Honest reflection: political violence is bad. It opens doors that don't easily close. Political violence doesn't stop when you want it to. It veers off in directions you probably won't anticipate. It gobbles up fuel until it burns itself out.

Kyle Kinane once celebrated the power that some villains have to unite unlikely groups of people. He was talking about Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, but private health insurers fit the bill, too. It is wild to see someone who you've probably never heard of get murdered and the internet, apart from some think pieces in prestige publications, basically says "hell yeah!" Not just hell yeah, but "we will collectively suck the killer's penis clean off his body and torment the fast food worker who turned him in, here's a pamphlet on jury nullification." [And hey, you should know about jury nullification!] It is hard to imagine this being the last targeted killing; there will probably be copycats looking for similar hero worship.

Heck, I never heard of the CEO before. He was the fearless leader of an organization that profits by creating unnecessary human misery. I'm not about to mourn the guy.

In a sane, fair world, the killer would go to jail for a long time and the health care industry would beg to regulate for the safety of its leaders. We're probably gonna get just one of those, the one you don't like. Someone else will get paid enough to run UHC.

Maybe I'm wrong and we will get a major popular uprising to reform health care in America. But we've got an incoming government of real French aristocrat types who have barely even begun to repress the hell out of the rabble, and I think it's really going to show because now these paranoid powerful types have a rational basis for their fear. If this is the start of prolonged social upheaval, may God help us all.

Enshittification in action

#Meme #Google #AI #Enshittification #Politics

Her Person's Subwoofer*

*apologies to RCA

#CatsOfMastodon

a lesson in physics

#Caturday