I discovered his Substack only tonight and I was shocked at the amount of fallacies in his post. He writes in the voice of an arrogant expert in several topics, the US healthcare industry included, and yet, he has very little understanding of many of those topics. He just regurgitates other people's points without checking their accuracy, researching the matter for himself and trying to come up with an, ideally, objective point of view.
I was curious if this post this was an outlier in his "stack", but digging deeper it seems to be more of a pattern of biased perspective presented as objective, rational journalism.
Sad to see that so many people buy into his flawed, biased narrative.
What is interesting to consider is that Mangione was one of those people who found Gurwinder's perspective worthy of attention, and that just underscores the complexity of the "riddle" of who Mangione is. As for me, I am always interested in different perspectives, even or especially when they are different from mine--so long as those perspectives are informed by facts. We cannot be operating on different sets of facts and expect to have an honest, fruitful conversation about the same topic, and that is where Gurwinder fails, in my opinion. I only decided to write this when I realized how many people had commented upon his post and indicated it was "the best post I've read on this topic." Facts matter.
This is all speculation, but Luigi Mangione, however well intentioned and friendly in life, seemed to have had “incel” attributes. Based on his digital footprint (Goodreads, Reddit, Substack) he rarely interacted with female authors/thinkers/philosophers, unless they were women on X/Twitter sympathizing with men’s disdain over diminishing traditional gender roles. He shared (and at some point deleted) an X/Twitter post that ranted about women’s biological “disadvantages” and how women are the “Achilles heel” of the human race, causing men to have to play protective roles when around women, which then leads to men being combative and mysogynistic when interacting with other men. A “it’s not our fault, it’s our evolutionary biology to be this way, read some Darwin bro” kind of logic. Gross.
Based on what we know of him from his online writings, Mangione seems like a conflicted individual--complicated in some ways, wholly (and disappointingly) cliched in others. I also noted the absence of women in his reading and rhetoric, though sadly I don't think this is uncommon in men his age (men of any age?). But that Twitter post you noted hints at something deeper than your basic misogynistic indifference to women's voices. Is there any chance you have a screenshot of that deleted Twitter post? I haven't seen it before.
At the top of the post is a “spreadsheet” sort of deal. Don’t click on the web.archive links as they will only display html code. Scroll all the way to the right and you will find columns displaying working links to OG posts, as well as his deleted retweets, and deleted replies.
To add to the overall incel logic, it was written in response to a question about men verbally abusing each other in gaming spaces. I could write several paragraphs about the pathetic logic employed to extract justification for use of abusive mysogynistic language from poorly perceived concepts of evolutionary biology but it would be a waste of my life to do so. Apparently, at some point in the Spring of 2024 it spoke to Luigi Mangione, enough so that he felt compelled to repost it. He also interacted with some on Twitter named Jennifer Epstein, who posted a meandering rant about, I barely know what, but it’s racist, sexist, and homophobic. To Luigi Mangione’s defense his reply was to question her logic surrounding a statement about slavery being voluntary (she mentions American enslavement of African-Americans here), he notably did not question any of her remarks about women.
He has also interacted with a man online who has made public comments that women’s depression could be cured if they had babies and stayed at home. The outpouring of admiration from young girls for LM is the most ironic thing here. Most of them are unaware of his sexist views, but even when they do become aware they defend him with comments that he has probably changed (they don’t use evidence of that because there is none), and that it doesn’t deflect from the heroic act he allegedly did. Being objectively good looking, and assassinating a member of the oligarch outweighs incel logic in their minds it appears.
I totally agree with you, the article seems to be very much one sided. Being trapped in our own echo chambers will not lead us to a solution.
His article is peppered with logical fallacies and cognitive bias and his replies to any comment that did not align with his point of view were so condescending, that for the first time ever, I felt compelled to comment on his post.
