m writing, because one faction in this story is fighting for a cause that’s essentially good, but they’ve become extremely jaded by lack of change and have resorted to extremely violent measures. So it’s obvious the government they’re fighting would call them terrorists, but a hundred years later, history should view them with reserved optimism. It’s hard to categorize how the narrator and heroes should view them though, since the heroes don’t necessarily directly cooperate.
It amuses me that the media has no idea how to spin Luigi into the villain of this story.
It means Italians aren’t white.
Italians, like the people that populate Italy, don’t think of themselves as white. They see themselves as Italian.
Americans of Italian descent have a complicated relationship with “whiteness”. White is not a biology. It is a malleable group designed to keep people labeled black underfoot.
Finally we have an answer
the funny thing about Sicilians…
What does King Koopa have to do with any of this?
And Luigi isn’t a man or patriarchy is over. Or maybe there are more than one system of oppression active at the same time and intertwined. We will never know.
I mean, it was inarguably violence, and that violence seems to have a political motive (since changing or reforming the healthcare system is considered a political issue), and there is an element of using fear to further that end (since he would obviously have known that he cannot realistically change everything by himself or even just shoot every health insurance CEO, but shooting one while featuring a catchy phrase to make it clear the motive was being fed up with the health system, potentially makes all the other such CEOs and people in similar positions afraid that the next guy to try this might go after them next, and that more might be inspired seeing the shooting). Id argue that it does technically fit the term. People are just so used to that term being used alongside causes that they have no agreement with that they think it can never apply to a good one, or consider if it can ever be justified.
I’d argue the US for-profit health insurance system is state sanctioned terrorism of the civilian population, for profit.
What greater way to terrorize a population than to deny them and their families healthcare, under the threat of bankruptcy? How about the threat of bankruptcy either way, whether they’re insured or not?
The industry kills 30x 9/11 every year, bankrupts 500k, while stealing 500-700 billion from the population (compared to the public systems of the developed world). At the very least, it’s financial terrorism and extortion.
Morally, yes. Legally, no.
Saying “legally” isn’t much of an argument, IMO, not to imply you meant it as one. What’s legal or illegal is arbitrarily decided on by those in power, and arbitrarily enforced. The vast majority of these laws were not voted on by us and they’re rarely if ever reviewed.
Well no shit, state-sanctioned terrorism is always legal according to the state that sanctions the terrorism
It’s a joke of a charge. Fascist Christian terrorists can shoot up LGBTQ+ people and never be called terrorists by media or charged with it. It’s bullshit and only because he took on our oligarch elite
The point is that terrorism is only applied when it’s convenient for the ruling class. Hate crime murders are similarly politically motivated but don’t get the terrorism label.
Isn’t this a straight “eye-for-an-eye” revenge killing?
He was wealthy enough to have no problems paying for all of his surgeries without insurance, tbh. His dad is head of Mangione Enterprise which owns and operates a lot of real estate including large resorts.
He had a Bachelors in Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science.
I think Luigi might have had no intention of advocating healthcare reform, he just wanted to disincentivize people he viewed as evil.
You can certainly interpret the killing that way, but there are many other reasonable interpretations, and to get a conviction you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Do we have a quote of him saying before the murder or publishing at any time something indicating that he was killing this guy to send a message to all the evil m************ who act just like him? If we do, your conclusion is warranted. If we don’t, your conclusion is speculation.
Let me give you a parallel. Imagine someone cuts me off in traffic and I pull out a gun and I shoot them. Am I terrorizing other bad drivers? Probably not. Probably I’m a psychopath dealing with road rage in a terrible fashion. In other words, the fact that other people can draw conclusions about similar behavior does not in itself make my actions threatening to them in any way.
I don’t consider him a terrorist because I don’t consider what he did as a political action.
I agree and also see lots of other acts that are political not get tagged as terrorism.
