The Making of a Murder-Cheerer

Last week, I spent some time at the eye doctor to address periodic swelling, irritation, and pain in my left eye. This happens periodically, but it got especially bad during my trip to Florida (to the point where airline attendants asked if I needed paramedics to meet me once we landed). The doctor was quite nice but suggested that incidents like this are a symptom of my keratoconus worsening and there probably wasn't much to be done at this point other than hope it doesn't happen too often and ride it out when it does.

I say "at this point" because at an earlier point there was something to be done -- a surgical proceeding called corneal cross-linking. Cross-linking surgery doesn't "fix" keratoconus, it just stops further deterioration, but since keratoconus is a degenerative condition that's no small thing. I was slated to get cross-linking surgery while at Berkeley, but at the last moment my insurer denied coverage as not medically necessary since I could still see with contact lenses. Again, remember that what cross-linking does is stop degeneration -- that is, the surgery would preserve the status quo where I could see with contact lenses -- so the fact that I currently could see with contact lenses is exactly why the surgery was being recommended to me. Nonetheless, even though the surgery had been scheduled for months, the insurer issued its denial just a day or two before, giving me essentially no time to appeal or gather additional medical information to support why the surgery was, in fact, necessary.

Several years later (now in Portland), I was able to get the surgery -- but only in my right eye. My left eye had, in the intervening years, deteriorated to the point where it was no longer a candidate for the procedure. And that deterioration is likely permanent, and (given the periodic swelling etc.) possibly still ongoing. My doctor said that if things continue to get worse in that eye, the only real treatment option available is a full-blown corneal transplant -- quite a bit more intense (and expensive) than cross-linking would have been, and not something I'm especially excited to pursue. There's not even the karmic satisfaction of the insurer having to pay more, because I'm on different insurance now compared to when the surgery was initially denied!

My experience is, of course, not uncommon. We've all been swapping stories on this subject prompted by the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. My case is not to the degree of being denied life-saving care, but permanent vision loss in an eye is not exactly frivolous either. Like many Americans, I have persistent ambient anxiety about what would happen if I faced a major medical crisis, and that anxiety is less about the crisis itself and more wondering in what ways will my insurer try to screw me over in my most vulnerable moment in order to financially ruin me.

There are very, very good reasons for Americans to loathe their health insurance companies. But even still, it is alarming how many people are outright thrilled to have witnessed a street murder. The cause of this excitement is, no doubt, in significant part justifiable fury at the injustices health insurers wreak on regular people. But that more systemic explanation I think has to be cut with acknowledgment that a significant portion of people seem to be excited at the prospect of being justified in cheering a murder. They are luxuriating in this feeling of justified schadenfreude, and are encouraging others to feel similarly, and are hoping to feel it again and again.

No matter how one identifies the cause, such a situation is not a sign of a healthy society. For me, there were eerie echoes of the days after October 7, where we also saw too many people be not just thrilled at seeing Israelis murdered, but thrilled at their mutual, collectively reinforcing justifications at why they were right to be thrilled. Certainly, Thompson was far more directly complicit in injustice than a group of teenaged concertgoers, whose "complicity" was basically being Israelis full stop. But to the celebrators, this is a difference of degree and not kind -- they labored hard to establish why being Israeli was a form of culpable complicity for which the proper punishment was death and the proper affect was a hearty cheer. And that effort to stretch so one can properly enjoy the murder is powerful evidence that the desire to enjoy murders is the actual driving motivation, with the political or strategic apologias just epiphenomenal window dressing. How far down the pecking order at UHC is it warranted to be excited at extermination? To the adjusters? To the HR professionals? To the janitors? We all know the Tumblr accounts who would rush to point out we should cheer not just the death of the Himmlers but every German Nazi, top to bottom -- so why not apply that logic to UHC? Or to Israel? Or to any other institution complicit in systemic injustice -- a category which can include without too much in the way of struggle every institution? (This was one of the lessons of The Good Place -- while everyone has an obligation to try to do the right thing, overindulgence in "complicity" arguments makes everyone guilty and places everyone in hell).

The terrible realization many of us had, and are having again, is that for many the orientation towards Israel/Palestine or the American healthcare system isn't "let's create a just political structure for all" but rather "I want to see the right people be hurt," and the thirst for the latter is what drives the nominal political commitments rather than vice versa. Even where one can sympathize with the causes, this sort of outlook never leads anywhere good; more often than not, it's just people coming up with stories for why they should be permitted to revel in the misery of others. As a species, we should know well that our problem is not that we are too skittish about justifying brutality and violence, and so we should be hesitant about any political momentum which takes the form of accentuating and accelerating a popular desire to enjoy murder.

