We pour tons of effort into punishing visceral, direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. But if white collar crime is being committed that leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, it's rare that anyone sees jail time. Maybe you could argue the decisions of Brian Thompson made only account for maybe 10% of why XYZ died but when you scale that out, you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder.
I think the younger generations are increasingly aware of this disparity in justice. If you find it hard to understand the celebration of violent vengeance but don't feel the same inability to understand the celebration of Jeffrey Doucet's retribution, then perhaps you are lacking the sociological imagination.
Nobody likes how insurance companies do business, but that doesn't make it "crime".
Things have deteriorated lately, and the population does not see the justice system as effective.
It is completely expected that we see vigilantism, but it is in no way extrajudicial.
The way they "delay, deny, defend" as a matter of course shows a lack of a good-faith execution of the insurance agreements, to the point that a sane world would understand it as extremely obvious (and documented!) fraud. Sure, it is de facto not fraud, but tell that to someone who didn't get insurance payments which they were owed to pay for life-saving treatments (or, I guess tell it to their grave).
He said "white collar mass murder."
The implication here is that it is wrong even though it is not currently illegal.
> Maybe [...] Brian Thompson [...] you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder.
Nope. Read it more carefully. It's two separate sentences.
The US is a very litigious society and Americans more than any nationality I've met are way too quick to conflate legality and morality. My personal guess is that this derives from a long running lack of class consciousness that is present in most other nations
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...
Fascinating study. Thanks for sharing!
Someone once said (I think Kay), that "a change in notation is worth 20 IQ points". Historically, people struggled with presently-mundane basic concepts, such as Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, and Maupertuis' Principle of Least Action, because they lacked the "notation" (concepts, really), that would have allowed them to integrate them into their consciousness (or otherwise were not willing to discard or diminish another pre-existing notation, like biblical stories).
The younger generations have the advantage of being exposed to a much greater variety of notations than any previous generation, thanks to the internet, and its unrestricted nature. There is a lot of alpha in being able to instantly find numbers, and compare them with other numbers. Those aggregations, and second-hand experiences (I did not need to get murdered by federal officers personally, in order to start questioning the legitimacy of the government more aggressively), are a kind of substitute for a few decades of lived experience (by the time you turn 30 or 40, you are old enough to understand a lot of the dynamics, but too old to do much about it).
What this does, in effect, is create an acute awareness of what I like to call "sign-flip institutions" (I have never heard/read this term used before). A sign-flip institution, is an institution, in which a "customer's" minus is their plus, the overwhelming majority of the time.
So for example, a bank is a sign-flip institution (unless you never take out any loans). This is in fact _codified_ in how they do their accounting. To a customer, a loan is (in the accounting terminology), a _liability_, while deposits are _assets_. To a bank (ask any accountant who works at a bank), loans are _assets_, while deposits are _liabilities_. Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans.
Historically, most sign-flip institutions were heavily regulated[0] (to prevent them from impoverishing the populace, or worse). In banking, it used to be the law that they could not give mortgages for housing, unless the purchaser can pay 1/3 of the mortgage up front. This kept housing prices very low. It also kept bank performance low. After decades of bribery (sorry, lobbying), the banks got those regulations removed, and now the housing prices are so high that people _have_ to go into debt to (not own, no), but _have access_ to a home[1], that they may never fully pay off.
Combine this with the fact that we have very aggressive anti-vagrancy laws (you are not even allowed to sleep in your own car/van, in an empty parking lot), and it should be no surprise that people will say that society is rigged, that those who govern (cities, states, federations, corporations, banks, etc), are illegitimate.
Most AI companies, are openly marketing themselves sign-flip institutions! I don't know how true this is in practice[2], but given their round-the-clock FUD-based marketing, one would think that they are designed to turn your time into their money. That they are designed to turn you into money.
The only surprising thing about this story is that it took a nation, known for school shootings, this long to get violent against the executive/governing class. It took them this long, to learn to leave their smartphones at home, and to bring their molotov cocktails instead[3].
[0]: Hospitals, for example, were not allowed to make a profit before 1978.
[1]: Landlords get a lot of hate, but, most of the landlords that I've spoken to, are in the same exact situation as most home-owners (mortgage, debt, inflation), which means that they are really just arms-length employees of the _true_ landlords, the banks. Similarly, if you peel back the finances of most AI companies (maybe even most Silicon Valley companies), I am sure you will banks at the center of that web.
[2]: My big suspicion/fear is that the anti-AI sentiment is being cultivated to scapegoat the nerds, and to protect the bankers/executives.
[3]: Most Americans stereotype the French, as a nation of sad artists, but to the contrary, their protests are glorious.
Glorious as a personal sentiment isn't exactly how I'd describe the French Revolution.
Yes, stirring up anti-AI hatred is fine as long as it's directed at your I-Banker/PE friends from school who majored in economics, but totally bad if it's directed at you since you majored in Comp Sci (the source of AI to begin with) and went into tech.
"Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans"- is this how you think finance actually works? Maybe first learn how things work before inventing your own terminology or "notation" like sign-flip institution. It's not worth 20 IQ points if it's wrong. The younger generations (and I am a member) are certainly no smarter or wiser than previous generations. Many sure seem to think they are though.
2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.
What is most disturbing in your comment is that it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable". That logic erodes the distinction between disagreement, accusation, and a right to kill.