I respectfully suggested that he perhaps should do a deeper analysis on both corporate governance and the operations and outcomes of the US healthcare system prior to quoting numbers that seemed cherry picked. Furthermore, his hasty generalizations were pretty atrocious.
Sadly, he both deleted my comment and blocked me. Which, to be honest, was sort of a relief because prior to him doing this, I kept wondering how come the majority of his comment section was such a perfect fit to this perspective and I started questioning my own reasoning.
Gurwinder also deleted my comment that linked to this substack post, and blocked me as well. In some ways he seems like an emotionally immature person who isn’t open to constructive criticism to his publicly posted writings. I want to say that’s a shame because he has a large following, but in fact, I have multiple friends I know in real life that have 20-60,000 more followers than he does on their social media (mainly IG). In reality his core following will likely remain whatever dynamic it was pre Luigi Mangione news. And I’m guessing that dynamic was largely based in the manosphere.
I had to go check to see if Gurwinder had blocked me, which he hasn't (so I'm going to assume he never bothered to read my post lol). Deleting comments that disagree with you is something else. That's some serious fragility.
There's definitely something to unpack in regards to Mangione's interest in these kinds of male self-appointed experts and what, exactly, he got from them. Still, it's hard to figure what a person who had a serious enough complaint with the health insurance industry to have (allegedly) taken drastic action at the cost of his freedom would have been getting from a guy who doesn't think America has a real health insurance problem.
Thank you for writing it out so clearly, for those who don’t know the ugly details of health insurance companies like UHC. As a retired nurse who worked for one of these companies, I can truly say: They are EVIL.
Gurwinder’s response really rubbed me the wrong way, as did one of the blog posts he sited written by Cremieux, which reeked of competitive bro logic, and reduced the whole situation to how bad the “manifesto” was. When in reality no one claimed to have written a “manifesto”, so much as a note.
I have yet to start crawling through randomcriticalanalysis.com, which he linked to, to back his claims that healthcare in America isn’t as bad as it is perceived, because we’re not looking at the data properly. I don’t know that I want to, I don’t think it would shift my perspective on the fact that the healthcare system is deeply flawed and corrupt. Even if there are graphs displaying US citizens get more screenings that most other countries, or most of the healthcare issues stem from obesity, or gun use, doesn’t change the fact that wealth is concentrated within the upper echelons of every company. And that is the meat of the issue here. Class disparity. Thank you for writing this. It was cathartic to read.
Hi Ashley, thank you for writing this piece and for sharing your thoughts, I appreciated you dispelling some of the points that Gurwinder made in his essay that he uses to inform his perspective (points which some of his readers in his comments are eating up blindly). He employs a "holier than thou" attitude in his writing which he defends by selectively dropping data points that are taken out of context to inform his thesis. It's easy to google a few financial metrics and dismiss the "human costs" that contribute to the returns insurance companies reap the benefits of year after year.
I clapped when you touched on the "game of chicken" that the insurance companies play. This "game" has a high opportunity cost that isn't easily measured or quantified, but that doesn't mean it doesn't contribute to the frustration and anguish people feel toward American health insurance companies. For example, how can you measure the "what-ifs" of a person's life if they didn't have a lasting disability that could have been prevented through timely treatment, had bureaucratic pre-authorization approvals not been drawn out (e.g going blind while waiting for treatment or the lost time with a loved one whose death could have been prevented with timely treatment)? Not to mention the anxiety of having a condition worsen but being helpless (especially if paying out of pocket isn't an option) as the insurance companies (and their AI algorithms) take their time to decide if a patient's treatment aligns with reaching their profit targets. I'm glad that, over the past few weeks, people have been sharing the true costs that contribute to the profits of insurance companies.
All in all, great article, you gained a new subscriber!
Thank you for this piece. I was truly disappointed by Gurwinder’s essay. You wrote exactly what I was hoping someone would write.
That's really kind--thank you so much for reading.
Thank you for this article!
