One view is that the western idea of "good taste" was informed by people looking at greek and roman statues and buildings and incorrectly assuming they were always intended to be plain.
It's funny how this comment chain is about how names stick to ideas in somewhat arbitrary ways, and you are using "Elon" to explain a personal policy for information grooming.
This seems like a plot to redirect residential Chinese traffic through VPNs, which are supposedly mostly operated by only a few entities with a stomach for dishonest maneuvering and surveillance.
I would have liked to personally drive a cattlerod through Epstein's brain, and yet I don't think there was anything wrong with Stallman's comments. How do you square that? Maybe you have not properly characterized the situation.
The violence was his only option to be know by many people. Wanting to be know by many people is not valid use of violence. That is what I propose. If you cant convince people to follow you in your community and then enlarge it like any other political operatives in the same period did, then you accept that you failed to find followers.
Bombing is not valid option. I am saying that Ted Kaczynski had no option other then violence complete nonsense.
A dead woman on the floor with blood pooling out of her head sends a weaker message in this respect than an appropriately-decorated piece of cloth being raised? I suspect you may be a little too shaken by recent events to be thinking clearly. Thoughts and prayers, my friend.
What we have seen conclusive proof of tonight is that police are happy to work with or at least to allow fascist mobs to storm the government, while they are willing to maim and kill leftist protesters against police brutality at the slightest signs of provocation.
The fact that a woman was shot by police in last night's protest is a tragedy, as all human life is precious. But a democracy can't bow down to mob rule for fear of violence. The protesters should have never even been allowed to get near the Capitol building while Congress was in session, and in that case perhaps this loss of life could have also been avoided.
Police brutality and the police culture of violence before other solutions is also something that has been discussed in leftist circles the entire year. It is a culture that must be changed, which will surely be a monumental task, if it even is attempted. Still, the alternative is not simply allowing mobs to attack federal institutions with impunity.
It's all the worse that the right is trying to paint her death as police brutality.
We need to be clear, she was shot while trying to force her way through a barricaded door when law enforcement was trying to safely get elected officials and other innocent people out of harm's way, and she was only shot after multiple warnings.
I fully agree that the terrorists shouldn't have been allowed into the building, but it happened, and given that, if this isn't a textbook example of a situation where law enforcement was justified in using lethal force, I'm not sure what is.
In case you have forgotten, last year saw literal insurrectionist leftist communes that took over parts of cities, and were left unsuppressed for weeks. This is definitely quite an escalation, but to me, a European looking from the outside in, it looks anything but unilateral.
How are protesters against police brutality 'insurrectionists'? Were they trying to stop an election from being certified? Were they trying to even overthrow elected officials?
Not to mention, the largest difference is that during the BLM protests you saw daily police brutality against the protesters from day one, with tear gas, rubber bullets, etc. You did NOT see police taking selfies on the steps of the buildings they were supposed to keep the protesters out of.
But you also saw police officers in demonstrations of solidarity (either photo-ops or sincere).
I think if you compare a single event with a large number of different events, you’ll find examples where one is worse by some measure and others where one is better. I don’t really want to comment on the recent events or the validity of the argument (or it’s spirit), but I think it probably isn’t reasonable to compare a single event with the aggregate of many different events.
Are you referring to the Red House? You believe that a fenced in house that was sometimes called an 'autonomous zone' (as far as I can tell, most often by people outside - the mayor of Portland for example apologized for calling it such) was closer to an insurrection than people seeking to overturn the legal results of the election entering the Capitol building while congress was in session?
Even if the people defending the Red House did call it an autonomous zone, their only real demands were to protect the livelihood of one family. They did not seek to expand, they did not try to gain political power from it,they did nothing that I would actually view as a significant attempt to challenge the authority of the state beyond a very specific case.
Even there, I understand the name "Autonomous Zone" was only used by the people occupying the area between June 8 and June 13 - afterwards they decided to call it an "Organized Protest" instead. They also never challenged the authority of the state itself (except for police), and all of their demands were social, not political. They eventually peacefully dismantled most/all of the area anyway.
