OP is confusing “prosecution” with “persecution”, thus making this whole thread impenetrable

They mean “persecution”

With the small caveat that you are not a judge, either appointed or elected.

Brought to justice? Is this the kind of “justice” you advocate for every transgression or are you making an exception for this one? Who decides what the penalties are? You? What if some other evil CEO committed some other nebulous “crime” but only a bit less serious, what would he deserve? Just a beating in the street? An hour in your personal torture dungeon?

In a civilized society we have institutions that dispense justice. They operate on the principle that a law must be broken first. If you don’t like the law, then you first need to get the law changed. You don’t get to decide unilaterally who gets punished how much and for what.

For sure, I feel morally superior to anyone who openly advocates murder. Not a high bar.

Lives are more important than shareholder value and no feduciary lawsuit would ever rule otherwise.

Indeed. That’s why murder is illegal, not to mention a moral abomination. I didn’t read the rest of your comment.

He was maximizing value for the shareholders of his company. That’s what happens in capitalism.

If you’re going to analyze the moral balance sheet of every private company then you’re going to need to be more consistent. Any major oil company will surely account for far more damage to people (not to mention other creatures) than this health insurer. Do all their CEOs deserve extrajudicial capital punishment too?

What about you personally? What are the wider effects of your personal choices of diet, for example, or mobility? Not great, I’d guess. Perhaps you don’t merit a bullet, but maybe some prison time is warranted?

Yes. He was a cog, I am one and so are you.

Yes. How dare I have my own opinions and values that contradict yours?

Someone openly advocates murder and then talks of empathy. The hypocrisy is almost beyond words.

Indeed, the dictatorship was followed by a restoration of the monarchy. And, after a few more revolutions, some of them bloody, by various other forms of regime.

In parallel, other European countries (the UK most famously) skipped all the violence and ended up at roughly the same destination of “strong liberal democracy” as you put it. A handful of them are today even stronger liberal democracies than France, with even better social protections.

What a waste of blood.

You make it sound so simple. It’s not. It’s complex. This guy was a cog in a system that we are all part of, that we are all responsible for. To blame him personally is transparent scapegoating. To gun him down while he walks in the street is, well, what it is: blatant, inexcusable, first-degree murder. Deep down, I’m sure you know that all this is true.

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Better hope nobody starts making such complex calculations about you and deciding that it’s therefore time for you to be shot dead in the street.

all actions have consequences

Yes, they do - bad consequences for everyone. If you take the law into your own hands it always ends in tears. Either you’ll get a strongman who “alone can fix it”, or you’ll get some kind of revolutionary regime which tolerates no dissent and eventually collapses, hated by the very people it was supposed to represent. Every. Single. Time. There is no exception in history.

I am against extrajudicial cold-blooded killing, just as I am against the judicial variety (capital punishment). But this does not even need to be a moral argument: human history shows very clearly that vigilante justice is a dead end.

The only way forward is discussion, and compromise, and hard choices.

Palestine? Kissinger? Completely irrelevant. You are advocating first-degree murder. Look in the mirror and start there.

The bureaucratic plumbing of American healthcare? So fix it then! Vote. Send letters. Get more involved in politics. Protest. What have you done about the problem you seem so worked up about, apart from cheer on a murderer? What?

If speaking out against vigilante murderers is “being on a high horse”, that’s fine by me and I’ll stay there.

The world you are advocating is a very dark place indeed. In historical terms, it’s France of 1794. A bloodbath that ended, as it always has in history, with a conservative backlash and a dictatorship. You talk in grandiose terms of the social contract but you seem not to know much about history.

If you’re claiming this guy (a human being with a family, and friends, and children) “murdered” people, you are either delusional or (more likely) twisting logic to breaking point in order to justify your own advocacy of cold-blooded murder.

No idea, I don’t know any CEOs. I’m disappointed you seem to think that a job title disqualifies someone from the right to life, the right not to be murdered.

Personally I would prefer that he get out of jail as soon as he is not considered a risk to society, since that is the only valid justification for prisons. Maybe months, probably years. And then he can consider the evilness and futility of his act.

And for all the people celebrating it here, you might consider your own hypocrisy and outright callousness at defending the indefensible. I still can’t quite get over my shock at the level of hatred and vituperation here. I thought this community would be better than that.

From a person who knew Luigi Mangione, just published in Unherd:

But while thousands reacted on social media with laughter emojis to Thompson’s murder, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenceless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.

It really is a conundrum. Group festivities seem almost designed to make the people on the margins of society feel worse about themselves. And yet try to imagine a society without such events. It would be even worse (and of course no such society has never existed). This whole problem is exacerbated so much by the fractured nature of modern urban life. In the past it was not even possible to be alone at Christmas, because nobody much was ever alone.

Anyway, as something of a marginal type myself, I agree with suggestions others have made. If you try hard enough, you really can see through the myth of social “success” and “failure”. At that point, festive dates will begin to seem like what they are: just dates. As for “getting company”, this one’s pretty easy. Join some social group with regular events, and make it a fixture in your diary. You’ll meet new people and eventually things will move on from there. But be patient! All human relations are about the hours invested. So if you haven’t taken this first step already, there’s no time to lose. Make it your new year’s resolution.

I second every word of this. Great advice, beautifully articulated.