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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Oh, I'm sure some Mottizens could.

But the Twitter screenshot I shared demonstrates that the killer had a nuanced view of societal problems that disavows scapegoatism. So for him to go and execute a scapegoat seems like a pretty extreme pivot.

I'm inching closer to the pitfalls I just described myself by going there, but executing such a "scapegoat" has effects that go beyond "the scapegoat is now dead", and therefore "saying that any or all problems are but-for causally due to the existence of the evil CEO is facile and wrong" and "it is a good intervention to unalive the CEO" are compatible viewpoints.

Someone could believe that this should be done pour encourager les autres, and the intervention will leave every actor that is involved in this complex system second-guessing how far they can go until some Luigi chooses to throw a koopa shell at them, and perhaps choose to exercise restraint; they could believe, in an Assangian way, that just the necessity of hiring more and fancier security details will raise transaction costs for similar enterprises in a way that will make them just a bit less sustainable; they could even anticipate the approximate shape of the popular reaction that we actually got and conclude that the society-wide soul searching and increased salience of the system that the scapegoat figureheaded alone will cause beneficial changes as a side effect, outweighing any negative ones. What impact do you figure this event had on the probability that a startup pitching "reform medical insurance" gets funded a month from now?

What impact do you figure this event had on the probability that a startup pitching "reform medical insurance" gets funded a month from now?

It will have a negative effect. This is the same logic that leads dictators to execute generals who lose battles and then wonder why they can't get any good generals. The would-be reformer will avoid the industry entirely now.

Prediction: UHC denies fewer claims and premiums skyrocket. Again.

Health insurance for my family costs over $20,000 a year and covers very little. This asshole just made it go up again. Thanks, bro.

Well, I don't intend to make the case that what the shooter did was in fact positive-EV with respect to your or my value function here. But given your prediction, there are possible value functions that he could have that would make that outcome positive-sum for him - he would just need to have the right mixture of concavity (weighing outcomes of the form "one individual denied prohibitively expensive life-saving surgery" much more than one million times "moderate misery due to your finances being wrecked by high insurance premiums") and aversion to surprise/betrayal (someone who thought they were covered being unexpectedly denied being a much bigger deal than someone not being able to afford insurance at all with higher premiums). The former is basically just left-wing care-foundation ethics, and the latter is common.

The would-be reformer will avoid the industry entirely now.

Surely depends on what kind of reform they planned. There are reform plans that do not entail becoming a successful insurance CEO with a target painted on your back. You might think that any such plans are reforms for the worse, but the shooter may think otherwise (e.g. see above).

Between Brian Thompson and Shinzo Abe, we seem to be developing a worrying new meta of assassinations in which they can be used to martyr the assassin and move the world ideologically against the target, rather than the reverse.

Communists were already doing that a hundred years ago, it's a common trick. They even used to play themselves up as victims when the czar pardoned them for trying to assassinate his family, and it worked on the intelligencia because they are universally retarded and easily molded by any propaganda delivered with enough repetition and chutzpah.

Just one of those little moldbuggian "isn't that weird" quirks of history you only notice examining it from a critical perspective.

Communists were already doing that a hundred years ago, it's a common trick.

Anarchists, not communists. Random assassinations of public figures are a chaotic evil act, not a lawful evil one.

Sorry, but this is Reddit nonsense. Real life does not follow D&D character alignment rules, and no communist is going to say "oh noes, I can't assassinate this strategic opponent because someone's interpretation of 'authoritarianism' means I must follow the laws of a regime I abhor".

Communists avoided random assassinations precisely because it was an anarchist tactic, and communists are not anarchists and did not want to be mistaken for them. "Don't be an anarchist, they are ineffectual morons" is a fairly common theme of early 20th century communist propaganda. The relatively small number of communist assassinations (Icepick Ho!) were carried out by professionals working for Soviet intelligence.

Lawful vs chaotic evil is a convenient way of explaining the difference between communists and anarchists to modern American geeks who are not familiar with the history.

Communists avoided random assassinations

Is that really true? Alexander II, Stolypin, Skalon, Sipyagin, von Plehve, Bogolepov - most of the assassination victims of the russian empire were done in by revolutionary socialists, and most of those killings were by SRs proper.

You have to balance this against assassination targets like Lincoln and JFK, though, who I think definitely got cast in a sympathetic light post-assassination.

Funnily enough there's another moldbuggian take about that.

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