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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30259 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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In recent years, it really did seem like the media put in the effort to not glorify mass shooters by plastering their image all over the place, fueling speculation as to their motives, and generally making them look cool. There are major shooting incidents to which I don't even remember the perpetrator's name. It finally sank in that this kind of attention was counterproductive.

Which is why I am fascinated by the Luigi Mangione story. He cracked the code. News outlets are showing his face 24-7. Everyone is talking about the issues that he wants us to be talking about. This guy is the most famous, most popular, and, if the ladies are to be believed, sexiest criminal of the 21st century. Why? Basic competence at not being immediately apprehended? Selecting an unpopular target? Being attractive? Not being unattractive?

The mood on social media feels like the end of Joker. Full mask-off glorification of murder, but it's gleeful -- giddy even. Part of the thrill of voting for Trump was the idea that the people, through sheer collective desire, could will one person out of prison, to look at someone prosecuted by the justice system and say, "no, we have his back". Can it be any surprise that the left wants in on this intoxicating elixir?

Elliot Rodgers is still immortal in the form of a meme that refuses to die, idea wise too. We have had plenty of examples of such people, not just in the US either. Luigi is a middle of the road centrist who had some rough edges and a very sympathetic motive.

Also violence is very attractive, the ability to act violently and get away with it is a very strong form of attraction which is why some serial killers who look alright attract girls, many people who get out of jail for murders have higher odds of casual sex due to the percieved status.

Luigi is a good-looking, well-adjusted, smart guy, the perfect conduit, an anti-woke, neo luddite, credentialed guy who went after one thing that no one sane likes. He chose to act out against something most people just whine about in a public and violent way. His acts were incorrect, killing an innocent CEO wont fix americas dreadful healthcare system ,modern democracies need to ensure a level of safety for the elites at least to work properly and. @/FromKulak gave him props too lol.

Can it be any surprise that the left wants in on this intoxicating elixir?

Nope most people want to win, ideologies exist as conduits to balance out self-preservation and winning. The left wants to claim him since unlike the right, they have a long history of violence that helped establish their regimes. People watch sports for these reasons too, winning just feels sweet.

I'm almost sad that nobody has 'called me out' on this given my consistent pounding of the need for accountability among the elites. My closing remark on that comment is:

Eventually the proles will start to conclude that the system is in fact SET UP so as to ensure elites are guaranteed to thrive regardless of the state of the country and that perhaps the only way skin gets re-inserted to the game is if the proles taken action themselves.

I think it does merit discussion as to whether this killing is the sort of action that suffices to bring more 'skin in the game' back to an increasingly unaccountable system where 'nobody' is responsible for bad outcomes.

For the record on my positions:

Do I condone the killing?: No, the opposite. There were other options on the table.

Do I understand the shooter's motives: Yes, and I find them sympathetic while I condemn the action. The fact that nobody else was harmed in the process is to his credit.

Do I think the killing is probably an 'inevitable' result of institutional failures that individuals feel powerless to affect? Yeah.

I think it is in fact bad that the guy is getting such an ovation from certain corners of the internet, and I strongly suspect many will come to regret their open support of the guy, even if they don't ever publicly recant.

I would remind people that this is just the most recent successful amateur assassination of a highly-positioned figure.

Multiple people took potshots at Trump earlier this year, as we all recall. The individual would-be assassins just didn't get the kind of outpouring of support this guy is receiving. Also can't forget that MULTIPLE people have lit themselves on fire due to the Israel-Palestine situation, so there's just 'something in the air' that is leading people to potentially suicidal action in the U.S. to try to affect large-scale outcomes.

I strongly suspect we're looking at a potential rash of future assassins, The means are more available than ever (3D printed guns are impossible to ban at this point). The motives are varied, and the signal cannot be ignored, if you choose your target well, that you'll get adulation and attention to your particular cause.

I'd also argue it ties into discussion of the 'male loneliness epidemic,' because the sort of disaffected males with minimal prospects are going to notice that women are responding positively to targeted killings. Objectively its the most high-impact action a guy in that age range can take, short of founding a billion-dollar company (or having a couple kids, but the whole point is that isn't a likely outcome these days!).

