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More on the left’s big slobbering love affair with Luigi Mangione — 37 Comments

1. All this is one reason I’ve ghosted my liberal/Democrat/leftist (former) friends.

   But not the only reason.

2. That was Jimmy Kimmel, right? I’m not sure, ’cause I don’t watch late night TV. But two things:

   -I now remember WHY I don’t watch late-night TV

   -I also wonder WHY ANYONE watches late-night TV.

   This is worse than sick. I guess I’d call it sick-sick.

3. I have had some conversations with such lefties in the past. When they talk about using violence to get their way, I just inform them that they probably don’t want to do that. I then tell them that if they really stir up us folks on the right, that we on the right have most of the guns and ammo, and know how to use them. Then they suddenly aren’t so cocky about wanting to use violence.

   But it seems most of those violent lefties are like the cretins in Hamas et al, they don’t want a fair, stand-up, fight (because they know they would get their rear ends kicked). Instead, they will try to fight from ambush, like vandalizing other folks’ houses late at night. It would be a pity for them if neighborhoods starting taking turns with late-night guard duty, eh? 🙂

   And, just to cheeze off the left some more, I am waiting for someone to make waterproof stickers of Luigi (especially that arrogant picture of him with his mouth open) so those folks can install those stickers in urinals in various men’s restrooms around the country!

4. The ideological fanatics on the left are determined to reap the whirlwind.

5. I am a gun guy, I do a lot of shooting, including competition shooting at steel targets against the clock, and I noticed several things the gunman did when he shot an unarmed man in the back. The gunman did not seem to have a lot of control of his shots however he was successful in killing his victim and when I first saw the killing my reaction was that this was a performance, the gunman for sure knew there were cameras present and he wanted to make his statement for the whole world.

   The gunman, and I refuse to use his name appears to wanted to be caught and not dissapear from the media, no real effort to lose his weapon and slip away and he will become another Timothy McVeigh who wants his day in court. Perhaps it is good that this wacko didn’t kill a bunch of kids in his effort to become the news lead for a few days. I think this is just one more spoiled, super educated, young asshole who wants to make his statement about something and we don’t do things that way in our nation. This young man is not a hero of any sort, he is just one more little weasel worm who slithers along causing trouble and killing a man who was not harming him. If his victim was harming the shooter we have courts where we can settle those disputes and we are not a people or a nation who settles disputes with a gun shot on the street in New York or anywhere else in this nation. Now his actions will go into the court system and we will see the outcome.

6. When they tell you they want you dead, or will gleefully dance on your corpse when you are, maybe you should believe them & start acting accordingly.

   At some point, and we may be mighty mighty close to it, the blowback against the left is going to make Tiananmen Square look like a church picnic.

7. I have previously thought that Mangione is a severe paranoid schizohrenic, and continue to think so.
   All the chatter “understanding him” from the Left is simply mindless or brainwashed chatter, unreason.
   John, I seriously doubt there will be a violent blowback, ever. Those on the conservative Right simply will never do that.

8. Old Texan:

   “. . . we are not a people or a nation who settles disputes with a gun shot IN THE BACK on the street in New York. . .” FIFY (fixed it for you.)

   We might scoff at the dime store novels that made Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson famous, but we still don’t shoot the people we’re angry with IN THE BACK. Even the most craven gang-bangers are above that.

   I’m a shooter too: IDPA, RF bench rest, long range steel silhouettes, etc. I’m not sure it makes a lot of difference if he is spoiled and from a super-rich family, but there’s something wrong with the shooter’s head and he needs to be locked up, probably forever.

   And yes, he was really not a very accomplished as a shooter. He apparently printed a frame for his Glock, then held onto it. Why? If he was able to print one, he could print another. Why not just throw it in the lake? I take that as hubris. And we all know what that leads to.

   I don’t think he was trying to avoid capture, I think he believed he was on a righteous mission and didn’t have to be sneaky about it. Deluded, but there you are.

9. Cicero:

   I continue to wonder what evidence you’re basing the idea of severe schizophrenia on. I haven’t read or seen anything to support it – which doesn’t mean such evidence won’t emerge.

10. F:

    I don’t know how old you are, but in the 60s and early 70s leftists did indeed shoot people in the back. And worse. See this. If you want even more of the horrible details of what was done to them, see this.