I fail to see how this can be presented as comparable in gravity with people attacking the Capitol building with the intent of overturning the result of the federal election.
The fact remains that BLM related protests in 2020 were handled much more harshly than this. If this were a BLM protest, not only would the protestors have been all arrested and/or killed, but the media would be treating it like a national emergency.
And it's not just the fact that the police allowed it to happen or that the military was not asked to intervene until way too late.
It's also the alarmingly not-alarmed media response. What happened to "thugs" or "rioters" or "enemy combatants"?
Are we watching the same news channels? They were called "terrorists" on several cable news channels, and (fairly) "insurrectionists" on just about every news channel. I also heard "thugs" more than once. I heard the event as a whole called a "sacrilege".
So does the American flag for a lot of people, that's why we need a military, right? Did you know this woman was a veteran, by the way? She swore an oath to protect that flag, not the confederate flag. Try reconciling this in your mind, maybe you'll understand what's happened better.
I'm not justifying it, just giving context for why folks are alarmed, especially for people from other countries who don't necessarily have context for obscure US symbols.
And yes, the American flag is problematic in its own way.
He said "how about this symbolism!" and talked about a piece of cloth. I'm now asking what an unarmed woman with blood pooling out of her head symbolizes. If it helps you answer the question at all, she was also a US military veteran with four tours of service.
Symbols usually become symbols due to them being glaring examples of an injustice. George Floyd became a symbol, for example, due to the obvious unreasonableness of him being killed violently on the street when an officer responded to the use of a counterfeit bill. People don't consider that a reasonable reaction.
If you had asked any American a week ago about what they think is a reasonable reaction for an officer faced with people trying to surpass a barricade, that has been set up for security reasons inside a government building to protect the people inside, after said building has been trespassed by a crowd breaking through the windows, I don't think "shooting" would have been unexpected.As some people pointed out half jokingly, "you can't even try that in GTA".
I don't see the relevance of mentioning that woman's connection to the military either, other than emphasising that she should have known better.
In opposition, I think the flag that symbolises the right of people to own slaves, being flown without consequence in the meeting place of congress while the officers stand around and take selfies with the mob, sends a clear message to the descendants of slaves about how much can they expect to be protected and represented by that democracy. Even more so in a climate where they have been violently repressed for protesting inequality.
Today's "Confederate flag" is literally a rebel battle flag from a horrifying civil war.
The fact that said civil war was instigated by the rebels specifically to protect the institution of slavery is just bonus.
It is a very powerful symbol. Anyone who claims it's about Southern heritage is being deliberately ignorant. It's blatantly oppositional, self-serving, and violent.
It's unfortunate that you're being downvoted, you make an excellent point.
George Floyd was murdered by police during a routine arrest.
Ashli Babbitt was executed by police for trespassing during a protest.
Both of these (and many others) are powerfully symbolic: of an overbearing and largely unaccountable police state, in which its enforcers use violence as a first resort.
George Floyd was a common criminal coming down from a large fentanyl dose (nevertheless RIP), Ashli Babbitt was a military veteran acting in an expressly conscientious manner alongside a large gathering of other like-minded political activists. Surely these are both tragic losses, and yet the common criminal received immeasurably greater sympathies here and elsewhere. What's going on? Were BLM grievances not rooted in an equitable respect for the sanctity of life and an earnest desire for peaceful coexistence? Perhaps this explains the months of undirected destruction that followed across the country in the middle of what was represented as a dire pandemic? Maybe these people are hypocrites, useful idiots, bigots, and losers?
From what I remember the common criminal was not resisting the arrest and got slowly suffocated by a police officer using a technique that is not sanctionned for neutralizing suspects.
The military veteran - gathering with like minded people who thought they were sent there to make a coup and storm the capitole and one of them was carrying colsons so who knows what else they planned to do - try to get further in the capitole, with the support of a mob behind her singing threats, to wreak havoc.