And that right there is why I don't think these killings or attempts quite qualify as legitimate 'skin in the game,' because they're not filtering out bad actors in a systemic, reliable way. Indeed, the people who live and who die will be almost random in a sense. There's no real attempt to select for targets based on qualities that we want to remove or disincentivize, the selection effect is not towards removing bad actors for harms they are responsible for.

We want the skin in the game to be a direct result of the institution/system itself functioning as intended, rather than a second or arguably third-order effect of its dysfunctioning. But, this will possibly lead to some reformation of the systems or institutions themselves.

I'm almost sad that nobody has 'called me out' on this given my consistent pounding of the need for accountability among the elites. My closing remark on that comment is:

But this assassin is an elite. The target was a working man who was surprisingly exceptional.

I had picked up on this delightfully ironic twist.

The individual would-be assassins [of Trump] just didn't get the kind of outpouring of support this guy is receiving.

I would argue that's mostly because they failed, and were immediately killed/arrested. Had someone managed to actually end Trump's life and then vanish (at least for a couple of days), that person would have been an absolute legend among the TDS types.

Agreed. They would have become legends even if they succeeded and then were immediately killed/arrested. The public outpouring of support for the person would be bigger than what Mangione is getting. But they failed.

The mood on social media feels like the end of Joker.

I had this thought too. I've seen screenshots which allege that tens of thousands of people have bought Luigi hats (i.e. Luigi and Mario) from Amazon in recent days.

Why?

All of the above. His target was the CEO of a healthcare company that is despised by the public, and (from what I can) by doctors and those who have to deal with their insurance in a professional setting. So his cause is arguably just. He killed the person directly leading the operations without any unnecessary casualties, then miraculously left Manhattan and remained free for days. So now it’s just + relatable + skillful. Then it came out that he’s a handsome Ivy League graduate that was personally affected by a medical issue. So it’s just + relatable + skillful + attractive + sympathetic.

So his cause is arguably just.

No, it isn't. Even if you are a consequentialist, the actions of this murderer will have large negative effects.

Here's what I expect to happen.

  1. For 2025, health insurers will be on their best behavior, approving payouts at a much higher rate than normal. Most of the payouts approved over baseline will be for unnecessary procedures. Profit margins, already thin, will go to zero or negative.

  2. For 2026, premiums will skyrocket to cover the cost of the unnecessary procedures.

This asshole is going to personally cost me a few thousand dollars a year, unless I decide to simply drop health insurance, which I might. Costs for insurance for my family are already over $20,000/year.

Oh, and he's a complete midwit to boot. Imaging writing this Reddit-tier slop and then thinking your ideas are so valuable you can have license to go and murder someone. Of course, he was more thoughtful before his likely psychotic break.

People are celebrating this murderer because they, like their Middle Age ancestors, feel powerless in their lives and want a scapegoat to blame for their problems. In the end, this murder did reveal some harsh truths, but it was not about the health care system, it was about the evil and stupidity that lurks just under the surface of the average person.

You can’t make a consequentialist analysis without considering all of the probable consequences. You predict that health insurance companies are going to approve more, but that instead of this affecting their profits (United’s 22bil), or C-Suite payouts and bonuses, it is only going to be passed on to consumers. As if, magically, the company would suddenly cease to exist except with the surprisingly high profit margins it currently has. I don’t find this probable. What I find probable:

  • the most important political discussion topic is now predatory practices in the healthcare industry, which politicians will respond to this.

  • everyone is reconsidering whether their coverage should be UnitedHealth, because their predatory practices are now common knowledge. The effects of this will take time.

  • health insurance boardroom meetings will reconsider whether predatory practices are a solid longterm plan, or whether they will result in reduced longterm profit and possible assassinations

Oh, and he's a complete midwit to boot

His book reviews, twitter messages, and educational history show a different story.

Imaging writing this Reddit-tier slop

If someone is on the run after the most high profile murder in the western hemisphere, I doubt their writing would be very good quality, even if they’re ordinarily a good writer. In any case, most men of action aren’t very good writers.

thinking your ideas are so valuable you can have license to go and murder someone

And yet he did! He gambled his life on the idea that he is right. Let’s see how it plays out.

