Seriously though, don’t do violence.
If violence isn’t a solution why does the government use it?
The state is nothing but a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. To a hammer, everything is a nail. To a state, everything is a target for violence.
The state even sometimes uses violence on itself.
See: Civil Wars.
I figure legitimate in this instance just means they won’t have any reason to expect repercussions for their acts of violence.
The state is nothing but a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Which, ideally, is pretty much how it has to work. The state is, ideally, composed of elected representatives and their appointees. The alternative to violence monopolized by elected representatives is violence distributed to private interests. State monopoly of legitimate violence is not great and I agree with the problems inherent to that, but realistically the alternative seems worse. I’m racking my brain for another system, but I can’t think of anything that doesn’t devolve to oligarch-led private armies oppressing people.
state is, ideally, composed of elected representatives
oligarch-led private armies oppressing people.
They’re the same picture.
Elections are a venue for competiting oligarchs - US elections are largely just a wealth check - with the bonus that afterwards people feel they’ve chosen their oligarchs and are less likely to notice that 90%+ of elected representatives only represent the interest of elites.
I do the same thing at work when I need mentally ill people to do what I say. “You can do what I want version A, or do what I want version B, which one?” always works better than “Do what I want!”
I agree that violence management is a very difficult problem with no easy solution. But I don’t think giving full control of legitimate violence to the rich is the best solution, which is what a state of elected representatives does.
Still, there’s the friction of checks and balances. It’s certainly not perfect, far from it, but the alternative is still worse.
This sounds super motivational until you stop to think about how the only thing worse than legitimate violence is the endless horrors of ILLegitimate violence. Solidarity is nothing but a stance of pure aggressivity towards those neighbors outside of your community
So just because it’s sprinkled with the magic fairy dust of ‘government’ it’s immediately moral and good violence?
Here’s a freebie thought experiment I had to pay a PoliSci professor for; if tomorrow the democratically elected government passed a law that from today forward, all babies with blue eyes will be euthanized at birth, is that legal?
Yes. 100% legal. And 100% morally bankrupt.
Consent of the governed is the bedrock of civil society - the ghouls that run big business seem to have forgotten/don’t care that legality does not equal morality.
You win my most obvious strawman award. I really tried to find how any of this pertains to any part of my comment and gave up. I still like your pretty metaphors despite the absence of logical meaning
You’re trying hard to be obtuse, or super myopic if you don’t see the through line from state violence, to consent of the governed to accept laws (and the violence required to enforce them) - hence my comment that legality is not morality, and the inference that lobbying has broken that trust and consent by legalizing policies like UHC’s that are not unique to that one company.
You brought solidarity into this, which is distinct from tribalist/sectarian violence like you’re alluding to. Soup kitchens, community legal defense funds, or cooperative farms are examples of solidarity. Not vigilante murder.
“Soup kitchens, community legal defense funds, or cooperative farms are examples of solidarity. Not vigilante murder.”
I will do what you consistently avoid here(even after I highlighted it, nonetheless) and engage directly with what you are saying rather than engage with a misrepresentation. I don’t understand where or how or why vigilante murder is even brought up here? Who said or implied anything about murder. I’m merely specifying the easily missed core of solidarity which is that a background of legitimacy is required to have these soup kitchens and co-op farms. The state and it’s “violence” of set rules and consequences must exist as a background before the space can be opened up for these examples you use. Quite hilarious to call me the obtuse and myopic one here, when my whole cornerstone from the start has basically been a suggestion to step back and think about what Solidarity means and how it is effectively sustained before we rush in to believing we can so easily make such harsh distinctions between legality and morality or state vs tribalist violence. We’re discussing abstract concepts that don’t merely exist as some objective science to be easily concluded–it’s all much more complex and arguably too open-ended for such hasty oversimplifications. Please don’t triple strawman me here
I don’t understand where or how or why vigilante murder is even brought up here? Who said or implied anything about murder.
The original post is literally about a vigilante murdering the UHC CEO and another company seemingly changing policy afterwards, with OP attaching a comment about ‘not saying it’s good, but maybe violence does work’. You brought solidarity in out of nowhere, and implied it was parallel to sectarianism/tribalism.