How you think your attempt to fabricate an alternative reality on HN is going to fly is beyond me.
> Were BLM grievances not rooted in an equitable respect for the sanctity of life and an earnest desire for peaceful coexistence?
GF was slowly put to death. Ashli Babbit broke through a doorglass after breaking into the capitole with people who had previously brought the flag down and claimed to overturn a democratic election. I don't see this act as a sign of wanting a peaceful coexistence.
Yeah, this is a tragedy and a failure of the VA as well.
I’m sure there is a program (or several) to help our vets adjust to civilian life but it needs to be updated to help build community so they aren’t as likely to get sucked into Qanon or similar cults like she did.
Separately, we need to continue to raise our expectations of police ability to de-escalate situations. This is one of many, many unarmed civilians killed by police in recent years. Normally they aren’t storming the capitol, but it should still be possible for police / secret service to de-escalate a situation like this. It won’t happen until our DAs and various state attorneys start charging cops that kill.
It’s not a schtick. This woman was apparently sucked into Qanon, a cult that targets soldiers & veterans and apparently went from someone who spent more than a decade respecting a strict chain of command in the air force to breaking into the nation’s capitol.
While climbing through a window that had the glass smashed out she was shot. Shooting an intruder is like the most protected type of self defense there is, so it’s to be expected when breaking into any building, no? So what happened to make her think this wouldn’t get her killed?
That doesn’t make it any less of a tragedy, even more so. Someone that served honorably shouldn’t be left alone to get sucked into all of this.
That said, in the video I can’t hear anyone issue a verbal command such as “Get back or we’ll shoot!” or anything like that. There should have been de-escalation at this point IMO. There were other ways to deal with this aside from shooting her.
(This is a problem with probably every law enforcement agency in the country, a very recent public example is the Breonna Taylor case where police chose one of the most dangerous possible ways to serve a warrant and created a deadly situation where there was none before)
> That said, in the video I can’t hear anyone issue a verbal command such as “Get back or we’ll shoot!” or anything like that.
Reminder that the rules of engagement for the US army are way more rigorous than those of the police forces and engagements are scrutinized more thoroughly. There should have been warnings until there was no other way to keep the protesters out of the perimeter.
Now that I think about that woman's profile: could it be that this veteran, because of her training, was expecting to hear warnings, didn't and so thought it was safe to keep moving forward ? We'll never know. I have seen the scene and there are other elements I can't explain. We'll never know the whole truth.
It's so sad that people who served their country for years get swallowed in this.
It's absurd to intimate the grievances people have surrounding the 2020 election are cult conspiracies. I have enough reasons to dislike Trump, and I'll tell you this election was an absolute disaster. It's obvious to any neutral party.
This is utterly non-responsive. I was noting it's wrong to interpret these people's actions as QAnon directives. Perhaps they merely have a brain and therefore have low confidence in the legitimacy of 2020 election results in contested states.
Yes, of course, excuse me. I should have said they are natural high-degree predators. It should also be noted socialization has a direct relationship with heightened predatory behavior in sociopaths: higher socialization translates into better understanding of how to manipulate people. Whereas in non-disordered individuals, socialization fosters empathy and compassion.
I know Shkreli. He's a great kid. Much better than most pharma execs, believe me. This "bad guy" image is all illusion. He had to take the fall for the real nasty people, the real ruthless operators who know how to politick. Analyze Shkreli's mistakes, and you'll notice he was always far too honest and forthright. Good people tend to wear their child-like nature as if it were a shield - but in the big leagues it only gets you hit. His only flaw was he isn't a hardened scammer; the professionals came down on him because he was a talented outsider bringing attention to inconvenient places. Shkreli Did Nothing Wrong.
Buying the rights to a series of obscure but lifesaving medications with no real substitutes and increasing their prices by anywhere from 5x to 56x is "nothing wrong"?