Yes, his writings before his likely psychotic break were more cogent. He even wrote about how complicated systems can not be reduced to trivial solutions.

In any case, the profits of the entire medical insurance industry are $70 billion up against medical spending around $5 trillion. Even if we factor in executive pay, the total amount of profit that is taken from the system is very little.

The only possible justification I could see from his actions is on accelerationist grounds. His actions will results in hugely increased premiums that will drive healthy people out of the system, making it collapse sooner. Of course, nothing in his rant indicates that this is his justification.

But look on the bright side! If you want to get an expensive, dangerous, and ineffective back surgery in the next calendar year, you might be able to get someone else to pay for it!

The costs of the medical insurance industry are far greater than its profits. But a lot of that cost doesn't go to fat cat executives. It goes to armies of support personnel (claim evaluators, billing coders, etc) to produce the vast amount of paperwork involved, some of them working for insurance companies and some of them working for providers. It goes to diverting the time of people who are nominally care providers into handing that paperwork and arguing with insurance companies. And lots of other ancillary personnel.

Of course, if you got rid of that, medical costs would go to infinity even faster. The insurance gating function is a necessary thing given that the pricing signals at both ends (consumer and provider) have been systematically destroyed. Everything's downstream of people wanting medical care without having to pay for it.

How did those other price signals get systematically destroyed? What alternative solutions are there?

How did those other price signals get systematically destroyed?

It started with employer-provided health insurance around WWII. There was typically 20% coinsurance on that, which only attenuated the price signals. Then we got HMOs, and PPOs and POS and all the other things which made health care essentially flat-rate (plus small co-pay), but had various gating methods to control cost (which users hated). Then governments worked on neutering the gating mechanisms, Obamacare being part of that.... and we are here.

Exactly. My worry is that the only place this could end up is with a Bernie Sanders style regime: unlimited luxury care provided at government expense, where every procedure is approved with no check on costs.

It's astounding to me that we pay 20% of GDP in health care. But if we follow the incoherent demands of the pro-assassination crowd, this is just the beginning. It could easily double, with hard-working healthy people forced to pay exorbitant taxes so that every drug addict gets a full-time nurse, every hypochrondriac gets exploratory surgery, and every minor illness is treated with a suite of expensive medications.

The problem isn't the insurance industry. It's waste and overutilization of the medical system.

Maybe there's some hope that, once premiums increase enough, the system will really collapse and revert to something resembling a free market. But I think the Bernie Sanders medico-tyranny version is more likely.

People are celebrating this murderer because they, like their Middle Age ancestors, feel powerless in their lives and want a scapegoat to blame for their problems. In the end, this murder did reveal some harsh truths, but it was not about the health care system, it was about the evil and stupidity that lurks just under the surface of the average person.

Maybe.

Or maybe bad actors are a bit too comfortable knowing their bad acts can never be proven. Or that their bad acts melt into a sea of bad acts, and it's impossible to ever sort out any single point of failure. When everyone is in on the take, who's to blame really?

In a system that is corrupt from top to bottom, with everyone fleecing everyone in a byzantine and dysfunctional system of rules of responsibilities, maybe we need a scapegoat lottery system. Maybe that's exactly the sort of outside the system pressure we need to nudge people into being a little more honest, and a little less greedy. Maybe if they were afraid of pissing off the wrong person, they'd make more ethical decisions instead of hiding behind process.

It's gonna be messy. It could decay into an even worse system. But America's "Broken Healthcare System" has been a talking point my entire life, and it's arguably only gotten worse. It's proven itself reform proof. I'm not shocked murder turns out to be Plan B. There never was a different Plan B offered.

I'm not excited about this. Assassinations are fucking terrifying. I'm a firm believer than the attempt on Trump, had it succeeded, would have been probably the single most tragic event for the world since the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. We would have had WWIII, the destruction of America with open borders, the completely and unambiguous destruction of the bill of rights, and a dark age of multipolar global fascism. Instead I have hope. But, you open the "murder people I don't like" box, and you put events like that back on the table in a major way. It's no longer a single bullet we all dodged, but a relentless tide of entropy for our entire civilization.

That said, I'm not shocked people aren't just willing to lay down and die, especially not without taking someone with them. Maybe we shouldn't do that.