That is why I called you out as being obtuse, a vigilante murder is the only reason this comment thread exists - it was there from the very beginning.
I’m merely specifying the easily missed core of solidarity which is that a background of legitimacy is required to have these soup kitchens and co-op farms. The state and it’s “violence” of set rules and consequences must exist as a background before the space can be opened up for these examples you use.
You never mentioned legitimacy - I inferred it. That’s called reading comprehension, not strawmaning. Which is why I posted that legal is not inherently moral. Because enforcing laws, not persuasion or incentives to prompt compliance, ultimately requires a state actor to force that law on another person. And if that person still says “no” then that state actor is empowered to use violence to either make that person submit and follow that law, be arrested, or ultimately killed if they continue to resist. A law prohibiting rape or murder is different than anti-vagrancy laws or occupational licensing - but the enforcement is facsimile if met with resistance.
Quite hilarious to call me the obtuse and myopic one here, when my whole cornerstone from the start has basically been a suggestion to step back and think about what Solidarity means and how it is effectively sustained before we rush in to believing we can so easily make such harsh distinctions between legality and morality or state vs tribalist violence.
This is a good explanation. Your initial comment was half-baked and didn’t expound on what you were trying to say, which is why challenged what I inferred your thrust to be. I’m not foolish enough to believe that we can all live in 100% peaceful coexistence, nightly drum circles, and unlimited cooperation and mutual respect. Because there’s always some asshole who doesn’t want to help or respect autonomy, and becomes the aggressor in order to steal/subjugate/dominate/etc. But my thrust was that the social contract is broken, when a company can essentially renege on a financial contract (heath insurance) arbitrarily and capriciously, and faces no legal repercussions. Because lobbying. Because “business friendly” legal environment where the one with the most money almost wins by default, if there even is a legal challenge.
Please don’t triple strawman me here
I genuinely don’t think you understand what that means, or are confusing presumptive argument for it. It you feel misrepresented and I am straw manning - explain in further detail. Like you just did now, instead of a snarky “u iz strawman winnar”. We never got to that part of the debate initially because you got huffy and left a drive-by comment at the first challenge.
Those look like sentences but it’s weird… I’m not seeing any meaning here.
Precisely what I was trying to highlight–many thanks for the confirmation comrade
Aw man. You’re gonna bring the “I like hospitals and roads but not taxes” crowd out of the wood work, claiming governments are just warlords with good PR.
It’s A solution, just not the preferred one.
You’re doing violence to grammar with your “an.”
Better now?
Stupendous!
Because the US government has more guns than any other entity on the planet. There’s no fight it loses.
Afghanistan and Vietnam come to mind.
The Vietnamese peasants and farmers beg to differ.
afganistan, lol
yeah except for basically all of them
If the us government where to go to war with its own populous it would destroy the very wealth they sought to control.
lol
My experience with human rights acrivists is that they only fight for the assholes. Never saw a human rights activist in a foundraiser for children, but talk about murderers and rapists they are all love.
Yeah, because nobody else speaks up for those who’d be railroaded through court otherwise. You don’t ’see them speak up’ because those same people’s voice get lost in the crowd of everyone else’s outrage/support.
It’s trite but true, failure to defend the fringes leaves a smaller and smaller pool of resistance/solidarity:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Look I’ve heard human rights activists say that over and over again but you know what I think? You can look at a CHILD that was raped and say "sorry he deserves to be treated nicely, your values are crooked.
I’m NOT talking about the legal system that is indeed corrupt, I’m talking about people that confessed to murder and rape and you still go out of your way to defend that “he need nicer food”. He needs to burn in hell
If rights aren’t universal they may as well not exist. To defend the rights of another is to defend your own. Remember that next time you see the rights being violated of someone you feel deserves it.
So are you talking about prison reform? Because MOST people in prison are not there for rape or murder.
They fight to keep government overreach in check
I get that in a lot of circunstances BUT once you have confessed killers what do you want? Them to have a nice life?!
Are you advocating for government sanctioned torture? Wtf is your point? Government should be as bad as cartels?
Seriously though, don’t do violence.
