> advocating for the murder of company leaders is essentially a roll of the chaos dice attached to a wish that somehow the resulting situation will sort itself out.
I think this misses the 'fuck it, I'm going out like a grenade' aspect. Someone facing death or long-term painful chronic illness due to lack of access to medical care, and who has the perception that this is in part or wholly due to health insurance problems, might not care that they're as you said, rolling the chaos dice. They won't be around for long to deal with those consequences. They might want to roll those dice as a desperate attempt to exert some control, to make some kind of statement, to a world they feel has trodden on them.
There's a kind of logic to it, one borne from pain and desperation. But there's a reason the cliche about a cornered rat exists.
I think in the case of something like healthcare, which can be literally life and death, these are not entirely separate. Many cheered LM's actions because they or someone they knew had been hurt by the healthcare insurance industry in the US, which again goes back to those feelings of pain, desperation and lack of control that they feel.
I do agree that the trend for the more average person to be okay with or even advocate for violence as a solution is disturbing. But a massive part of why it's disturbing is that it's a symptom. There are always fringe groups who resort to it as their primary approach, but when your regular person starts looking at violence as the way to solve things, there's some kind of broader sickness happening - a large scale societal malaise.
My great grandmother used to compare war, revolution, mass civil unrest and other such breakouts of violence as a fever for the body that is humanity; She'd lived through far too many of these fevers. They're rarely idiopathic, and while they might help fight off the current sickness, they also often killed. And even if you survive a fever, it's never a particularly pleasant experience.
Words have meaning. Care denial is a serious problem that causes much harm and requires a solution, but to call it violent is to make the word meaningless.
It is not. The care denial, coupled with financial siphoning to pad a risk pool is a form of inflicted harm. I do not qualify unreasonable financial shenanigans as exempt from being considered violent. I in fact find it aggravates above traditional violence because it is systematized, and automated, thus amplifying the scope and reach of the harm caused.
To constrain violence to physicality is to ignore and minimize the myriad creative ways we've concocted as a society to inflict harm. Maybe to you it seems to dilute meaning, but to me that's more of an indication of a dependence on the narrowed definition on your part, than a problem with the increased scope per se.
I suspect we feel the same way about the actual harms of care denial, i.e. they’re unacceptable, immoral/unethical, cause unnecessary suffering and death, are tragic and horrific, and reforms are required.
But we disagree about the use of language. Many people reduce complexities to the most extreme word they can think of. It’s very popular these days to call many things “violent”.
The issue is that this kind of reductionism makes people stop taking the word seriously, and by proxy the people using it. In my opinion, this ultimately hurts the underlying message.
> To constrain violence to physicality is to ignore and minimize the myriad creative ways we've concocted as a society to inflict harm
This is fallacious and untrue. There is no reason to believe that using precise/accurate (and no less expressive) language is synonymous with ignoring harms. To reiterate the point above, overloading language is far more likely to cause this problem because at some point people have no idea what the word means to the person using it.
I consider myself “woke” by the original definition and spirit of the word. But you’d get 10 different answers about what that actually means these days.
The looser these definitions become, the less able we are to communicate effectively and this is one of the many ingredients driving increased polarization and the feeling that we exist in separate realities.
I think this misses the 'fuck it, I'm going out like a grenade' aspect. Someone facing death or long-term painful chronic illness due to lack of access to medical care, and who has the perception that this is in part or wholly due to health insurance problems, might not care that they're as you said, rolling the chaos dice. They won't be around for long to deal with those consequences. They might want to roll those dice as a desperate attempt to exert some control, to make some kind of statement, to a world they feel has trodden on them.
There's a kind of logic to it, one borne from pain and desperation. But there's a reason the cliche about a cornered rat exists.