11. I have previously thought that Mangione is a severe paranoid schizohrenic, and continue to think so.

    Cicero:

    Perhaps. However, you haven’t made the case beyond an appeal to your own authority.

12. The left hates capitalism and especially American capitalism, and doesn’t think health insurance should be a business at all. Therefore, health insurance companies are evil. Brian Thompson was a successful capitalist who was CEO of a health insurance company.

    Health insurance and health care are pretty far from capitalism, though I don’t know if the rank-and-file Left knows that (their politicians certainly do). Federal and state governments are United Healthcare’s largest customers. Public-private “partnership” is maybe the nice way to say it, “crony capitalism” a little less nice.

13. I think there are plenty of people on the right that think that CEO compensation in general is obscenely high and many or maybe even most CEOs are utterly forgettable and too many outright disastrous.

    Edit not too many think they should be shot in the street though.

14. Niketas:

    That was part of my point #6.

15. Nobody should discount the right rising in a huge backlash someday. Folks need to study the history of the United States. In particular, study “Bleeding Kansas” just before the American Civil War, and also study Missouri in the ACW. Although it wasn’t “right vs. left,” there were two warring sides, and a whole lot of bushwhacking folks from ambush. It was ugly. That is what the ACW II would look like, around the entire country. But since the left isn’t particularly adept at reading any history (true history, that is), they’ll keep pushing until they provoke ACW II.

    As far as the perp having trouble with his firearm during the assassination, he obviously didn’t account for the suppresser not allowing his pistol to cycle spent rounds properly and then feed a new round into the chamber.

16. The left has always had a special jones for young leftists who are violent and deemed attractive, such as Che.

    –neo

    Yeah. It’s true. I never quite yielded, but I felt the pull. There is a deep romanticism to being on the left.
    ____________________________

    Continue with your work, continue with your talk
    You have it in your hands to own your life to own your land

    There is no one who can show you
    The road you should be on
    They only tell you they can show you
    And then tomorrow they are gone

    –Judy Collins, “Che” (1973)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C63MdZ2-fKE

17. I did a bit of proofreading of Mao Tse-tung on guerilla warfare (a translation published by the Navy Dept. for the US Marine Corps) for Project Gutenberg, and found it interesting. Hope to try the whole book when it is released.

    I have Antifa by Mark Bray on my Kindle, but didn’t get far reading it. Such a load of feces.
    ……………………………………………..
    Chris Plante on his radio show said the Mangiones are a prominent family in Maryland, which may include the trumpeter Chuck. Plante said they own at least one conservative talk radio station, and one of the family members is a Republican State Senator.

18. Apparently Luigi is not related to Chuck and his pianist brother Gap (Gaspare), who are alive and kicking at 84 and 96 respectively.

19. Huxley-
    I am a triple Board-certified MD with decades of experience, and my medical opinion is more valid than those not educated by psychiatrists or in medicine in general.
    What is your psychiatric education and experience?
    My bro is a real psychiatrist. I ran the Mangione schizophrenia thing past him, and he agrees with me.
    Just beware of the MSM nonsense in this matter.

20. I am a triple Board-certified MD with decades of experience,
    ==
    I’ll still take the other side of the bet.

21. Cicero could be right about the schizophrenia. The guys actions in isolating himself from family was maybe an attempt to hide his deteriorating mental state? There is an example of a schizo who committed a murder in Rainier, Oregon in 2011 that is a little similar. I became very aware of the details of that murder through an attorney relative who lived in Longview, WA across the river from the murder location and was a good friend of the victim. The killer knew he was slipping into insanity and had been hiding it from everyone. Evidence later surfaced that he had also been using a range of street drugs in an attempt at self-medication.

    Here is a brief account of the killing and the verdict 8 years later in 2019. The killer was given a life sentence after entering a guilty by insanity plea.

    “RAINIER, Ore. — Daniel Butts, the man accused of shooting and killing Rainier Police Chief Ralph Painter, changed his plea to guilty at a hearing Tuesday morning and was sentenced to life in prison. He will be eligible for parole after 30 years, when he is 70 years old.