It is no answer to point out the many, many more people whose lives have been ruined by unjust insurance denials (UHC has the highest denial rate in the country, denying a full third of all filed claims). For one, anyone who reads a story about one of these denials and lets out a whoop and high fives would be a bad person too. More fundamentally, I also return to one of the most outstanding articles I've ever read, Robin West's "Sex, Law, and Consent," which does a superb job explaining how direct interpersonal injustices are qualitatively different than "systemic" ones even when the latter cause greater tangible loss than the former. We experience being robbed or burgled differently from being on the receiving end of wage theft, even if the latter might actually take more dollars from our pocket; West extends this analysis to how we think of rape vis-a-vis the broader suite of patriarchal norms which regularly generate "consent" to sexual activities that are not truly or enthusiastically desired. Again, this doesn't mean that UHC's conduct in the healthcare system isn't an example of serious injustice -- it is, just like wage theft is and just like structural sexism is -- but the point is that we're not simply delusional in viewing street murder as qualitatively different notwithstanding the fact that it is but one dead body.

I say all this because there is not, or should not be, a tension between "the murder of Brian Thompson is bad" and "we are obligated to create a more just and humane healthcare system that is not liable to the exploitations and predations of entities like UnitedHealthCare." Anxiety about insurer-driven financial ruin notwithstanding, and direct experience with insurer manipulation causing permanent medical injury notwithstanding, I never wanted Brian Thompson to die, and I cannot relate to thousands of internet strangers who did want him to die. What I want is for our health care system to work for us and to take care of us. That's all. My first response to Thompson's murder was to write:

The murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO is outrageous. We as a society must do everything in our power to ensure that a tragedy like this never occurs again. If that means implementing national universal healthcare so that anger over a failing private system isn't displaced onto violence, so be it.

And while yes, that was intentionally snarky, I also meant it with total earnestness. We should hate murder. And we should commit ourselves to creating a just healthcare system that doesn't generate justified seething hatred amongst ordinary Americans.

Yet here we see another element of our despairing time, which is that the proof is in the pudding in terms of what drives social change. Just like it may be sadly true that manipulative echo chambers are a more effective political strategy that earnest and honest engagement with people of diverse political views, it may be sadly true that violence and social disruption are able to drive necessary political change where persuasion and law fail. It is a bad precedent when we let terroristic violence drive even salutary social change, and the lesson to draw from that is to make salutary social changes without being prompted to do so by terroristic violence. And if we can't learn that lesson, then I'm at a loss except to say that it inherently puts us in a very grim place, and nobody should be excited to live there.

I have no answers here. But I again cannot help but feel that it is fundamentally unhealthy when people feel, and are encouraged to feel, excitement over murder. For too many people, the murder of Brian Thompson isn't about murder or even about generating justice in the healthcare space. It rather is an opportunity to enjoy the spectacle of a murder, and feel righteous in doing so. That instinct is one we should be very wary about letting flower unchecked, in ourselves or in others.

From Individuals to Institutions and Back Again

The "execution-style" killing of two NYPD police officers, apparently in retaliation for the Eric Garner and Michael Brown killings, has shaken up the emergent conversation about police violence. And reasonably so -- after all, it was a shockingly brutal slaying by someone who claimed to be acting under the same banner as that motivating the protesters from Ferguson to New York. And so perhaps it is unsurprising that we fall into familiar patterns, with the protester groups denouncing the killing and labeling it an isolated incident and police unions responding Mayor De Blasio and the protester community has blood on its hands.

In some ways, this conversation is very familiar, but in others it is quite different. We have not seen, to my knowledge, any serious efforts to dig up dirt on the slain NYPD officers -- use-of-force complaints or litigation records. Nor have we seen much in the way of deflecting the motives of the shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley. While Brinsley had posted messages on instagram indicating a desire to kill cops, he also shot his girlfriend in Baltimore earlier that day and later killed himself. One could argue that he wasn't the paradigm case of a calculating, rational actor, but rather a disturbed man with possible mental issues. But we haven't talked about that either.

This is not a complaint. This is a compliment. At the individual level, the relevant point of analysis is that two public servants were brutally murdered on the street, and that's horrifying. At the individual level, this is not the time for apologias for the shooter or insinuations that the victims deserved their fates. The way we're talking about this case, on the individual level, is how it should be. It's how it should be for all persons who are killed without justification.