In recent years, it really did seem like the media put in the effort to not glorify mass shooters by plastering their image all over the place, fueling speculation as to their motives, and generally making them look cool.

Huh? When did you think you started seeing this?

We know vastly too much about every mass shooter. Their names and putative motives are plastered everywhere for weeks. They are frequently cited as notables on this website, and people are expected to know who they are.

Yeah, terrorists are seen as martyrs in all cultures that feel that they are oppressed, the US simply lacks that so shooters get a decent amount of cred.

Glorification of the killer, from what I can tell, is almost entirely happening on social media. Mainstream media (or, perhaps more accurately, legacy media) is almost without exceptions, from what I can tell, condemning his act and is painting him in an unglamorous light by doing things like showing unflattering visual pictures of him, emphasizing family/friend interviews in which people say that they are shocked and horrified by what he did, and sometimes rightly or wrongly pointing out that he came from a fairly well-off background. The "sexy killer" angle is almost entirely being put forward on social media. Mainstream media is only referring to that angle occasionally and when it does, it's just in the form of "some people online are calling the killer sexy".

I don't think one needs any theory of a coordinated conspiracy to explain the divide. Mainstream media has powerful norms that prevent them from glorifying political violence in the US domestic politics context. Furthermore, after years of often well-justified populist rage against mainstream journalism lies, it is understandable why mainstream journalists would feel a personal interest in not doing anything to encourage acts of violence against supposed or real representatives of the "establishment".

One angle of the whole event that I have not seen pushed as much as I would wish is that law enforcement seems to have responded to this high-profile killing with a massive deployment of assets that I doubt they would have done if some random Joe Shmoe, say, got killed in a home invasion or a street robbery. This genuinely insults me. I feel like a basic tenet of modern civilization should be that society should at least try to stop all murders by using a significant deployment of state power. Not just when a high-profile person gets killed in a lurid and politically relevant way. It feels obnoxious to live in a society that decides how hard to crack down on murder based on the killed person's socioeconomic status and on the level of media coverage of the killing. It's hard to feel good paying one's tax money to such a society.

I hope that I am wrong, but honestly it feels hard for me to believe that if I was killed tomorrow by some angry person or some street criminal, the nation's various police forces would devote nearly as much energy to finding the killer and bringing him to justice as they just did in trying to solve this case of the killed CEO. I understand the argument that society maybe should pay extra attention to deterring political assassinations, but I do not find it convincing on the most fundamental emotional level. I do not enjoy living in a society that has such a multi-tier system for deciding which killings deserve maximum police effort.

It doesn't make sense to you that ideological assassinations would get more resources than a gang shooting or a homeless guy turning up full of holes? We're talking cold blooded murder of one dude walking down a street here. I understand your feeling to an extent, but the nature of this crime is very different from the average murder among the lower classes. Usually there is some provocation and a lack of evidence for the latter. The former was premeditated, in cold blood, between two well-to-do higher class people who were strangers to one another (Mangione went hundreds of miles and must have spent a long time planning this), and a lot scarier.

Bob Lee getting killed in San Francisco last year got a lot less buzz, didn't it? I'm not sure why, but I would suggest that even though it was similar to this case with two well-to-do people being involved, in that case, it was not premeditated, it seemed to be over some personal dispute, and perhaps the perpetrator being an immigrant with a criminal history also had something to do with it. Edit: for a while it was suspected that a homeless person did it, which would also make leftists not want to celebrate such a thing (makes homeless look bad).

If the target was different, would your opinion be changed? Would this level of resources be appropriate for someone who shot Trump, or the man who shot Shinzo Abe?

Wasn't the Bob Lee murder about the alleged suspects sister sexual assault at the hands of a Bob Lee drug / sex party acquaintence / friend, allegedly?

I really am still not clear, after reading about it to post. But because it wasn't an ideological assassination, apparently reddit and other social medias didn't see fit to look very positively on it, other than general smirking that a billionaire died. That's my guess, anyway.

Selecting an unpopular target?

This is obviously it, isn't it? The media don't want to prevent copycat attacks.