Many other pharma companies do this, it is an activity basically encouraged by the fda orphaned drug program. Also keep in mind the dynamics of how people pay for drugs in the us. For the most part the victim is insurance companies, and in a diluted fashion healthy americans forced to buy health insurance. If you're sick and financially needy, there are usually ways to obtain the drug without the 56x markup.
You're mixing up your concepts here: orphaned drugs are those that would not be profitable to produce without a subsidy. The drugs Shkreli acquired were profitable and still produced, but out of patent (so they were cheap) and without an approved generic version (so there was no existing competition).
Legally, it was above board, and financially, it was sensible regulatory arbitrage. Morally, though, it was reprehensible.
Sorry you're right, I had the terminology wrong. It's abandoned, not orphaned, and the specific program is FDA NCIE.
IIRC this program grants advertising exclusivity (weaker than patent exclusivity) as a carrot to give companies "IP protection-lite" in exchange for re-testing old drugs under the FDA phase flow.
"If you're sick and financially needy, there are usually ways to obtain the drug without the 56x markup."
Which is subsidized by the customers of insurance companies that do pay the 56x markup, which are funded by the employers and individuals who pay for private insurance or tax dollars that pay for medicare. There's no free lunch.
Why shouldn't a pharmaceutical company with the expertise to identify and acquire an undervalued drug be rewarded? Aren't these precisely the people who deserve to be granted the privilege to allocate further capital? That's the whole point of capitalism, right? That's what HackerNews is all about? If there's some exceptional nuance here, we should explore this rigorously.
Drug design isn't free. That R&D money is coming from somewhere. Where's it come from in your world?
why shouldn't a life saving treatment be exploited for personal financial gain? hmm let me think about it for a minute. Meanwhile, when the future "allocation of capital" is to spend $2m on a rap album, I think your argument falls apart.
Sociopaths often do small goods to whitewash their ills. Saying that any action Shrkeli might take is ok because some other purported endeavor is designed to help people is a perfect example. To say that the only way to get money for medical research is to exploit society and its regulatory environment, sounds to me like a bad faith argument, since it's so easy to come up with counter examples (VC, public grants, prior profits from normal development/sales cycles).
Besides, Shrkeli is in prison for securities fraud unrelated to his pharma shenanigans, so how does that work when he's actually a terrific person?
> Meanwhile, when the future "allocation of capital" is to spend $2m on a rap album, I think your argument falls apart.
He spent a tiny portion of his earned wealth to honor and support the Arts--in particular he supported struggling African American rap artists with a long history of strong performance and depth. Shkreli is a bona fide Rennaissance man, and I certainly do not hold this gesture against him. I am tempted even to call it charity.
> Besides, Shrkeli is in prison for securities fraud unrelated to his pharma shenanigans, so how does that work when he's actually a terrific person?
His "financial crimes" are nearly universally acknowledged even in this thread to have been contrived by his political enemies in retaliation for his more famous antics which were unambiguously legal. The case they brought against him was an absolute joke, and he would have been acquitted of all eight charges (instead of just five!) if he had been given a fair trial. Then, to further make the crooked lawfare obvious, they absolutely slammed him at sentencing with an outrageous ruling that departed dramatically from federal guidelines and rulings in similar cases, including those involving his "co-conspirators"! It was an unambiguous "f_ck you" to an American hero who deserves nothing but respect and admiration. He rose into wealth and prominence in a highly technical field despite coming from virtually nothing by the force of sheer talent and motivation, and the established powers that be were really rubbed the wrong way. This is all yet another sad case of feelings of inferiority by bug-souled racists clashing with pvre Albanian Excellence.
Shkreli's company didn't "design" squat, it bought existing drugs where the patent period had already expired and the R&D costs were paid off.
Also, funnily enough, in an actual capitalist environment you couldn't do this, because a competitor would immediately undercut you. However, the drugs market is heavily regulated, and Skhreli exploited the fact that it would take years and cost a lot of money for any putative competitor to get a generic version through FDA approvals.