Why not? It’s a perfectly fair response to the violence perpetuated upon millions of “customers” annually, made “legitimate” by paid off lawmakers. Why should we not be allowed to respond in kind when they’re allowed to kill us - just because it’s in a more roundabout method? Fuck 'em. I’ve never been a gun type, but right-wingers have really been getting me to rethink that stance.
I’m mostly saying it because I don’t know the mods on this sub or if/when they’re gonna start nuking posts and comments like the News mods did. But also, I don’t want to be responsible (or at least feel responsible) in the unlikely event that an unhinged person sees this and does something stupid.
Like…look, am I weeping because a man who profited by denying people healthcare is dead? No. Am I happy to see billionaires suddenly afraid of the people they’re exploiting? Yes. But does that mean I want people who see this meme to start gunning people down in the street? In all seriousness, no, don’t take this as a call to violence.
I know there’s some hypocrisy in that statement, but that’s kinda the point I was getting at with the post: “I can’t condone this action, but damn, it appears to have been very effective at enacting change.”
I couldn’t have said it better, tho we have yet to see if it’s effective at change. It’s really too early to tell.
- If you are USA citizen, you have the right to bear arms in case goverment turns evil
- While yiur giv turned incompeten/insensitive instead, it also soldd itself out to corporations.
- Thus, corporations = gov
- Thus, you have right to bear arms in case corporations turn evil
The intent of the 2nd amendment was for states to maintain a military force that could be easily called on. George Washington used the national guard to put down rebellion of American citizens. It was never about government oversight.
Yeah, and the Supreme Court was never intended to solve Constitutional conflicts, either. The purpose of things changes over time, and I’m pretty sure the hero who brought this CEO to justice didn’t ask whether doing so was really what the founding fathers meant when they said ‘a right to bear arms’.
you have the right to bear arms in case goverment turns evil
I didn’t say it, man, you did. Just letting you know that’s misinformation.
I did not say that at all, so I don’t know why you’re claiming I did while talking about misinformation.
murder is in general bad, fed-posting is inadvisable
also there’s a broader boring argument about the dangers of violence being normalized as means of political change, but those arguments are boring
Self-defense (or defense of others) is not murder.
Brian Thompson killed thousands, and contributed to the suffering of millions more. The judicial system was both unwilling and unable to stop him.
What choice was there? What alternative to stop him?
I didn’t make any arguements about this specific situation? Murder in general is bad
The problem is that there’s no clear endpoint of that thought process. The number of people that exact thought process applies to would require a level of violence that I doubt anybody sane wants.
Edit: to be more precise here. I’m leery about trying to apply the logic of individual self-defense to broader questions about social murder. The entire system is complicit, but if we go to burn the system down without a replacement ready we’ll end up sorrounded by nothing but ash and corpses
You’ve been propagandized to hell. Both in defense of systemic violence, and the belief that these systems would cease to exist without a financial class to absorb profit from them.
You need to wake the fuck up.
Wow very convincing. thank you, directly calling me an idiot without addressing the core of my argument really has brought me over to your way of thinking
I very deliberately said “in general”, i did not say “in all cases whatsoever”.
For health insurance there is a replacement ready, the answer is to have Medicare do everything.
Didn’t call you an idiot. Just propagandized.
So then expand on your comment about burning systems down without a replacement. What systems do you believe will cease to function without a layer of financial class to soak up the profits?
I dont care about the difference between “propagandized” and “idiot”. You attacked me instead of my argument.
Its not the hypothetical removal of the evil and waste of a system, it’d about the process of removing the undesired elements. The problem wasnt just with Brian Johnson was an interchangable empty suit, the problem is with the entire culture and system of incentives. Killing one bad person doesn’t do enough to fix things, targeting enough people to make the change that’s really needed will need a bureaucratic structure to actually get done, target selection, weapons supply, training, validation, paperwork. Very rare for breaucratically enabled violence to ever be good.
For healthcare in particular is pretty much is just as simple as nationalizating health insurance and have everything done by medicare (or state/local govt health plan) But targeted assassination doesn’t automatically translate into an act of congress.
False dichotomy is a common tactic used to radicalize people and instigate violence.