Wow, you're not kidding. I haven't really liked /r/slatestarcodex for quite a while now, but so far its failings were imo mostly on the "naive, well meaning quokka stats nerd" end of the spectrum. Now, some of the most highly upvoted comments there are completely misinformed apologia of the killer on how the insurances are killing people for profit.

I get the impression that sub has been exploited by various wannabe substackers. If so, it wouldn’t be surprising that said wannabes are jumping on the Current Thing.

Follow the names back to subs and you'll find a lot of familiar faces. The discord server takeover plus weaponising the "no culture war" rule just let the rest of reddit ooze in and fill the space.

I'm not familiar with the discord takeover, but hasnt the sub had a "no CW" rule for a long time? The redditification of the subreddit seems to coincide also with Scott's new blog, his new writing, and his blog's new comment section.

The "no CW" rule in practice means doing culture war from the left (e.g. objecting to some post as being racist, sexist, or homophobic) is OK but objecting to that is "culture warring".

Part of the thrill of voting for Trump was the idea that the people, through sheer collective desire, could will one person out of prison, to look at someone prosecuted by the justice system and say, "no, we have his back". Can it be any surprise that the left wants in on this intoxicating elixir?

I can sort of see what you mean. Trump said a lot of offensive things, and Luigi…murdered someone rich

Hmmm, somehow doesn’t seem equivocal though

If you look at who supports/doesn't support him, it's not on clear party lines at all. It's about the legitimacy of institutions vs individuals with respect to violence.

It's simple really: do you think the protagonist of John Q. was in the right? And as it turns out, a very large amount of people think so.

I don't really think comparisons with Joker, which ostensibly is more about how this sort of glorification is a form of performance and simulacra, are valid.

This isn't really simulated or done for glory or the exploitation of someone who's mentally ill for spectacle, there's no lurid livestream full of memes, his actual manifesto isn't the sort of self indulgent dramatic political thesis you might expect (and ironically people forged that because they couldn't get their hands on the real thing).

He plainly explains that he got fucked over by the system, which everyone knows fucks people over constantly, and wanted to make the system find out.

The only principled objection I've seen is that, well, we have rules and you can't just start killing people who wrong you. And very well we do, for good reason. But the legitimacy of those rules is always standing on the legitimacy of the institutions that enforce them, and those institutions have done nothing but continuously burn down their legitimacy over the past century.

Is it really a surprise then that people cheer when someone takes extrajudicial action, much like they cheer for parents who gun down their child's rapist when they get off with a slap on the wrist?

What endears the CEO to the masses? What's actually the story you can tell that makes people have any shred of sympathy for him? What sort of commonality does he share with the average Joe that would give him any sort of moral community? Even basic stuff like "he has a wife and kids and goes to church on sunday" doesn't work and is even laughable given the state of society.

Hell the McD's employee may not even get any of the promised reward on a technicality for reporting the assassin that killed because he got fucked over on a technicality. That's where we are.

We have destroyed the bonds that held society together and turned it into an atomized free for all ruled by managerial bureaucracies. Random acts of violence like this were quite literally predicted as the outcome of this absurdity. Nobody should be surprised.

Is it really a surprise then that people cheer when someone takes extrajudicial action, much like they cheer for parents who gun down their child's rapist when they get off with a slap on the wrist?

I'm not exactly surprised, given the nature of people. But I'm not sure this works as any sort of justification or equivalence.

He plainly explains that he got fucked over by the system, which everyone knows fucks people over constantly, and wanted to make the system find out.

I don’t see any explanation like this in the manifesto. The guy was from a very very rich family. He clearly could afford treatment. No one fucked him over! His grievances seem very murky and probably due to psychosis if I’m betting

We'll know more with time, and perhaps I have been primed by reading the fake one. But the whole back surgery thing seems way too à propos not to factor in. I still haven't seen any convincing evidence that drugs played a part here, however.

In any case this is my interpretation of:

I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.

Yes the back issue probably has some significance to his warped perceptions. Feels victimized, decides to blame insurers as somehow the ones causing his back pain. Maybe opioids triggered a schizophrenic break.

In that passage, what I see is thought disorder, delusions of grandeur, and paranoia

My understanding is that back surgery is very rarely helpful and usually makes the pain worse. People are always upset to find the surgery is not covered, but there's a very good reason for it. It doesn't work.