Once people treat their own ideological conclusions as sufficient moral license for violence, they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process — beyond just the letter of law, as in the Jeffrey Doucet case, but also in its spirit, for we have democracy and due process precisely to tease out the ambiguities that social questions of causation and responsibility are so replete with.
There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect.
> it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable"
There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crimes like burglary, murder, etc despite the abundance of scholarship we have arguing for social forces driving those actions.
I'm not against applying the sociological imagination in both instances. I think it's almost always more useful than a narrow personal perspective. I'm just pointing out the obvious inconsistency.
> they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process
This "democracy" has clearly produced a result where poor people crimes are heavily policed and rich people crimes are heavily underpoliced. All robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft amounts to about $12 billion a year while the total amount lost due to wage theft each year is over $50 billion. Yet one version of this crime is much more heavily policed than the other.
I never called for a "right to kill", I'm calling for fair application of justice. I don't think we individual citizens should have the responsibility of carrying out this justice. Instead I think a properly running representative system would be carrying out the justice. But it's simply not.
Nothing in my original comment was prescriptivist. I'm just describing the state of matters as I see it. And I predict we will continue to see a rise in this sort of vigilante acts of justice until we have a valid alternative to it
The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
More generally, I said there is a major difference between structural harm, white-collar crime, and deliberately killing someone. Your answer was to fixate only on general claims about inequality, underpolicing, social causes, etc, which insinuates that maybe Brian Thompson deserved to be murdered while maintaining plausible deniability.
Yes, the system is unfair, but in what ways it's unfair is up to debate, unlike whether the child predator in the Jeffrey Doucet case abused a child. You are trying to connect the fact there is injustice in the world to how justifiable it is to deliberately kill someone, by using this analogy.
You can deny that you are endorsing it, but your comment still does the same thing: it takes a personal act of violence and places it inside a moral story that makes it sound less straightforwardly wrong. That is exactly the problem.
Also in no moral universe, do you shoot someone in the head in cold blood because they were negligent, let alone negligent in some abstract way related to structural social forces. That is a blanket justification for all sorts of political violence.
On democracy, you are using disappointment with democratic outcomes to erode respect for democratic process. By your standard, every single political faction would argue against respecting the democratic process.
The axioms for a majority of people right now are 1. Person X is doing bad things or leading an organization that does bad things 2. The government is refusing to address it and is actively abetting it 3. There is no way to stop this evil from occurring besides extrajudicial murder. The only thing you can suggest without breaking one of those axioms is that we must let evil happen because the alternative is worse, and frankly i'm not sure that argument is a good universal standard.
As for letting bad things happen, every time the party we don't like wins the election, we let what we personally view as "bad things" happen instead of use violence to overturn the election. That's the whole point of democracy. We show some humility and respect the majority will. We respect the process.
As for letting bad things happen, there is something to do when your side loses the election: wait 4 years. It's a very easy action to take, you know for certain there will be a change or strong opportunity for it soon. That is not true in all situations.
And what is your evidence that he was personally involved in any of these alleged crimes? He's the CEO of a huge bureaucratic entity. He plays his own highly limited, even if high-profile role. He probably doesn't even know what's going on in 99% of the company.
Before going as far as taking his life, you should be able to articulate exactly what he did wrong, how he is culpable, etc, and back your claims with objectively compelling evidence At least try to mimic the judicial process before taking such drastic measures. That even this bare minimum isn't being done by the mobs of people cheering on his cold-blooded murder shows a basic lack of regard for justice and human life.
And no, it doesn't work that way at all. I have problems in my life, stemming from government laws, that I might have to wait 80 years for any government to fix. It's likely everybody does. If everyone resorts to terroristic violence because of such problems, the very foundations of society would fall apart and we'd see mass suffering far greater than anything people experience now.
From a "we live in a civilized society" perspective, I can see why some people are outraged about his killing.
Finally, looking at the balance sheet of his accomplishments, I can also see why the pitchfork crowd is cheering.
"purpose of a system is what it does"
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
I sometimes wonder how many of the "outraged" are really just people who don't want to be judged for what they've done too.
More of a mass murderer in my eyes, but I'm willing to be wrong on that point.
And if the tradeoff was grandma's health for child's health, people would be sympathetic to what you are saying. But the tradeoff was your health for his profit.
The bird’s eye view of a health insurance policy is that you have some amount in premiums coming in, some amount of administrative expenses, some amount of profit/loss, and the rest is claims going out. As a percentage of premiums, the profits and expenses are pretty tiny. The reason for claims being denied is making the numbers balance out so as to not have the insurance company risk going bankrupt (insurance regulators tend to want insurers to be only writing policies they expect to make money on on average as insurance companies going bankrupt is bad for other policyholders). If you have a policy where you pay more in premiums, you can expect to have more claims approved.
The big reason healthcare is so expensive is not so much the small profits made by insurance companies as the large costs from providers (some is profit, some is remuneration for well paid doctors, some is having more expensive facilities or equipment or treatments than necessary). You could imagine a world where the insurance company is more of an agent for the patient, trying to avoid providers overcharging to keep premiums down, but that’s not the world we live in. There don’t seem to be good competitive pressures to reduce the costs from the providers. If you compare this to places where people often pay out-of-pocket for healthcare, providers can be much more conscious of this, eg for dental work there can be a choice of having a tooth removed, and then various different qualities of filling that can cost different amounts.