• turkishdelight@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    when a whistleblower dies on the day of his deposition, you have to work really hard to convince me that it’s suicide.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    It’s important to remember that whistleblowing is extremely stressful, so much that it’s one of the main things the government talks about on their whistleblowing site:

    Practice self-care and stress-reducing activities throughout your whistleblowing process. It is common to experience toxic forms of retaliation – from professional isolation to gaslighting (manipulating someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity) – which can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or even thoughts of harm.

    https://whistleblower.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/whistleblower.house.gov/files/whistleblower_survival_tips.pdf

    Researchers have found the same thing, being a whistleblower is terrible for your mental health:

    About 85% suffered from severe to very severe anxiety, depression, interpersonal sensitivity and distrust, agoraphobia symptoms, and/or sleeping problems, and 48% reached clinical levels of these specific mental health problems. These specific mental health problems were much more prevalent than among the general population.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6604402/

    In addition, “Half of Patients With Suicidal Thoughts Deny It”

    Not only did approximately 50% of people with suicidal thoughts deny having those thoughts, roughly 50% of people who had died by suicide, and 30% of people who had attempted suicide had denied having suicidal ideation in the week or month beforehand.

    Furthermore, in many cases, people who had disclosed in apps and on paper that they had thoughts of suicide then denied that they had suicidal ideation when questioned directly in face-to-face assessments or interviews. For example, in one study, nearly 60% of those who reported their suicidal ideation on an app then denied their suicidal ideation in a telephone interview less than 24 hours later.

    https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.10.9

    So, just because he denied he was suicidal doesn’t mean that’s necessarily true. He might have been trying to appear strong to everyone while suffering in silence.

    This should definitely be investigated as possibly being murder. And, even if the investigation does determine that he shot himself, they should keep looking to see if he was being blackmailed or if he might have been pressured into suicide.

    I just can’t imagine an executive at Boeing going out and hiring a hit man. But, what I can imagine them doing is hiring a team of private investigators to go through this guy’s entire life and dig up every bit of dirt on him. It could be they found something really embarrassing and were going to blackmail him with it. It could be that they found something innocent that they could frame as being awful, like to make him look like he was a child molester or something.

    • experbia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I just can’t imagine an executive at Boeing going out and hiring a hit man

      Really? That’s weird, I totally can. It’s an exceptionally narrow-minded and short-sighted knee-jerk reaction to a perceived threat of one’s executive career. Most coked-out executives already have a massive god complex once they get their MBA and are installed above the proles workers. I can absolutely realistically imagine one Boeing executive getting angry enough and coked-out enough to just decide, “fuck it, I’m going to fix this problem for us before he threatens my career and reputation any more”.

      The information you present about whistleblowing being stressful is fair. He may indeed have been driven to kill himself instead of being straight-up assassinated like others believe. I refuse, however, to give the benefit of doubt to a massive corporation who has already demonstrated a complete lack of regard for human life and an extremely poor track record of moral and ethical decision-making. This needs to be investigated under the assumption that a hit is an entirely possible reality. Unless you’d rather that nobody blows the whistle on anything in the future - you’ve already demonstrated that it’s an incredibly stressful action. If there’s the lingering remote possibility that you can be simply assassinated over it and everyone will look the other way, nobody will ever raise their voice again. The nature of his actions before his death demand a comprehensive and exhaustive investigation into if any person from Boeing had anything to do with it whatsoever, or whistleblowing will continue sliding into something only the insane consider.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Really? That’s weird, I totally can.

        While Boeing executives may be criminals, they’re pretty much exclusively white collar criminals. They went to business school, not the military. They come from rich households. They don’t have gang or organized crime affiliations. How would they know anything about hiring hit men?

        Hiring a firm to do PR and to dig up dirt on a whistleblower, sure, that’s within their skillset. That’s even something they can brag about in board meetings because it’s legal. It’s the kind of thing they can google, or have a secretary research for them. It doesn’t matter if transcripts leak. But, hiring a hit man, how do they know they won’t get caught – and this time for the kind of crime where people actually get sent to real prisons?

        This needs to be investigated under the assumption that a hit is an entirely possible reality.

        Sure, they should work under the assumption that it was a very careful hitman who made it look like a suicide. They should be 10x more careful than they normally would if they even suspected it might be a suicide. But, I still think driving him to suicide is much more likely.

        IMO, the kind of press this is getting is part of the reason I don’t think it was a hit. If this were Russia, sure. A hit sends the message to anybody else that they better not think of doing the same thing. The press will tell whatever story the government wants. Even on social media nobody very few people will speak up in Russia. But, in the US, this death is going to draw so much more attention to Boeing. Just look at how many articles there are about the whistleblower’s death vs. how many there were about him beforehand. Corporations are used to managing news cycles when it comes to legal cases and congressional hearings. Those are boring and don’t tend to go viral. But a whistleblower dying as he was giving testimony, that’s exciting, it’s like the movies, so it’s all everyone’s going to talk about.

        Unless he had even more damaging information that he somehow didn’t give to anybody yet, despite the fact he had already been testifying, it seems like the damage his death does is much higher than the damage his testimony would have done.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          You didn’t think executives would resort to violence?

          Let me introduce you to Coca Cola and Shell. And the East and West India Companies before them.

          These guys approved MCAS knowing it could create situations that were were unrecoverable. They aren’t above killing people for profit.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            Let me introduce you to Coca Cola and Shell.

            They’ve been found guilty of killing people on American soil? I hadn’t heard that, do tell.

            And the East and West India Companies before them.

            Yeah, the 1400s are really relevant here.

            These guys approved MCAS knowing it could create situations that were were unrecoverable.

            Yes, white collar crime.

            • So what do you mean by white collar crime? Does it include killing people or not? Because knowingly bringing about systems that result in the death of people, having a private security contractor that you know will shoot striking workers in your third world countries plantation or ordering a hit on someone are all the same. It is decided that people will die for the companies profit and just because the people who order it dont do it directly themselves, doesn’t change the gravity of it.

              Also there os myriads of examples from today, where western companies directly or indirectly order people to get killed, just usually in third countries. The idea that a defense company with billions of profits at stake every year doesn’t have access to hitmen is unconvincing. Why wouldn’t they? Just as the mafia is branching into white business, white business of size are employing criminal means.

              If you still think there is some unpenetrable divide, all you need is a private detective agency that has a history of dealing with problems “reliably” in the past.

  • BigMacHole@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Hey look! Boeing just gave the Biden Admin a HUGE W! All they have to do is investigate and punish the people at the top!

    Whoops! Nevermind! I guess we’ll just continue saying we AREN’T Trump!