I discovered his Substack only tonight and I was shocked at the amount of fallacies in his post. He writes in the voice of an arrogant expert in several topics, the US healthcare industry included, and yet, he has very little understanding of many of those topics. He just regurgitates other people's points without checking their accuracy, researching the matter for himself and trying to come up with an, ideally, objective point of view.
I was curious if this post this was an outlier in his "stack", but digging deeper it seems to be more of a pattern of biased perspective presented as objective, rational journalism.
Sad to see that so many people buy into his flawed, biased narrative.
What is interesting to consider is that Mangione was one of those people who found Gurwinder's perspective worthy of attention, and that just underscores the complexity of the "riddle" of who Mangione is. As for me, I am always interested in different perspectives, even or especially when they are different from mine--so long as those perspectives are informed by facts. We cannot be operating on different sets of facts and expect to have an honest, fruitful conversation about the same topic, and that is where Gurwinder fails, in my opinion. I only decided to write this when I realized how many people had commented upon his post and indicated it was "the best post I've read on this topic." Facts matter.
Thank you so much for reading.
This is all speculation, but Luigi Mangione, however well intentioned and friendly in life, seemed to have had “incel” attributes. Based on his digital footprint (Goodreads, Reddit, Substack) he rarely interacted with female authors/thinkers/philosophers, unless they were women on X/Twitter sympathizing with men’s disdain over diminishing traditional gender roles. He shared (and at some point deleted) an X/Twitter post that ranted about women’s biological “disadvantages” and how women are the “Achilles heel” of the human race, causing men to have to play protective roles when around women, which then leads to men being combative and mysogynistic when interacting with other men. A “it’s not our fault, it’s our evolutionary biology to be this way, read some Darwin bro” kind of logic. Gross.
Based on what we know of him from his online writings, Mangione seems like a conflicted individual--complicated in some ways, wholly (and disappointingly) cliched in others. I also noted the absence of women in his reading and rhetoric, though sadly I don't think this is uncommon in men his age (men of any age?). But that Twitter post you noted hints at something deeper than your basic misogynistic indifference to women's voices. Is there any chance you have a screenshot of that deleted Twitter post? I haven't seen it before.
Thanks for these great comments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeLuigi/s/9AXizJfUFE
At the top of the post is a “spreadsheet” sort of deal. Don’t click on the web.archive links as they will only display html code. Scroll all the way to the right and you will find columns displaying working links to OG posts, as well as his deleted retweets, and deleted replies.
https://twitter.com/devon_eriksen_/status/1791832265602789638
This is the post he retweeted and deleted that I referenced in my comment.
To add to the overall incel logic, it was written in response to a question about men verbally abusing each other in gaming spaces. I could write several paragraphs about the pathetic logic employed to extract justification for use of abusive mysogynistic language from poorly perceived concepts of evolutionary biology but it would be a waste of my life to do so. Apparently, at some point in the Spring of 2024 it spoke to Luigi Mangione, enough so that he felt compelled to repost it. He also interacted with some on Twitter named Jennifer Epstein, who posted a meandering rant about, I barely know what, but it’s racist, sexist, and homophobic. To Luigi Mangione’s defense his reply was to question her logic surrounding a statement about slavery being voluntary (she mentions American enslavement of African-Americans here), he notably did not question any of her remarks about women.
He has also interacted with a man online who has made public comments that women’s depression could be cured if they had babies and stayed at home. The outpouring of admiration from young girls for LM is the most ironic thing here. Most of them are unaware of his sexist views, but even when they do become aware they defend him with comments that he has probably changed (they don’t use evidence of that because there is none), and that it doesn’t deflect from the heroic act he allegedly did. Being objectively good looking, and assassinating a member of the oligarch outweighs incel logic in their minds it appears.
I totally agree with you, the article seems to be very much one sided. Being trapped in our own echo chambers will not lead us to a solution.
