I'm not going to pretend I have anything especially original to contribute here - all the points herein may have been made better and more eloquently by writers who do not primarily write furry porn. However, the recent Assassination Situation been on my mind a ton and I've deleted a few Bluesky posts regarding it already, so I'm writing this to get in the habit of penning stuff for the website and also to exorcise my thoughts.

A quick aside about ethics

As often happens when bad things happen to bad people, there's two competing impulses in a lot of us, both deeply human ones - our aversion to violence, especially arbitrary interpersonal violence, and our desires for accountability and the cessation of harm by the powerful. I think this particular incident has a lot more of the later taking precedence because, of course, American healthcare is basically a giant indentured servitude scam and UHC in particular is uniquely evil. Suffice to say that the CEO of such an enterprise may be one of the least sympathetic people on the planet.

Honestly I'm more interested in thinking and talking about what all this means in a cultural sense - maybe that's the American in me coming out, considering that we're at the point where mass shootings barely get a peep. This is only being publicized because it's a rich guy who died and a highly political murder. Still, it's hard to discuss without putting yourself on the table for the ethical question, so I'm going to give you this food for thought:

How many people does someone need to harm, injure, debilitate, or kill before the moral calculus weighs in favor of stopping them by any means necessary? I don't pretend to have a good answer to that question, but I am sure that such a number must exist. We recognize a right to self-defense when one's life is in danger. What's the difference between a knife in the gut or a pen drafting denials if the outcomes are the same?

This was completely foreseeable

That's not to say that I'm happy with that kind of calculus. As I tell people, I would suck at Cool Crimes, you know, I'm a queer disaster with an anxiety disorder. I don't have the composure to succeed in a Mad Max situation! I can't even drive or ride a bike! (I'll work on that in Spring, shhh, don't judge me.)

That said, ultimately I don't have any input over something like that. That goes to people with the levers of power and funding - well-connected special interests, politicians, institutional investors, the independently wealthy, you know the rogue's gallery. They're the ones who are currently dictating the social environment, and short of a spontaneous general-strike-mass-uprising-societal-upheaval thing - you know, a secular version of the fucking rapture - that is going to continue for the immediate future. And as dumb and miserable as some of them are, they're not all completely clueless to the possible consequences of their utterly craven behavior and the systems they've built to enable and encourage it, in themselves and others.

“How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”[...]
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader? (from The Guardian)

So, millionaire managers and up, the ball is in your court. What are you going to do about this? This is the environment you're cultivating. Some are more active and malicious about it than others - there are, of course, plenty of such people who are trying to take the bubbling rage under the surface of our society and turn it towards vulnerable groups and imagined adversaries. This is a cold reminder that there are limits even to propaganda and extreme efforts to demonize. It is a lot harder to make someone deny something that has happened TO them - indeed, the misery of receiving healthcare might be one of the only things the vast majority of Americans can agree on, left or right.

Or, you know, it's fine. Continue as you are, if you want.

About what happens:

Much hay has been made about left versus right wing terrorism - mostly the lack of the latter. It's true that the political left has, on the whole, been significantly less violent in the US than the right wing. I've seen this be a source of both pride and proof of our moral superiority, and despair that no black block cavalry will save us with a storm of direct action. And there is some truth to this framing - a reactionary worldview is certainly more violent than the vast majority of leftist thinking.

Still, there's a big piece missing from viewing it this way - the fact that many on the right are living in a goddamn phantasm! I hate to do this to you, but imagine waking up and thinking like a reactionary. The enemy is at the gates. They're transing the kids, whatever that means. "Illegals" are somehow stealing all the welfare but also all the jobs but also they're lazy bums, etc etc. They've convinced themselves the world is going to hell and only complete social upheaval is going to save it from the nebulous Them, an imaginary hellscape constructed out of their own pieces of hatred mixed with the propaganda-panic mill of conservative media. I'm not trying to evoke sympathy for these people, to be clear, but when you have that much sludge in your brain it's not much of a surprise you'd end up being violent if I'm being honest.

By contrast, while many things have been getting worse for a long time for a lot of people, most people left of right-wingers... even centrists... have at least one foot in reality. Most of them have food on the table, presumably loved ones, shelter. This is going to partially pacify a lot of people because hey, rocking the boat by doing a political assassination of a prominent executive? Pretty risky to whatever small comforts you have left! So despite the intense pressures of our modern rot, people in those categories are not generally getting guns and shooting up people.

What happens when "the availability of safe food" or "friends and family being targeted by the state", courtesy further orgies of corporate looting, bring people in that category closer to where the reactionaries are? And not through conjured illusions and hateful rhetoric, but actual, material harm happening to them, constantly and with no end in sight? What happens when you keep dialing up the pressure? Eventually cracks form.

To reiterate: I extremely, supremely do not want this to happen. I would be an active liability in such a situation. Finally, me and a lot of wealthy people have something in common: an interest in this not becoming the Years of Lead. If any executives are reading this, I will happily try to explain to your cohort why dialing back the frog boiling might be a good idea.

For the right rate.

In Conclusion

Thanks for getting to the end of this. It's a tough subject, and it feels weird for it to be the inaugural post on what is ostensibly a soon-to-be primary home for my erotic writing. Still, I am a person and not a brand, and this is what I wanted to write about, so here you go. If this is somehow the first thing I've mine you've read - welcome! I'm Vylraz, I mostly write kink furry smut.

Here's a palate cleanser for you:

Caves of Qud's full release has come out today! It's a really good and weird roguelike-thing with a fascinating world, charming writing, and a lot of player freedom to dick around with. It also has a good checkpoint implementation if you're not a permadeath fan. I highly highly recommend giving it a go - it singlehandedly kept me sane with a dopamine drip during an EXTREMELY stressful time earlier this year, and I can't wait to revisit Thrice Gaze, my asshole Truekin reddit-fitness-bro hybrid guy. Go check it out!