If you read the tragic suicide news about American service in the military, you may sense a tone of responsibility.
“One suicide is too many and MARMC leadership is taking a proactive approach to support the team, improve mental fitness, and manage the stress of its sailors,” Rieger said. “We remain fully engaged with our sailors and their families to ensure their health and well-being, and to ensure a climate of trust that encourages sailors to ask for help.”
Even more to the point than detection, the news cites widespread prevention actions taken by management.
A Navy spokesperson confirmed to The Hill that Arestivo, who is not typically on staff, was brought in along with other experts as part of a suicide prevention stand-down at MARMC between Nov. 14 and 16. The stand-down included presentations from different mental health organizations — including the command’s own suicide prevention coordinator — which all of the center’s assigned 3,000 sailors and civilian staff were required to receive, the spokesperson said.
All sailors are required to be in training, as everyone is tasked to help prevent suicide. You might even say it’s part of the job to keep sailors alive.
The complete opposite story is unfolding at Krogers, a giant grocery corporation. Its management clearly has engaged in bullying that leads to suicide with documented steps taken to destroy the lives of it’s own staff; abuse inherent to its management culture even when it means death.
It’s even more opposite from the military response because Kroger argues that it’s completely legal to kill its staff through constant targeted harassment.
Their defense is science-denial (related: management bullied staff who wore masks during COVID-19). They claim courts will affirm for them that nobody can predict causes of harm, which obviously is a completely bogus test.
It would be like saying Kroger doesn’t know whether shooting staff on a bridge at midnight would kill someone (they could drown instead) therefore Kroger can’t be charged with a VERY predictable injury let alone death.
Again, we’re basically dealing with ruthless denial of science. Yet Kroger management want people to still also believe they know how to run a company based on… science. Is your food “spoiled” or even “dangerous”? Who can predict that soup might make you sick or die? Not Kroger but also Kroger.
Furthermore, the actual case precedent Kroger lawyers want to bank on is inhumane. Ohio courts ignorantly ruled in 1987 men are not to be charged if a woman they rape and give a loaded gun kills herself.
Seriously. Kroger is set to formally argue that management literally violently raping its own staff still would not make it liable in suicide.
Read the news and you can see it’s really that bad.
Kroger managers are accused of waging a “campaign of terror” that included sabotaging his work, harassing him sexually, following Seyfried after work and sending him menacing and obscene texts.
Menacing text methods are a special concern here, as Kroger may be trying to legalize robotic/automated systems for elimination of its own staff via known psychological warfare methods (like those I’ve discussed in presentations about AI dangers and Russian military intelligence methods).
If you read Kroger details right, management basically engaged in a psychological terror campaign that has a very predictable outcome.
Thus “social” machines designed to drive humans to death are a logical next step for such management waging war with its own staff. It perhaps even already runs machines that rank staff suicide as a “win” based on one metric alone: lower company spend.
Ironically, Kroger runs its entire profit on proven ability to forsee risk (and flaunts such things to investors), while it lawyers up to argue it has zero ability to forsee risk (suicide).
Really what people should be thinking is that if Kroger couldn’t predict suicide in this case, they are unfit for management of ANY risk — a corporation that poses predictable danger to society.
Here’s their absurd defense plan, centered on the chilling Ohio principle that a man should not be held accountable for suicide by the young girl he just raped and then left alone with a loaded gun:
An Ohio appeals court upheld the dismissal of the case 1987. It ruled Morales wasn’t liable for the girl’s death because the plaintiff didn’t argue or prove Morales knew she was suicidal or put his gun in her hand. […] In court documents, Kroger’s legal team argues Seyfried’s suicide was not foreseeable, citing Fischer v. Morales at length. They do not discuss their clients’ alleged conduct in detail. “The Kroger defendants could not have reasonably foreseen Seyfried’s suicide,” Kroger attorneys wrote. “The Kroger defendants cannot be held responsible.”
It’s basically legalized rape to say a suicide after rape isn’t “foreseeable” or “manifested”. There was no suicide risk before the harms done, therefore the harms done aren’t liable for a resulting suicide?
A new study published by The BMJ found that workers who have been exposed to sexual harassment—”undesirable advances or offensive references to what is generally associated with sexual relations” in their workplace—are at greater risk of suicide and attempting suicide.
I’m reminded of WWI soldiers being executed for low morale because the British refused to believe trauma was a direct result of traumatic stress.
And I’m reminded of a high rate of suicide when the British government treated gay men as criminals. WWII hero Alan Turing’s suicide not only could have been easily predicted, it was because of a specific set of targeted incidents. Kroger sounds eerily similar.
Back to the opening example from the military, it’s night and day when you think about a proper response to suicide risk indicators versus Kroger failing to protect its staff from attacks.
And it’s even more shocking when you consider the military is in the business of killing people using machines… yet apparently so is Kroger.