His article is peppered with logical fallacies and cognitive bias and his replies to any comment that did not align with his point of view were so condescending, that for the first time ever, I felt compelled to comment on his post.
I respectfully suggested that he perhaps should do a deeper analysis on both corporate governance and the operations and outcomes of the US healthcare system prior to quoting numbers that seemed cherry picked. Furthermore, his hasty generalizations were pretty atrocious.
Sadly, he both deleted my comment and blocked me. Which, to be honest, was sort of a relief because prior to him doing this, I kept wondering how come the majority of his comment section was such a perfect fit to this perspective and I started questioning my own reasoning.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your perspective!
Gurwinder also deleted my comment that linked to this substack post, and blocked me as well. In some ways he seems like an emotionally immature person who isn’t open to constructive criticism to his publicly posted writings. I want to say that’s a shame because he has a large following, but in fact, I have multiple friends I know in real life that have 20-60,000 more followers than he does on their social media (mainly IG). In reality his core following will likely remain whatever dynamic it was pre Luigi Mangione news. And I’m guessing that dynamic was largely based in the manosphere.
I had to go check to see if Gurwinder had blocked me, which he hasn't (so I'm going to assume he never bothered to read my post lol). Deleting comments that disagree with you is something else. That's some serious fragility.
There's definitely something to unpack in regards to Mangione's interest in these kinds of male self-appointed experts and what, exactly, he got from them. Still, it's hard to figure what a person who had a serious enough complaint with the health insurance industry to have (allegedly) taken drastic action at the cost of his freedom would have been getting from a guy who doesn't think America has a real health insurance problem.
Thank you for writing it out so clearly, for those who don’t know the ugly details of health insurance companies like UHC. As a retired nurse who worked for one of these companies, I can truly say: They are EVIL.
Gurwinder’s response really rubbed me the wrong way, as did one of the blog posts he sited written by Cremieux, which reeked of competitive bro logic, and reduced the whole situation to how bad the “manifesto” was. When in reality no one claimed to have written a “manifesto”, so much as a note.
I have yet to start crawling through randomcriticalanalysis.com, which he linked to, to back his claims that healthcare in America isn’t as bad as it is perceived, because we’re not looking at the data properly. I don’t know that I want to, I don’t think it would shift my perspective on the fact that the healthcare system is deeply flawed and corrupt. Even if there are graphs displaying US citizens get more screenings that most other countries, or most of the healthcare issues stem from obesity, or gun use, doesn’t change the fact that wealth is concentrated within the upper echelons of every company. And that is the meat of the issue here. Class disparity. Thank you for writing this. It was cathartic to read.
Hi Ashley, thank you for writing this piece and for sharing your thoughts, I appreciated you dispelling some of the points that Gurwinder made in his essay that he uses to inform his perspective (points which some of his readers in his comments are eating up blindly). He employs a "holier than thou" attitude in his writing which he defends by selectively dropping data points that are taken out of context to inform his thesis. It's easy to google a few financial metrics and dismiss the "human costs" that contribute to the returns insurance companies reap the benefits of year after year.
I clapped when you touched on the "game of chicken" that the insurance companies play. This "game" has a high opportunity cost that isn't easily measured or quantified, but that doesn't mean it doesn't contribute to the frustration and anguish people feel toward American health insurance companies. For example, how can you measure the "what-ifs" of a person's life if they didn't have a lasting disability that could have been prevented through timely treatment, had bureaucratic pre-authorization approvals not been drawn out (e.g going blind while waiting for treatment or the lost time with a loved one whose death could have been prevented with timely treatment)? Not to mention the anxiety of having a condition worsen but being helpless (especially if paying out of pocket isn't an option) as the insurance companies (and their AI algorithms) take their time to decide if a patient's treatment aligns with reaching their profit targets. I'm glad that, over the past few weeks, people have been sharing the true costs that contribute to the profits of insurance companies.
All in all, great article, you gained a new subscriber!