[LOCKED]WTF

Don't forget... You are the Chief Executive Officer of your own life. ~ Me

The corner of the internet in which I spend time isn't celebrating the guy's death but there is a certain...disquiet over how much attention this is getting as opposed to the latest school shootings. It seems disproportionate, what with all the think pieces and breathless reporting on CEO SAFETY, etc.

I saw that they had a CEO shooter look alike contest in NYC.

And at least one person has a tattoo of the guy...

LOL

"Yes, "Social" Media has poisoned our society in cyberspace. My concern is the breaking out of that into physical space by a generation of people who "haven't spent enough time outdoors"."

Pretty sure the ancient Romans thought something similar, because plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

There are more people emboldened to say the garbage in their brains out loud and in public, a process facilitated by social media, but I'm completely unconvinced that the number of people saying shitty things has increased in the last 50 years.

It's similar to the notion that a large number of people are celebrating the death of a CEO, when it's really that there is attention paid to some loud voices and then followed up by the poorly thought out conclusion that loud = many.

“ the Millennium Falcon "made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs".

The ensuing hue and cry resulted in the subject being addressed in the Han Solo movie, and in The Force Awakens.

One common explanation was that Han didn’t misspeak. The Millennium Falcon was able to fold space, effectively shortening the distance to 12 parsecs. Yes, I know it’s a weak argument.

The more glaring misstep was the fact that folks from a galaxy far, far away used the term parsec, which is an earth based measurement.

"Discussing health care is not necessarily political at all."

Yes, not necessarily, until it gets to the point that the discussion turns to certain legal matters and regulations regarding it.

Like some of the online discussions and certain media broadcast regarding the incident I've come across.

And that's all I have to say about that.

@GGMM

Yes, "Social" Media has poisoned our society in cyberspace. My concern is the breaking out of that into physical space by a generation of people who "haven't spent enough time outdoors". Remember that these are the same generations that adamantly refuse to return to the office. because, you know, there is no value to interpersonal contact.

Is it an accident that there is a new generation of "leaders" who capitalize on this anger? The question becomes pertinent, I think, where the rubber hits the road. Where the "social norms and mores" developed in the troll populated universe of "Social Media" start to be condoned in the non-cyber world.

One example of a likely outcome from (relatively) recent history is the virulent anti government sentiment, ironically invoked by a political party, in the nineties, in the service of shrinking government. The underlying principle was that government was an easy target and without the "protection" of being a gender, an ethnicity, a religious minority etc. The inevitable result was the Oklahoma City bombing. People were shocked. I worked for a local government at the time and, based on the public's openly rude and disrespectful treatment of me at the time, was anything but.

Thank God that got peoples attention. At least for a time.

I think Sting said it well in the song "Fragile": "For all us born beneath and angry star. Lest we forget how fragile we are."

@Good

Discussing health care is not necessarily political at all. And I don't see any of that in this case. I would welcome a discussion of our insane way of paying for medicine. "Insurance" as a name for what we do never made any sense to me, for one example. It's not remotely like any other type of insurance - fire, life liability, etc.
The problem is the people who don't like the way things are and pick a scapegoat. Then become...ugly is not a big enough word IMO. Imagine an oil company executive being gunned down and the cheers raining down. And many of those cheers would come from people driving gas powered vehicles. maybe a few who vacation in Hawaii, Mexico or Europe. Guilty BTW.

GGMM "Only in the media is it "joy by so many." It's seriously mostly just the hyper online keyboard warriors who have never spent enough time out of doors"

QFT

"...is anyone else as troubled as I am about the general reaction of people to the callous murder of the United health care CEO, and specifically the reaction of joy by so many?"

Only in the media is it "joy by so many." It's seriously mostly just the hyper online keyboard warriors who have never spent enough time out of doors and in the company of others to develop empathy. It's bipartisan in the horseshoe sense, so any representative sample is likely to be largely nutters.

I am indifferent on the insurance CEO murder case, as I have not looked into the story... I am focused on other stuff right now. But, at a minimum, this case is a wake up call for the bigwigs of all companies regardless of industry; and, it will prompt a big look into the details of insurance companies and their policies. The case will eventually prompt a hard look at healthcare insurance reform.

Be careful. The entire thread could get moved to the Politics section.