At the institutional level, things grow more complicated. A very proper moral asymmetry, at the individual level, can't work when we try to situate this shooting as part of a broader social problem. The police union's hypothesis -- that these killings are attributable to efforts by the Mayor and other agitators to rile up community sentiment against the police -- is a hypothesis; specifically, it is a hypothesis about what caused the degradation in the relationship between the community and the police. It is not the only hypothesis on that score. At the institutional level, it is just valid (and far more likely) that it is police behavior that is the source of this mistrust and rage. The people aren't being whipped up by demagogues to feel thoughts not their own. This is organic.

This hypothesis doesn't justify, in any way, the shooting. To be crystal clear: even if it is the case that unjustifiable police behavior caused the sense of rage that contributed to this shooting, it would not mean that the shooting was justified. Normative and structural explanations are not the same thing; the move from individuals to institutions alters, among other things, what counts as victim-blaming. One can leverage our rightful aversion to victim-blaming to ends both good and ill; using it to close off important angles of inquiry falls into the latter camp. Realistically, the individual wrongdoer isn't necessarily going to have much bearing on how institutions should alter their behavior.

In any event, obviously there is a disjuncture here, between a populace that views itself as being preyed on by those paid to protect them, and a police force that thinks the community doesn't understand the realities of being a police officer. It's been said before, but it should be said again: Being a police officer is hard. It's hard for the very obvious reason that it requires the officers to put themselves in peril and to commit (in the words of a police chief I worked with back when I was practicing) "to run towards the danger." But that undersells the difficulty considerably, because part of a police officer's job is to do all that while still being trusted by their community. Being a cop would no doubt be easier -- albeit not easy -- if one could make arrests and conduct patrols without having to care about how one was perceived by the neighborhood. But that's not the way it works. If the people don't view the police as being on their side, then the police are doing a bad job no matter how many arrests they make or what the crime stats say. A community that feels constantly terrorized by their local police department is not being effectively policed even if the murder rate has flatlined.

Are people sometimes unfair in their appraisals? Sure they are. But "solely engaging with fair, high-minded people" isn't really part of a cop's job description either. The population is what it is; the burden is on the police to act in accordance with how the community wants the police to act.

Fixing this problem isn't about finding bad apples or folks with malign motives. When people say the problem isn't with a few bad cops, they're not (or at least shouldn't be) saying "because its about a lot of bad cops." They're saying that the search for bad cops -- in the sense of persons who deliberately and consciously abuse their authority -- is a misguided one. Those people exist, but they don't exhaust the problem, because the problem goes beyond finding some stereotypical Bull Connor types. Good people, who think they're doing good, can still be bad cops to the extent that the system of policing doesn't view its perception within the community as one of its metrics for success. That a person fails at their job doesn't make them a bad person, but neither does them not being a bad person mean they're a success. Being trusted by their community shouldn't be some bonus goal attained by the very best police departments. It is their job, as much of their job as putting away bad guys. If the community doesn't trust the police, then the police are failing at their most fundamental duty. It's as simple as that.

Reasons and Doubts

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to serve on a jury. When I have this thought, it's invariably followed up by amazement that juries ever convict anyone. It's the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard that trips me up. Officer Jones says he caught Smith with marijuana; Smith says Jones planted the evidence. Adams says he saw Green leaving the scene of the crime, Green says he was nowhere nearby. Daniels says Johnson attacked without provocation. Johnson says it was self-defense. It's not that I can't believe person A over person B. But can I really say that it's not even reasonable to think B is telling the truth and it's A who's lying? Sometimes there's a mountain of physical evidence that sufficiently tips the scales. But often it's simply about what narrative one believes.

I was thinking about this when reading Jack Chin's post (and the ensuing comment thread) on the Trayvon Martin case. Chin now has doubt as to whether the evidence is sufficient to establish "beyond a reasonable doubt" that a felonious murder was commited (particularly given Florida's putative standard whereby self-defense must be affirmatively disproven). I've had similar thoughts. It's not that I don't believe that Zimmerman killed Martin in circumstances which would constitute a murder. But can we say "beyond a reasonable doubt" that this is what happened? I'm not sure.

More troublesome is that Chin seems to think that an acquittal might be good for people of color because it would reject the validity of convicting a defendant based on "impeachment and insinuations about motive in the absence of meaningful evidence that they actually committed crime." Given that minorities are more likely to be vulnerable to this sort of prosecution, Chin argues, permitting Zimmerman "to be convicted based on thin and ambiguous evidence . . . will harm blacks and the poor much more in the long run." The problem is that acquittals are not precedents -- no black defendant will be able to point to a George Zimmerman acquittal and say "therefore, you must acquit me too." It's not as if Chai Vang was able to cite Bernard Goetz.