Brian Thompson was the head executive of a corporation. He likely spent his days looking at spreadsheets and BI reports, going to meetings where he was held accountable for making a profit for the shareholders and playing golf. If he is responsible for deaths related to the 30-something percent of claims that the company he ran denied, then he is equally responsible for any lives saved by the 60-something percent of claims they approved.
I’m not mourning the guy, but I know his friends and family are. If his murder was justified, is mine justified for not feeling bad he died? Is my daughter’s murder by a Palestinian justified because I pay taxes that buy bombs my government sells to Israel?
There are lots of alternatives to murder (or whatever euphemism for murder you choose to use). Murder certainly feels easier in the short term, especially when you have no connection to the guy who pulled the trigger. His life is likely ruined now as well.
Hiding behind a desk and ordering others to commit your crimes for you does not make them any less disgusting. Not for Brian Thompson. Not for Netanyahu. No one. We will not give anyone a pass for murdering people indirectly.
Is his family going to return the blood money?
After digesting your comment some more, I’m thinking it’s either extreme boot licking by someone profoundly propagandized, or you were projecting and feeling your own moral hall pass being challenged.
Which is it? Have you been giving yourself a pass for a morally reprehensible career of indirect harm?
Neither. I’m actually pretty well aware of the harms caused by places I’ve worked, including in the US military. I’ve even left places when I couldn’t square that circle. I figured the comment would get some heavy down voting because I know how most of the world is looking at the scenario. I felt some schadenfreude watching the guy get gunned down, too. My perspective is that I see the left committing a lot of the same logical fallacies typically committed by the right in this scenario. It feels a little too close to “well, the cops wouldn’t have shot him in the back if he just complied” or “Palestinians elected terrorists so they’re all terrorists and gldeserve whatever they get” arguments to me. I try to practice the Principal of Charity, and I don’t have any good evidence that this man was cackling with glee while personally slamming a big red “DENIED” stamp on grannies chemo medicine claims. If he’d approved every claim, he would be fired, and they’d bring someone else in to deny the claims. I’m not defending the insurance industry or capitalism for-profit healthcare, but I worry more generally about society normalizing or celebrating violence.l and where that’s moght take us.
I’m not defending the insurance industry or capitalism for-profit healthcare, but I worry more generally about society normalizing or celebrating violence.l and where that’s moght take us.
society already normalizes and celebrates violence plenty. it just doesn’t tend to normalize it or celebrate it against the people who actually deserve it, pretty much apparently until a couple days ago when everyone sort of collectively seems to have realized that they all agree.
You are absolutely defending them. You’re defending them from individual accountability for their part in mass murder and suffering. As if them working to spread out the blame erases individual accountability.
And you comparing this monster to victims of police violence and genocide is fucking disgusting and shameful. The ‘reverse victim and offender’ piece of DARVO.
It sounds like you still haven’t figured out how to square that circle.
Violence towards the evil power can be good. See the French Revolution.
The French Revolution ate the nobles, sure, but then it ate itself, then went on to try to eat the rest of Europe. It was a loooong time before it had positive results.
For the most part, the French revolution really only took down the royal family. A large portion of land owners and business people made it out perfectly fine with both their assets and heads.
Is it weird that I’m ok with people in the $50 mill range? Like yeah, they’re stupid rich. But they’re still closer to us than to people with $100 billion. And also, a lot of them just inherited it. Which is also bullshit, but they may not have done any evil to become that rich, necessarily. The question is whether or not they keep up with the evil. Bezos ex wife is a great example as she has spent tons of money on charitable organizations that opposed her ex husbands bullshit. There’s a handful of good, rich people out there, but they’re few, and far between.
We can put a number on the difference between “rich” and “filthy rich”. It’s about $10M.
I say this with regard to the Trinity Study, which backtested a retirement portfolio to see how long it would take for a given withdrawal rate (and adjusting for inflation each year) to fail. It went all the way back to 1925, which means it would have seen boom and bust, high inflation and low. What it comes out saying is that if you withdrawal 2.5% per year of a balanced portfolio, you can live on that indefinitely.
2.5% of $10M is $250k. That’s enough to live very comfortably anywhere you want. Yes, even Manhattan and San Fransisco–lookup median household income for those areas and you’ll see that $250k is far above it. Also, you can live basically anywhere if you do this, so maybe don’t live in a high cost of living area. There’s plenty of nice places to live that are cheaper. That said, if something is keeping you there, you can do it and still live pretty well.