We need to fix our healthcare, obviously. It is costing lives and money. The paperwork alone is a nightmare. Insurance companies make lots of money by turning down care. Resubmitting takes time and effort which could be used better. Just look at the statistics. Care is better and cheaper in other countries. They live longer and have a better quality of life.

Many of our costs are hidden in employer provided insurance. Even with insurance, deductibles and copays are a burden and keep people out of the doctor’s office so they don’t get the care they need.

Don’t talk to me about long waits. It took 9 months to get an appointment with a primary care doctor even with good insurance. The year I had crappy insurance, I couldn’t get a doctor to see me and had to use telehealth to manage my prescriptions.

And on the subject of WTF, is anyone else as troubled as I am about the general reaction of people to the callous murder of the United health care CEO, and specifically the reaction of joy by so many? I mean, I can understand people's frustration with our complicated, expensive, politicized, and generally unsatisfactory experience with health care, but to see a commenter look at the clear pictures of the suspected murderer and remark "This looks like the face of a hero!" was pretty jarring.

Aside from the moral ambivalence of the victim's occupation (a legal and, arguably at least, necessary occupation BTW) I found this outpouring of vitriol particularly dark and ominous as an indicator of our country's ability to deal with societal issues. Thoughts?

The idea of the fixed celestial sphere of stars, while suspected by many astronomers to be wrong, was not proven so till the 1830s with measurements of stellar parallax. This is like the apparent shift of an object when you close one eye and then the other. Further objects appear to shift less. The geometric baseline in this case rather than the distance between one's eyes, was the diameter of earth's orbit, with the measurements taken six months apart.

This is also the origin of the word "parsec" a contraction of "parallax second of arc", a corollary distance measurement that has been confused by generations of people ever since George Lucas converted it to a measure time by Han Solo's boasting that the Millennium Falcon "made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs".

Conspiracy theorists beware...

The moon is made out of cheese!

:-D

"...some people were put here just for our entertainment."

The next time I'm trying to control my face as someone says something completely ridiculous, I'll try to remember this framing.

A friend recently said she believes some people were put here just for our entertainment.

"...wish natural selection would take them and end their ability to be stupid, by ending themselves."

Except that's not how natural selection works. Instead, we have the possibility of less well adapted offspring gradually being overtaken by better adapted progeny. Pea plants and fruit flies can manage it in your lifetime. Humans take much, much longer.

Personally, I want some of us to wear a sort of neon halo that lets the rest of us steel ourselves against the pain of rank stupidity.

The 'what the fuck' with all of those that are misinformed and put into motion all of the crazy theories is, why are these people allowed to breed? Why are they not sterilized? Even better, why is it that they still exist? Is it because murder is illegal? For this type of 'stupid person,' I wish no harm, but wish natural selection would take them and end their ability to be stupid, by ending themselves.

Even the geocentric Ptolemaic model - which persisted up until just a few hundred years ago, considered the fixed stars (the "celestial sphere") to be an unchanging canopy at some great distance. They didn't pretend to know what it was, but they thought it never changed, and they thought they were all at a comparable distance

Not just primitive tribes, but certain disciplines in European academia as late as the 1500s (hollow earth theory).

Even worse is people who really should know better use such crackpottery for their own agendas. Just yesterday, Jake Tapper speculated that the N Calif earthquakes were possibly caused/made worse by man-made climate change. Whether you believe in climate change or not, no one who's respected in the scientific community has linked climate change and earthquakes. Either Tapper is stupid (which I don't believe), or he's cynical with his commenting and thinks that OTHER people are stupid.

You can find plenty of similar examples on both sides of the spectrum, he's just one of the latest.

"very large tarp wrapping around your area with pinholes in it, allowing sunlight in?"

I'm a voracious reader, mostly history with some historical fiction in the mix. I can recall reading that some primitive peoples (American Indians, African tribes, someone else, I can't recall who???) actually thought stars were that very thing.

That's what my sister in law thinks.

So also uses the fact that Hillary once referred to a glass ceiling as proof...

You can't make this shit up...

To throw another monkey into the wrench and see what nut bags get up in arms about...

The night sky, is it truly stars in the sky? Or, is there a very large tarp wrapping around your area with pinholes in it, allowing sunlight in?

An old friend of mine came up with that idea, in a joking manner. But, could you imagine what kind up uproar would happen if an influencer cons people into that one?!