    “Butts pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and two counts of attempted murder. Butts also entered a guilty except for insanity plea to several other charges. A doctor has said Butts suffers from schizophrenia.

    “Chief Painter was shot with his own gun Jan. 5, 2011 as he confronted Butts, who was trying to steal a hot rod car from a stereo shop. Butts fought with the chief, taking his gun and shooting Painter in the head.

    “What followed was a long series of hearings and examinations about the state of his mental health that day, as Butts refused to cooperate with his own lawyers and the legal system.

    “In March of 2012, Butts stabbed himself in the head and refused treatment, even though the wound was infected. In 2013, Butts was transferred from jail to a state mental hospital in Salem, with Columbia County Judge Ted Grove ordering that he be forcibly medicated. In July 2018, Grove ruled that Butts was fit to stand trial.

    “On Tuesday, Painter’s family gave people in the courtroom a heartbreaking glimpse into the past eight years.

    “Our lives were torn apart that day,” said Amy Painter, Ralph Painter’s wife. Painter’s oldest daughter said, “People do not remember cowards but my dad will always be remembered because heroes are never forgotten.” Painter’s mother, Kathy, said to Butts that she believed he knew what he was doing and that a family shouldn’t have to wait eight years for justice. Painter’s teenage son also spoke, saying he wishes he could have one more bear hug from his dad.

    “Attorneys said Butt’s sentence takes into account his mental state during the crime and now.

    “Outside of the courthouse, a woman who identified herself as Butt’s aunt said she wanted to express their sympathy to the Painter family. She said it’s a tragedy that never should have happened.”

22. The AMA, like the APA, has published ethical guidelines regarding diagnosing people in the news (Opinion 8.12 section (f)).

    Refrain from making clinical diagnoses about individuals (e.g., public officials, celebrities, persons in the news) they have not had the opportunity to personally examine.

    (I didn’t see an exception for Donald Trump in there but there must be one.)

23. Cicero, if I recall correctly is an Oncologist (a cancer doctor) is he a doctor that knows about all types of cancer, or particular subsets? His brother is a psychiatrist.

    An oncologist is not a psychiatrist. Has his brother done any research on the suspect (perp.) or met the suspect (perp.)? If not I would tell Cicero thanks for his opinion but that and five dollars will get you a small cup of coffee.

    Sorry Cicero, but just because you were a medical doctor doesn’t make you an authority. Just another Interweb psychiatrist.

24. When I saw “full of passionate intensity,” I also thought of another Yeats poem, Easter 1916, in which he expresses rather ambivalent feelings toward the passionate intensity of the rebels, even if he was sympathetic with the cause.

    That woman’s days were spent
    In ignorant good-will,
    Her nights in argument
    Until her voice grew shrill.
    …
    Hearts with one purpose alone
    Through summer and winter seem
    Enchanted to a stone
    To trouble the living stream.

    These leftist admirers of Mangione are morally bankrupt.

25. F on December 13, 2024 at 5:34 pm
    “This is worse than sick. I guess I’d call it sick-sick.”
    But that is only because you are not yet ready to call it (sick-sick-sick-sick-….)^nth power

26. “John, I seriously doubt there will be a violent blowback, ever. Those on the conservative Right simply will never do that.”

    I guess I know different people than you do.

27. Old Mangione is headed to a folk song( I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night……) the question is who’ll sing it?

28. Here is a brief account of the killing and the verdict 8 years later in 2019.
    ==
    Only took them eight years to process the case to a trial verdict. Most impressive performance.

29. Apparently Luigi is not related to Chuck and his pianist brother Gap (Gaspare), who are alive and kicking at 84 and 96 respectively.
    ==
    84 and 86.
    ==
    The 1920 Census records 57 men in the United States who were born during the years running from 1875 to 1895 and had the surname ‘Mangione’.
    ==
    The grandfather of Chuck and Gap Mangione, one Gaspare Mangione, arrived in the U.S. in 1906. The great-grandfather of the murder suspect, also named Luigi Mangione, arrived here in 1912. The former settled in Rochester, NY and his descendants are there today. The latter settled in Baltimore, where they are well established and prominent. Both men came from Sicily. The thing is, Sicily had a population of about 3.5 million at the time and the towns in which they grew up were about 50 miles apart. It’s conceivable the two men were cousins, but it’s unlikely they were brothers. I would wager Chuck and Gap Mangione are no closer than 3d cousins to the suspect’s father.