Back surgery works for severe disk herniations, but the mechanism is that it removes pressure on the nerves. The nerves die under pressure resulting in partial paralysis if surgery is not done within 48 (ideally 24) hours. Nerves don't regenerate/grow after age 30 or so.

I'm reading a lot of stories on reddit of people whose back surgeries were delayed 2 to 6 months over insurance stating that a surgery would not be paid for without a diagnostic MRI (which is fair), and a diagnostic MRI would not be paid for without weeks of physical therapy first (which is unconscionable).

aren’t private MRIs pretty cheap in America? I would just bite the bullet and pay for one if it was that dire

I think they’re about $1000.

More comments

If you look at who supports/doesn't support him, it's not on clear party lines at all. It's about the legitimacy of institutions vs individuals with respect to violence.

I'm seeing professors and mainstream journalists openly supporting him and celebrating the murder. I would bet that both those specific people and their social classes generally would come down solidly on the "legitimacy of institutions" side in the last several societal conversations we've had on the issue: Donald Trump and Daniel Penny, for instance.

his actual manifesto isn't the sort of self indulgent dramatic political thesis you might expect

Do we have his actual manifesto? I read a manifesto that talked about his mother suffering chronic pain and getting screwed over by the insurance and medical system, but I thought that was the fake one.

No argument on the rest, you seem straightforwardly correct.

This seems the real manifesto (Klippenstein is a former Intercept reporter, so not confirmed by a second source yet, but he is decently trustworthy). It is super short:

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto

“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.

This is the part that sticks out as what's broken in this otherwise reasonable and smart-enough sounding person. "This is a complicated problem that I can't say I fully understand but the answer is obviously violence." He keeps using adverbs like "simply, frankly, clearly", to try and drag violence within the realm of reasonable answers to a problem that is resistant to any other solutions. Violence is a reasonable answer when you are absolutely certain that it is the only way to resolve an issue with more severe consequences than the damage caused by the violence itself, which is why it's such a bad answer to complicated societal problems. But by his admission it IS a complicated societal problem that he doesn't feel like he has a good enough grasp on to explain himself.

Not even a personal grievance, just terminal Reddit-brain?

Choice of target. Mangione isn't a mass shooter, he's an assassin, and he chose a target that almost anyone could at least understand wanting to kill.

I'm kind of hoping that Crooks broke the school shooter trend, and our disaffected white boys will start shooting ceos and politicians rather than children. Even assuming the CEOs don't deserve it, one dead CEO is an improvement over twenty dead kids.

Nobody knows how to prevent these, though.

I think this is a very bad trade. With spree killers, we at least had massive social opprobrium against them, such that the tactic was a resort only for the most nihilistic, dysfunctional and despairing among society. This new evolution is something different: killing for a cause, for an ideology, killing tribal enemies. The old sort of spree killing was a problem that was vexing but survivable, like wildfires or famine or organized crime; we could collectively band together to oppose it and to mitigate its effects. This version is corrosive to the very concept of society in the way that the old form was not, because the violence is fundamentally popular, and at the same time polarizing.

What this is leading to is more killing, not less. The killing will not constrain itself to such broadly unpopular targets as health insurance CEOs, nor to CEOs or senior politicians generally. It will most visibly start there, certainly, but some of the victims will be popular with one tribe or the other, and that tribe will then be motivated toward partisan revenge. Escalation will continue along this new axis, and people will realize that CEOs and senior politicians are increasingly hard targets, whereas it's much easier to just go for their supporters directly.

This is how peace and plenty goes away and never comes back within your (very possibly abbreviated) lifetime.

we could collectively band together to oppose it and to mitigate its effects.

Not really. Murdering 10+ children is always going to be easy unless we make the cure worse than the disease. We've already increased security at schools to a pretty high degree; any more and they'll start to look too much like jails. Not to mention Gun Control which we have proved over and over again we can't agree on.

I hate to say it, but if we're assuming that we have to have either the mass shooting of children or assassinations of well-paid executives, I'll take the latter every time.

You point to the reality of the situation. The reality is that this sort of killing is going to have its own supply and demand curve, so I'd rather have less of it.