This observation leads to a more fundamental one. "Reasonable doubt," I suspect, is about whether juries can envision other plausible narratives of the events other than those which lead to a conviction. An all-White jury hopefully can envision "paranoid White vigilante attacks and kills unarmed Black teen" as plausible given the undisputed facts, but it probably can also envision "Black teen attacks Zimmerman and Zimmerman, in fear of his life, pulls the trigger." With two plausible narratives, one which leads to a "not guilty" verdict, then there is "reasonable doubt" and there cannot be a conviction. If the races were reversed, however, and a Black man jumped an unarmed White teenager walking home from the convenience store, there isn't even a controversy about this case. The only "plausible" narrative to the White jury's eyes would be "Black thug kills innocent White kid." An attempted "self-defense" narrative would be laughed out of court. "Reasonable doubt" is not entirely disconnected from the individual facts of individual cases, but it also has much to do with the limits of our imagination, and those boundaries are set by forces long predated voir dire.

One can say, perhaps rightly, that Zimmerman should not pay the price simply because we do not do justice to Black defendants. But the systematic inequality would still remain, and this case most certainly will not be "precedent" that will help any minority defendant.

Automatic Self-Defense, Redux

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, and in particular this piece by Michael Skolnik on how he has the privilege of "never looking suspicious", I thought I might repost this piece of mine from 2010, wherein I relate the following story:

I've never been stopped "on the street" by a cop. But I do remember one time when I was a teenager playing "hide and go seek in the dark" by my house. I was crouching behind a leaf pile in my front yard, wearing a dark hoodie, when a cop pulls up behind me. It could not have possibly looked more like a stakeout, and I knew it. So I stood up and heartily waved at the cop, who looked at me for a moment, then kept driving. There is no way in hell he would have just kept driving if I was Black.

See also this one from 2006 ("They'll pull me aside sometimes because they say I fit the description. Yeah. Young black male. I always 'fit the description.'").

The George Tiller Had It Coming Homicide Endorsement Act

A law currently working its way through the South Dakota legislature (it just passed a committee vote, so at the very least it isn't only a few cranks) would establish an affirmative defense in homicide cases where the killer was attempting to protect the life of a fetus. On face, this would seem to sanction the murder of abortion providers -- and there is little evidence that this isn't exactly the outcome the legislators proposing the bill had in mind.

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state's legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person "while resisting an attempt to harm" that person's unborn child or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman's father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.

Scary.

The Invisible House

CNN asks how it is that 11 Cleveland-area women could have gone missing and nobody noticed. Looking at the pictures, the answer seems obvious: None of them was a pretty White blonde.

And there is another suspicion echoing among Cleveland residents, particularly in the black community: that the lives of poor black women aren't worth much, certainly less than had they been suburban white women.

Gosh, whatever could give them that idea.

Edwin Valero Arrested on Suspicion of Murder

WBC lightweight champion Edwin Valero has been arrested in Venezuela on suspicion of murdering his wife.

Venezuelan Federal Police Chief Wilmer Flores said Valero was arrested after police found the body of his wife, Jennifer Carolina Viera, in a hotel in the city of Valencia.

Flores said Valero left the hotel room around dawn on Sunday and told the hotel's security personnel that he had killed Viera.

Flores told state television that police found three stab wounds on Viera's body. He said Valero was transferred a local police precinct, "where we are headed to take samples needed for the investigation of the case" and to question the boxer.

Valero's lawyer, Milda Mora, did not immediately answer telephone calls seeking comment.

The 28-year-old boxer has been in trouble with the law before.

Last month, Valero was brought up on charges of harassing his wife and threatening medical personnel who treated her at a hospital in the western city of Merida.

Police arrested Valero then following an argument with a doctor and nurse at the hospital, where his wife was being treated for a series of injuries, including a punctured lung and broken ribs.

Valero entered a Venezuelan rehabilitation center under court order on March 28 for treatment of drug and alcohol addiction, Mora said at the time. The boxer's attorney said Viera was injured when she fell down a flight of stairs at the couple's home while checking a water tank located on the roof.

Valero is (was) a national hero in Venezuela; it is unclear how a trial against him will progress. And I should add that he is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Nonetheless, his track record is not good. If he's guilty, he should be locked away for a long, long time.

H/T: BLH. In the comments there, someone is reporting Venezuelan sources stating that Valero has confessed, and will claim self-defense (he's saying his wife attacked him with a knife).

UPDATE: Valero has reportedly hung himself while in prison.

Justice

Scott Roeder has been convicted of first-degree murder in the slaying of Dr. George Tiller.