So that’s the limit. Anything above that is just hoarding wealth.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
But dead nobles were positive results
I agree is justified in many situations, the French revolution ain’t a good example for that, namely that it didn’t work in the long run with all the Napoleon-ing. The people most adept at violence, who will be most empowered by violence as normalized political tactic mostly don’t promote the interests of most people if they get into power. Napoleon and such
also every time there’s been prominent “propaganda of the deed” it’s backfired by inciting a HUGE state crackdown, Tsar Alexander II and William Mckinley come to mind
though both were relative reformers, which would make this about target selection and not alienating potential allies rather than the use of the tactic in general
Violence is clearly justified. There’s only a question of it being the most effective means.
I’m currently reading “Why Civil Resistance Works”, which strongly suggests that non-violent means of protest are far, far more effective.
I’m currently reading “Why Civil Resistance Works”, which strongly suggests that non-violent means of protest are far, far more effective.
Oh yeah all the peace marches ended slavery. All the peaceful sit-ins that took down the Nazis. I remember all of those… never happening.
Kill your masters and oppressors. Full stop.
This Run the Jewels is
Murder, mayhem, melodic music.
Yes, someone who worked at the state department wouldn’t have any motive to push for “civil” protest.
The opposition to the south african apartheid did a campaign of sabotage because it wanted to reduce casualties. I would say it was very effective.
correlation is not causation.
repeat the experiment.
Without 25 observations at least we cannot draw conclusions
Depends on your dataset, confidence, and margin of error.
Assuming that 95% of billionaires will act similarly and 750-ish total billionaires in the US, if you want to have 99% confidence and 1% margin of error, you’ll need a minimum sample size of around 600.
We really should be thorough. For science.
Usually I would nit pick the hypothesis you want to confirm and the math you used, but for some reason 600 sounds right.
Hmmmm… I wonder what would cause pharmaceutical prices mysteriously drop?
When you crush folks into the ground for decades, ensure there’s no legal recourse, and bleed them for every dollar until the money runs red. It’s hardly a surprising outcome.
Here’s the song that’s been playing in my head last couple days, for no related reason: https://youtu.be/o9mJ82x_l-E
Not sure if you know the reason for the song, but here is the info behind it… the actual footage was brutal as well.
A Song Inspired by an Infamous Suicide
Patrick found the lyrical inspiration for “Hey Man Nice Shot” from the January 1987 suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer. It occurred on the day Dwyer was to be sentenced for 11 counts of bribery for which he had faced up to 55 years in prison and a $305,000 fine, according to an Associated Press article from the time. No money was said to have exchanged hands. The public official spent 20 minutes on live television proclaiming his innocence, then shot himself to death. The incident shocked family, friends, and political associates, not to mention the viewing audience.
I saw that video when I was in middle school and found out later in my teens that song was about that headshot. It’s a good song.
Wasn’t that the guy who was later found to be innocent? He tried to fight the charges, got convicted, killed himself, and THEN they figured out he really didn’t do it?
Here’s the song I’ve been thinking about
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm1nCYOZB-s&t=175s&pp=2AGvAZACAQ%3D%3D
I prefer this one for obvious reasons.
Oh damn, I don’t think I’ve heard that one in since I was in middle school.
I have a soft spot for what my friend calls, “divorced dad rock.”
To me this is, “rock my edgy older sister listened to.” Gave me a nice nostalgia hit too.
This is my jam this week
Violence gave us (the US) freedom from being a colony, freedom from slavery, workers rights, women’s rights…wait a minute.
Why do we get told to not do violence again? Seems like we just need a little bit of organized violence and we can solve problems.
Because violence is a tragedy and in an ideal world there would be no need for it. However, fewer and fewer people these days can pretend we live in an ideal world.
I do think, ideally, we should be able to resolve disputes without violence. We don’t live in that world though. Mainly because people that have a lot power and resources worked to keep it that way. They actively work against progress.
And those people will use violence to continue their oppressive rule.
worked
HAHAHA
Equivocation much? By your logic either idiots set the standards or it’s morally defensible to attack people who kill us slowly.