How’s that? It seems very political to me
Unless we’re doing a “I didn’t see nothin” bit, that’s cool too
Luigi didn’t make any political demands. He just said this CEO was a bad man and so he killed them.
No specific demands, but this was absolutely not only about the man Brian Thompson, and very much about larger political and economic issues in the country.
…If the manifesto is to be believed, anyway. I understand not everyone trusts the veracity/provenance of it, and that’s a reasonable doubt to have.
I saw the Manifesto and I didn’t see any socioeconomic political theories, just an apology to the police but “it had to be done.”
If it said “The system of privatized health insurance is evil as a result of failure of legislation to restrain the actions of an industry” THEN that would be political, but it didn’t say that at all.
My understanding is that Luigi did not publish the manifesto, and that it was discovered by others later. If that’s true, then the manifesto itself is not particularly relevant to anything criminal. The message on the bullets could be considered relevant, but I don’t see how that alone would be proof of intent to terrorize.
The reason for “it had to be done” is political.
Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.
He explicitly states that he does not have the “space” nor the qualification to lay out what you want him to lay out, but he pretty much says what you said he should’ve said for it to be political: “Privatized health insurance is corrupt and greedy, we’ve known it for a long time and nothing has been done to prevent or stop it, thus I took a more violent approach to do something about the corruption and greed.”
There are a lot of murders and I’m sure every single non-negligience murderer thinks theirs had to be done, mate.
But the reason why they think it had to be done still matters. “This CEO wronged me personally” and “the systemic oppression made me do it” contextualize the act in a very different way. The reason he did this is why it’s political. If he had done it because he had a personal vendetta against the CEO or he had some religious beliefs that made him do it or if he was just insane, then it wouldn’t be a political reason. But he did it because (paraphrasing his statement) he saw an unopposed corrupt system that needed to be opposed. That is a political reason.
it’s not political because politics shouldn’t have anything to do with healthcare.
kinda depends on your definition of politics
the one I heard that I think is the most useful is, On the broadest level, Politics is how societies decide how and where resources are distributed
by that definition, healthcare can only be a political question, cus no matter how you set it up, you’ve made a decision about how it’s staffed and funded, who it caters to and what its goals are
You say “shouldn’t”, but until that’s true, it does
I never noticed that Spongebob’s shoulders change position on his body when he raises his arms.
So does that mean his shoulders are actually inside his torso, and he just has really long upper arms?
I was unable to find any images from the show where he didn’t have sleeves, so they must be part of his body. Maybe they just slide around on the sides of him.
Ah, good find! Although his buff form anatomy is so different from the norm it doesn’t answer any questions.
I’m pretty sure it’s a Rayman situation, the sleeves are just cover
This is most definitely cursed knowledge
He doesn’t have bones (except for in gags), so he doesn’t actually have shoulders anyway. He’s just squishy
no his arms have TWO ELBOWS EACH and his finger bones are doubled with claws inside the flesh of his hands so he can quickly regenerate in case of traumatic injury he’s a monster
jesus christ imagine his skeleton
He is a sponge. He has either no skeleton, or that weird soft one where no piece links to each other.
Spongebob canonically has a skeleton, we see it multiple times. Maybe its cartilage like a shark.
they also charged martin luther king jr, nelson mandela, and gandhi with terrorism too so he’s in good company.
is accused of saying "Delay, deny, depose, you people are next
Which is… illegal now?
Free speech for me but not for thee, huh?
Technically, he is a terrorist, since he targeted a civilian for political or ideological reasons. Doesn’t change the fact that his victim was absolute scum.
Doesn’t it just mean political violence?
Terrorism?
No.
Terrorism is the targeting of uninvolved civilians to spread fear for political purposes among the population at large. It can get a bit blurry but I’m not afraid of being assassinated for denying healthcare.
Are you?
Now if we want to talk about how carpet or drone bombing campaigns are terrorism that’s an interesting conversation but the system is just doing what’s it’s designed to do, protect the oligarchy no matter what.