How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Islamic Republic

HBO's series Rome focused on the exploits of two Roman soldiers, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, weaving a tale of how these relatively minor characters had a huge impact on the course of human history itself. In the episode How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic, for example, a friend of a man Pullo had killed attacks Pullo as he is escorting Marc Antony to the Senate. The ensuing brawl is seen as an assassination attempt by Pompey, and the political fallout of the event directly leads to the collapse of the Roman Republic. And so we see how one man, a bit player by all accounts, can through his actions change the tide of history.

I think of this episode when I reflect upon the death of Neda Agha-Soltani, whose shooting at the hands of a Basij sniper is becoming the banner around which pro-democracy protesters are rallying. Neither Ms. Agha-Soltani, nor her killer, were major political figures. The sniper likely will remain anonymous for all time. Moussavi did not intend for to die, and I am sure that Ahmadinejad did not wish her to be killed.* And yet, in their deathly duo, they may be the ones who cause the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran in its current form.

There is much happening in Iran's halls of power, which will undoubtedly have great impact on the future of that nation. But everyone's best laid plans can be swept away by the squeeze of a single over-zealous triggerman, and the martyrdom of a brave young woman.

* Not out of any tenderness of his heart, but because the fallout from her death may be the event which finally causes him to break his grip on power.

How Much Time?

A new ad out tries to force McCain into that question pro-lifers never want to answer: if abortion should be a crime, how much time should women who have them serve? (Via)



I've yet to hear a coherent justification (at least, one that isn't nakedly paternalistic -- e.g., women are irrational creatures controlled by their emotions, so they can't be punished) for why abortion can be outlawed (as murder), but the murderers should get off scot-free. I suppose if someone doesn't think abortion is murder, but still can come up with a reason for it to barred, they could dodge out of this, but the few arguments I've heard on those lines are also pretty paternalistic (it's a serious decision, and we can't know if you're taking it seriously enough unless you're willing to prove it somehow to the state).

In any event, it's a question that McCain and his allies shouldn't be allowed to dodge. But I agree with Bean: it's a pretty new tactic (at least in mainstream argumentation), and nobody knows how new tactics will play out.

The Old Standby

I don't know why this always works, but it does:

I decided to go up to the young female students who were passing out their "genocide leaflets" to the students walking by and chat.

I asked each one if they wanted to overturn Roe vs. Wade and make abortion illegal. They all said yes, of course. I asked them if abortion was murder. They all said yes, of course.

I then asked each of them, once this is made illegal, what the preferred prison sentence should be for a woman that has an abortion.

The first girl I talked to seemed bewildered by the question. She literally had never thought about that before. She was willing to stand in front of these horrible pictures and accuse people of murder and genocide, yet she had never even thought what type of penalties women would get if this was made illegal. She looked like a deer caught in the headlights, so I let her go to ponder just what in the hell she's doing out here.

And so on and so forth. You'd think someone in the pro-life movement would have figured out this paradox by now.

Actually, I suspect there are some pro-lifers willing to take their position to the logical conclusion and support long prison sentences (or capital punishment) for women who have abortions. But there are definitely others who are not willing to hold that. What's missing is a terribly compelling reason why.

Also, "Bare Foot and Progressive" is a fantastic name for a blog.

Via

Killing Spree

Last year, I blogged, appalled, on a quote from a good American citizen who said that we should "just shoot" any illegal immigrants we find crossing the border. Then I got a comment from a charming fellow who told me that "We could shoot them all in the back of the head and line huge pits with their bodies and their is no harm-no foul. These people don't have a right to breathe my air let alone to be treated 'humanely.'"

And today, US Senator Tom Coburn joined the fun, asking why agents couldn't just shoot people fleeing them at the border, even if they're unarmed, even if they pose no threat. Ummm....because that'd be murder? But don't let that stop you. People say rap music encourages violence? Let's start with the US Senate!

Awwww Fuck! Chuck's on a killing spree again
With guillotines for men
I walk around town with a frown on my face
Fuck the whole world, fixin' to catch a murder case
The murder rate

May increase if your caught up in the world
While it's dyin', I guarentee your fryin' cause I am
On the verge of knockin' muthafuckas out for no reason
Once I get down there'll be no breathin' it seems when
Muthafuckas wanna calm down, put his palm down
Seems I gots to lay the law down
Now its on pow what you to do? I'm askin' you

Step to face I'll break your ass in two, bastard you
Rather swim in some fuckin' hot tar
Before you fuck wit Willie D cause what I got for
Your ass will make ya shit your meal
Cause it's die muthafuckas, die muthafuckas still.

--"Still," Geto Boys.