> it would take years and cost a lot of money for any putative competitor to get a generic version through FDA approvals
It's more than that, the FDA grants advertising exclusivity, which is de jure weaker than patents (the patent office and the law regulates patent criteria, the FDA cannot) but is de facto just as effective, and is an IP lock on the product. (I would also call this "not really free market capitalism")
You're talking about this one drug in question, Daraprim. He actively funded the development of several new drugs you've never heard of, and sending Shkreli to prison was literally a crime against humanity. I don't think you know anything about Shkreli you haven't read in neatly packaged hit pieces.
He pulled the same trick with Thiona, Chenodal, Vecamyl and probably more -- it was on the record as his own company Turing's strategy after all.
As noted, this was all legal and I agree that he was railroaded to jail for essentially completely unrelated wrongdoings, but there's no universe where he's not a scumbag.
When he used that money to fund the production of substitutes, and provided it for free to those who didn't have insurance, then how does your viewpoint change?
The marginal cost of an additional course of the drug is negligible. What makes you think Shkreli would have ever withheld it from the uninsured? Lust for death? That'd be an odd quality for a pharma guy, he'd be in the wrong profession. You're thinking maybe mortician or mercenary.
If you're such a champion of insurance companies, there are literally hundreds of personal injury attorneys (read: serial fraudsters) and their pet "doctors" who deserve to be sentenced to lifetimes of forced labor before Shkreli deserves to serve a second in prison (for securities fraud, btw). Where's the passion against ambulance chasers? Not enough bloggers writing hit pieces on 2nd rate bug-souled parasites? Why not? Why's the gifted Brooklyn immigrant from a war-torn country you've never heard of get all the heat?
Because these scams have been going on forever. They're built into the system by the parasitizers whom it protects. It's "the way things work". If you catch onto the grift, if you even come close to it as an outsider, that's when they start making trouble for you. That's what happened with Shkreli. Send him to prison on some unrelated charge, drag him through the mud, then celebrate the defeat of your "villain". And totally miss the point. You changed nothing. You took out a scapegoat for people who are effectively real life caricatures of the imaginary villain they built up for you to strike down. You don't have a problem with Shkreli, you have a problem with our clown-world healthcare system. The real world doesn't run on warm sentiments you for whatever reason don't associate with Shkreli's face. It runs on THE RULE OF LAW, and you haven't even engaged it except in some contorted vengeful fashion against a wholly lawful (and might I say lofty-spirited) young man. Shkreli should be living free right now, and your complaints should be directed to your legislator.
He committed the worst sin in Corporate America - he told the truth. And he exposed the underbelly of the American pharmaceutical system. And someone had to go down for both of those things, and it sure as shit wasn't going to the CEO of the larger, far more powerful pharmas.
This guy might be a dickhead, but last I checked, being a dickhead isn't a crime; and speaking of crime, the shit they trumped up for him was shit that gets done a hundred times a year, at far larger scale, with much worse consequences than what he did. And what was the end result of Martin's actions, once the dust settled? He made a profit for his investors.
Its a fucking disgrace, is what it is. This is why the American people have no faith left, because every goddamned institution has been co-opted by money, and where at least in the past, they had the good fucking grace to deny it and keep it hidden, now they blatantly flaunt it, because they know that not only can you not do anything about it, you're too fat and happy to bother risking anything yourself.
Nothing will change until half this country is starving in the street. And even then, I doubt anything'll change.
I for one am absolutely appalled by the virulent anti-Albanianism which has somehow taken root in my HackerNews. It is my earnest hope and prayer that we may open our hearts and minds to these oft victimized people and understand their storied history and potential. All peoples are capable of great beauty and accomplishment - including Albanians - and it strikes me deep in my soul to witness the unjust downfall of such an exemplary young man who had risen above hardship and disadvantage to build something so great. In my mind there is nothing more responsible for the unearned hostility he has suffered than brutish prejudice, and I hope he still has time to complete his grand visions for a future with fewer life-threatening illnesses threatening humanity despite these unfortunate setbacks.
Hacker to hacker, stay strong Shkreli, my brother. We support you.