30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDSBV0vTfTo
    ==
    Some joy for Saturday morning.

31. The Kimmel clip was funny, though also dark and disturbing. It sounded like something the Babylon Bee invented as a satire or its non-fiction offshoot, Not the Bee, found and used against the murderer’s fans. For Kimmel to bring the tweets out himself as an example of how his staffers think is bizarre and damning.

    About Mangione and Raskolnikov: Vladimir Nabokov hated Dostoevsky and his murderer-hero. That had much to do with his disdain for Dostoevsky’s style, and perhaps Nabokov was trying to conceal his similarities and debts to Dostoevsky, but it also had to do with the fact that Nabokov’s father had been killed in a political assassination. Nabokov Sr. had been killed by right-wing assassins, but his son’s disdain and disgust also extended to the left-wing assassins who were common in pre-revolutionary Russia and often went unpunished. The debate about murder as a creative act runs through Nabokov’s work. He’s repelled by the idea and he rejects it, but he can’t drop the topic.

    Is Mangione schizophrenic? Does that mean he hears voices and sees hallucinations? We’ll find out if he is or isn’t soon enough. The word of the decade seems to be “silo,” and even people who aren’t clinically insane are caught in self-contained mental worlds of their own that don’t reflect external reality. The internet, which was supposed to bring people together, supplies the mental material for people to furnish their private intellectual world. At some point, living in one’s own mental silo or bubble may be pass over into some form of insanity, but there’s a long and hazardous “slippery slope” down to that point.

32. There’s a segment of the population that is in love with Mangione’s looks. There were even people with crushes on Dzhokar Tsarnaev. But there’s also a silence or puzzlement that happens when people who have been raging against an elite of one sort or another hear that someone from the elite group has died or been killed. Hollywood (an elite institution in its own way) makes folk heroes of men who are pushed to the wall by circumstances and lash out violently. When this happens in real life people don’t know how to react and there’s much awkwardness and many uncomfortable reactions.

    There is a parallel to how Northerners reacted to John Brown in the 1850s. Suddenly someone took the moral agitation against slavery seriously enough to launch violent attacks on it. How to react to that? The South had its own heroes in the fight over Kansas, but the South wasn’t as dominated by the media, and no one was as charismatic as mad John Brown.

33. Neo:

    You’re right: my comment about not shooting someone in the back was more about the fictional vision of the Old West, not real life. I’m a little older than you; certainly old enough to remember leftists shooting people in the back. Poorly worded on my part. I was multi-tasking when I wrote that and should not have been.

34. I have endured actual harm from United Health Care–they withheld legally contracted payments from my group that caused us to have to sue them to recover–and we are far from the only group in this country that had to do so–
    but I would NEVER advocate killing their CEO.

    I do understand though why the face of a business that takes money from people to cover medical care, then denies care as its business model and holds payment for elligible coverage to play the float gets murdered.

    Just sayin’–
    Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

35. Lee:

    Unfortunately, health insurance as a business is always going to deny people care at times and be sued. I don’t know whether United Healthcare is any worse or any better than others. Health insurance can be very frustrating.

    I do know that most of the people I know with Medicare have United as their supplemental and have never had a moment’s trouble with it. But that may be quite different from United’s regular insurance policies as compared to their policies for supplemental Medicare insurance.

36. United has the worst claim denial rate of any insurance company at 32%, and Kaiser Permanente the best at only 7%.

37. @The Other Chuck:Kaiser Permanente the best at only 7%.

    Apples and oranges. Kaiser has an integrated HMO. When Kaiser members get services done at Kaiser facilities they’re just moving money from one of Kaiser’s pocket to another. The flipside is this is a narrow network, you can’t just have any doctor you want. They have much less need to deny claims, because they have more control over what services their members get.

    Not everyone with Kaiser is on their HMO plan, but most are. If you’re on the Kaiser PPO plan, you can have any doctor you want, but Kaiser will sometimes refuse to authorize services at non-Kaiser facilities.

    There is a lot to know about health insurance, and any factoids you read in the media are selected to create a narrative which is probably misleading.

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