Can we please just tell the truth

@tristandross You're equivocating on what "you should die" means for the rhetorical point.

if a company decides you should die to make a line on a graph go up and its shareholders richer, well gee that's not ideal i guess, but reverse this paradigm, and now it becomes unconscionable. in this scenario, the human lives have actual value!

really is fascinating watching centrists grappling with public support for an act of ultraviolence when it involves the taking of a human life, which should be sacrosanct, and in the same breath referring to the millions of lives lost to the profit motive as 'suboptimal policy'

@Jesse_Brenneman The argument isn't really being made, though. It's being asserted but not argued.

“But those aren’t the same thing.” And the argument being made is that we should think of them as being more alike than we do!

You really have to work hard to try to misunderstand this argument. The point isn’t that murder isn’t bad, it’s that it is—which is why the killing of people by healthcare execs and policy is bad and should be treated as egregious as other forms of murder.

@actingliketommy @KevoModesto Hasan's view is transparently that what Mangione did was good and right, both from this interview and his streams.

@KevoModesto for you to extrapolate that i said "murder is ok" from my statement is a real stretch. seriously. you invented that statement. i never said close to that, neither did hasan in that video. you're projecting you own whatever into this. you're a fucking dolt, homie

I don't understand why people are freaking out about this. My son is about to turn 21 and everyone in his social circle feels the same way... about how violent and abusive capitalism is, and how you can only do that for so long before it bites back. This is not radical.

@urfriendpub @chazzaward1 @ArchGotta @BigP4P4Smurf @MarcoFoster_ As I said to the other person, my answer depends on what was discussed beforehand. A question can be “simple” yet lack necessary detail for answering. “Would you slap or kick?” is a simple question, but you likely have no idea how to answer, because I haven’t told you enough.

@FloodingLong @chazzaward1 @ArchGotta @BigP4P4Smurf @MarcoFoster_ THATS NOT AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION. YOU’RE PRETENDING NOT TO UNDERSTAND THE QUESTION BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO ADMIT YOURE EITHER WRONG OR UNSURE. IT WAS A VERY SIMPLE QUESTION.

Hasan Piker: “If you steal from the poor, you become rich. If you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison. There’s only one direction where you can do unlimited theft. Wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America”

@MasKpls @airbrushpen @FlyinMackenzie @lukeisamazing Whether or not you choose to believe me, I would die for what’s right. Apparently to you, disagreeing with your particular views in favor of moral consistency means someone has no real beliefs: a deeply narcissistic outlook.

@FloodingLong @airbrushpen @FlyinMackenzie @lukeisamazing Kingdom of Conscience: Unlocked

sorry but Mark Twain already made the perfect reply to this bullshit line of reasoning about 150 years ago

@dog_gotta @TFTSAA @HeerJeet Lol, you’re the only one of the two of us who feels the urge to repeatedly imply that an invisible outside audience would totally consider you normal and me abnormal. But, I’m the one focused on “winning”, huh? :)

@FloodingLong @TFTSAA @HeerJeet sorry, this ain’t a debate. I know this bothers you because you want to be able to “win” on technicalities but it’s literally just communication and the more you try to “win” conversations the less trustworthy normal people see you as.

One reason Piker discourse is so tiresome is his critics constantly misrepresent the plain meaning of his words.

@urfriendpub @chazzaward1 @ArchGotta @BigP4P4Smurf @MarcoFoster_ The builder isn’t a direct analog for the inmate; that’s why we shifted from discussing inmates to now discussing a different scenario. The problem is you’re equivocating on what “cannot say no” means. For the inmate someone will literally physically compel them.

@FloodingLong @chazzaward1 @ArchGotta @BigP4P4Smurf @MarcoFoster_ IF THE BUILDER IS AN ANALOG FOR AN INMATE, THEY HAVE NO ABILITY TO AGREE OR DISAGREE TO THE PAYMENT. HOWEVER, THE JOB TYPICALLY GOES FOR $500, AND YOU ARE PAYING THE BUILDER $100 BECAUSE THEY CANNOT SAY NO. SO AGAIN: WOULD YOU CALL THAT THEFT?

No, I have never spoken of being cleansed of responsibility, or that the actions of the insurance companies are completely moral or amoral. I especially haven’t said anything against arresting or impeding people. I haven’t said “social harm” is an imaginary concept; I said “social murder” is. Murder is a particular kind of thing that inherently justifies certain kinds of reactions. It’s not as though once someone just accumulates a certain number of “evil points” it becomes justifiable to murder them. The use of violence must be justifiable: it must be used against someone who is a decision maker or enforcer of active violence, a person whom our killing would actually make a substantive difference of outcome, and preferably it should be after some group process, not an individual acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Thompson fulfills basically none of these. Insurance companies are unfortunately necessary until the government passes legislation for universal healthcare. UnitedHealth (which already has a profit margin at less than half the national average) could announce that they’re taking 0 profits starting tomorrow; all it would accomplish is the decline of the company and its clients having to go to a different insurer. One response to this is to cite lobbying, but there’s no hard evidence at all that lobbying is why we don’t have universal healthcare: although most Americans support universal coverage in polls, they’re split on if it should be single-payer or a public option, and many voters who support it vote Republican or moderate Dem anyway due to other issues. Happy to cite polls for these. Thompson was also pretty much just a figurehead; he was replaced quickly and without any significant change in policy that I’m aware of. Killing him accomplished nothing that’d make the killing worth it. There’s also a question of why hospitals that refuse to care for patients for free escape the exact same sort of blame levied onto the insurance companies… I’m not saying that insurance companies don’t often engage in immoral practices. My point is that murder is not a legitimate response.