I do think it’s morally defensible for an oppressed group to direct violence toward their oppressors. It’s also a tragedy that it comes to that but tragedy and justice are not mutually exclusive. I also think only an idiot would accept the standards in which we are expected to live, therefore to demand satisfaction with such standards would be idiotic.
It doesn’t really sound like we disagree about anything. Pardon my earlier tone. I should have been mellower, or at least funnier.
Violence is the one true power from which all other powers are derived.
Denying healthcare = violence
Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield reverses decision… for now. They’ll wait a month and then introduce it again.
“Violence is bad”
-Sincerely, every country that came into existence from the violent overthrow of the country that existed before it.
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Ah, good. So the corrupt, evil, and greedy tactics of health insurers are finally mitigated to… checks notes oh, to what they were last week.
You know they’re sitting on a wish list of awful policies while they’re waiting for this to blow over so they can implement them when we aren’t looking. Fuck that.
This was self defence. Insurance companies conduct violence on a grand scale. The adjuster just defended himself.
I was really hoping we would avoid violence by electing people like Bernie Sanders. Instead it looks like the class warfare will come to violence.
We really have no other option left
🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀
Violence is neutral.
Human nature is bad.
When someone is violent to someone else and doesn’t need to be violent, they are bad.
When someone unintentionally wrongs someone, you try to settle the situation without violence in a way that is fair to both parties.
When they don’t settle or they keep wronging people, you need to escalate.
When the person wronging the people is in a place of money and power, and you cannot escalate, there should be consequences.
I’m not a big fan of vigilantism, If the world ran that way, we’d have a lot of innocent deaths. But if the government and laws don’t protect the people, stuff like this happens, or at least it logically should. If anything, I’m kind of shocked this isn’t more commonplace.
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Killing a rapist mid-act is not wrong. Killing an innocent person because they have the misfortune of being insured by your company is wrong.
It was here before we got here, and good and bad are both words of human origin.
The one hand-wringer downvoting you didn’t see the video of the pregnant zebra watching its unborn fetus ripped from her uterus and eaten, in front of her terrified, defeated, anguished eyes. The hyenas were just surviving, violence wasn’t taking place.
There’s always one in a crowd.
I think what theyre getting at, is that in the assailant’s mind it’s justified, or they wouldn’t have done it.
The legislature and violence monopoly are there to ensure all people have legal recourse instead of needing to turn to violence. If you corrupt that system and use it to oppress the masses, they become violent.
I neither agree with, nor condone violence, but it does not surprise me at all. Just surprised that it took so long.
Violence from the masses requires the masses to feel like they are starving, sick, and dying with no way out except death. We have been slowly accelerating towards that violence for a while now.
Watch for an increase for those CEO’s, (at least insurance and pharmaceutical CEOs), to have much increased budget for private security measures. Both in surveillance and personnel. I think we will start to see more ‘black limo caravans’ like the the POTUS moves around in. And being surrounded by people in black suits with guns openly visible. They will do whatever it takes to stay alive and be evil.
The next question is: how long before politicians start becoming targets?
violence is bad
It is bad if used as the first approach.
It is fine when used in self defense or when all peaceful approaches have been exhausted in response to oppression and other malicious actions. It does matter when and why it is used.
Agreed. This happened because both parties are bought and paid for by big corpo. Our vote is only on how to address some of the social issue symptoms, if at all, of our crony capitalist economy, and only if they don’t meaningfully effect corpo profits.
Example “please leftwing Obama, save us from this for profit healthcare hell!” proceeds to further enshrine for profit insurer leeches in a plan made from the heritage foundation because big corpo demand line go up.
The people don’t get a vote on the crony capitalist economy.
When we wish to protest, we’re now sent to designated protest zones out of the eyelines and profit operations of those we protest, making such “protests” as effective as masturbation in creating change.
This is happening because they have made us this desperate,and taken away/castrated our non-violent options. Some are apparently finally realizing that our votes and our protest have been manipulated by the capitalists that know they’re doing us harm into still technically existing, but no longer mattering.
Gotta hand it to them, it’s far more insidious than overt slavery with chains.
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