@FloodingLong @instain_mother By your own logic, an arms dealer or drug dealer is cleansed of responsibility for any harm their trade causes because they're not personally, physically attacking anyone, and to arrest or impede these people is irrational because social harm is an imaginary concept.

This is the danger of being a socialist who has to react to the news. Youll have to write paragraphs to answer for the murder of a Brian Thompson but capitalists will never have to explain why its okay for people to die prematurely or go into debt for the sake of a health insurer

You have it exactly backwards. Of course it’s important whether a killing was justified, what a ludicrous thing to say. Meanwhile you speak as though being able to offer some causal analysis of what happened bears on how we should react to it. If I insult someone with a temper issue and he beats me to an inch of my life, it wouldn’t be a mystery why he did it, but that has no relevance at all to the question of whether what he did was right. And, when you talk about human beings as though they’re mechanistic reactions to determined processes, you can justify any action under the same logic. That’s not reality, though. Mangione freely willed what he did; no force of “natural consequence” compelled him to commit murder.

@FloodingLong @instain_mother It's not important whether it's justified. It is, but I have no interest in discussing that with you. His death was a natural consequence of the system he worked within. If I broke your car window and you came out to the parking lot and punched me, it wouldn't be a mystery why.

@turbopisser @twodspessmen @lukeisamazing Yea I actually don’t think mass executions were somehow necessary to the project of overturning the regime

@FloodingLong @twodspessmen @lukeisamazing If only those heartless bourgeoisie and peasants had tried to reform the Ancien régime instead of just resorting to violence!

@YObscurities @lukeisamazing UnitedHealthcare’s profit margins are at like half the US avg. Unless/until the government passes universal healthcare legislation, it must have some profit margin to continue existing/providing the service it does. What they do is just not equivalent to your poetic analogy.

@FloodingLong @lukeisamazing The man who hoards food while others starve in a famine is a monster. The man who manages to hoard so much food that others starve in a time of plenty is a worse monster, but is on the cover of Forbes.

@spaceghostmane Based and webcomic pilled

@FloodingLong I’ll concede since you have a webcomic garou pfp

@ligmathong @Lipripper069 You guys rly have a passion for this huh

@Lipripper069 @FloodingLong thats not even a trick question 😭😭 so you are capable of understanding nuance, look at you go. so how can you excuse varying levels of murder , but not understand that about stealing, which results in no death if i do it

Hasan's biggest issue is he speaks about difficult topics with a TON of nuance. It's just not something modern internet culture is capable of handling. Its all about quick clips and assumptions, substance is all out the window.

@YObscurities @lukeisamazing Lol, that Nazis are not equivalent to healthcare CEOs morally doesn’t invalidate an argument that Twain’s basically just saying without justification that it’s suspicious we focus on personal mass murder rather than the deaths that result from scarcity.

@FloodingLong @lukeisamazing Wow, so Nazis are completely inapplicable as an analogy here? Interesting. One might even suspect that you were being guided to a point about your original argument.

@wroughttt @instain_mother Yes I’m aware that if you reverse which deaths were caused by non-personal forces like sickness and which were directly caused by a person acting violently, your view suddenly seems justified.

@FloodingLong @instain_mother You seem to be misunderstanding. The preventable deaths are those who are actually victims of the healthcare system, whose insurance is denied for frivolous purposes to the benefit of the ultra wealthy, like Brian Thomas, whose death was a natural consequence of the above.

@wroughttt @instain_mother You really see no bandwidth between that and “shoot CEOs dead in the street”

@instain_mother Her position seems to be that preventable deaths caused by the us' broken healthcare system are regrettable tragedies caused by a flawed system that must never change in any serious way

@YObscurities @lukeisamazing Assuming this is real and you mean that killing him actually helped stop it in some way rather than you just being judge jury and executioner to no gain, later in life: he was an accomplice to actual mass murder, so no, different case entirely from “social murder.”

@FloodingLong @lukeisamazing I killed a man who did nothing but conscientiously complete paperwork to make sure that the operation he was part of worked smoothly. He never hurt a fly. The operation in question was Dachau. Does that make any difference?

@airbrushpen @FlyinMackenzie @lukeisamazing No, I don’t think having basic consistency in your moral principles means you’re a “goody good boy” who just wants praise for being moral. This is a deeply cynical outlook.

@FloodingLong @FlyinMackenzie @lukeisamazing This is such peak liberal pathology showing through. Your entire conception of politics is based on you being a goody good boy and everybody else needs to recognize and be impressed by your virtue. No goals, no vision, no project, just pure masturbatory moralism

@spaceghostmane It’s the closest to being murder (because it’s a magical just-so button) and would be intensely evil, but it would not be murder if you didn’t cause the thing that’s killing me. The difference matters because reciprocity is a huge part of when actual violence is justified.

@FloodingLong If someone paid me 5 dollars to not press a button that kept you alive, it would be murder even if you were dying anyway.

By violence here I don’t mean the narrow sense of involving punching and kicking etc., but rather that the death was a result of you acting from the outside to cause a death that would not have occurred otherwise, or aiding someone who does. If a given insurance company didn’t exist, the person’s sickness wouldn’t magically go away. The insurance company did not make them sick. There’s also no evidence at all that the insurance company maliciously wants the person in question to die. Therefore there is no grounds to call a failure to provide coverage “murder.” It may be evil but it’s not murder. Otherwise everyone including the hospital who refuses to provide care without insurance would be murderers.

@FloodingLong @FlyinMackenzie @lukeisamazing It is not. The word murder does not entail physical violence, only intentional killing (nor does the word "killing" entail physical violence).