I hate to say it, but if we're assuming that we have to have either the mass shooting of children or assassinations of well-paid executives, I'll take the latter every time.

My argument is that the latter will inevitably lead to much, much more of the former.

Like peace and plenty went away in my father's lifetime when he lived through the political murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Sharon Tate, etc.

Oh wait, no, the boomers who saw that in their youth lived through an unprecedented era of peace and plenty in human history.

I dunno, the 21st Century so far has me suspecting that the Cold War ending how it did may have just been a lucky fluke we didn't appreciate. The 80's was filled with economic hardships paired with plenty of fears of the end of the world vis-a-vis WWIII. Imagine if the Soviet Union didn't collapse when it did.

No, not like your father's time, because your father's time was fundamentally unlike our current situation in a number of crucial ways, foremost among them the steep decline in trust and social cohesion, and the steep increase in polarization and tribalism. Our present system almost certainly cannot survive the kinds of hits society took through the 60s and 70s. We are at much, much higher risk of self-sustaining fratricide than they were.

Literal antifa gets frightened off from potential targets all the time- who do you think is going to be carrying out this tit-for-tat violence?

I'm actually not so sure about that. CEOs are, no offense, more important than regular people. This is true descriptively if not normatively. If CEOs stop maximizing shareholder value because they have concerns for their physical safety, that could have sizable effects on the economy.

Have you considered that this type of thinking may be a contributing factor to the increasing political instability we’re seeing?

No one wants to be told “sorry, you’re actually unimportant and nothing can ever change because… taps sign The Economy”.

Eventually, there will be people who start saying “fuck your economy”.

The type of thinking where we dispassionately try to predict the secondary effects of an event, or the type of thinking where we curse at dispassionate analysis? I'm going to blame the latter.

I recently debunked this nonsense meme for a friend when it made the rounds again on Facebook. Although he in particular is actually a caring and compassionate person who immediately understood and accepted the correction, I haven't been getting that vibe from most of the "blame the Kulaks" types in the same misinformation ecosystem. I'd bet that if you divided the country into people who think falsehoods are more dangerous than envy vs those who think envy is more dangerous than falsehoods, Spergistan would be stable and prosperous (despite an increasing Gini coefficient) whereas Equalia would end up with poor peasants being killed by even poorer peasants for saving "too much" seed corn.

Personally, I can also see dispassionate utilitarian arguments for our level of or even a higher level of economic redistribution, but "we can afford to tax and redistribute trillions of dollars a year because ... taps sign The Economy" still ends up resting on the foundation of The Economy, not because I said so, but because the reality of total production needing to balance total consumption says so.

Eventually, there will be people who start saying “fuck your economy”.

Of course there will. This shit didn't kill people by the tens of millions last century because of a weird virus that made everyone's minds go temporarily haywire, it did so because our minds' permanent "we all need to share and what are incentives anyway" instinct made sense for a 150-man tribe in the pre-agricultural pre-industrial world where our ancestors evolved. If the Chieftain has more fruit than he can ever eat, it's not because he planted an orchard, it's because he's an ass who took too much from the gatherers after their trip to the wild fruit trees. That kind of thinking doesn't even apply in a world where fruit comes from agriculture, much less to a world whose richest men obviously weren't merely hoarding the output of wild operating-system trees and wild electric-car trees, but nobody ever spells it out explicitly, they just let the same instincts run wild.

United Health is downstream of people politically demanding healthcare that covers everything and that they don't have to pay much for. And the ability to do that even as much as United Health does is downstream of having a decent economy. Where will the "fuck your economy" people be when they can't get employers to pay for their health care, because they're unemployed?

Talking about the issues with "maximizing shareholder value" and capitalism and all that with the health insurance industry is ridiculous. It's one of the most regulated industries around.

Some are, some aren't. Most corporate CEOs in America are overpaid, in that their performance is mostly mediocre and could be replaced by a broke actor reading off whatever ChatGPT says a CEO would say in that situation. CEOs are also easier to secure than every elementary school, movie theater, mall, night club, etc in America.

Maximizing shareholder value is not the sole goal humanity should have. This is strawman paperclip maximizer talk.

Do you want Big Drug CEOs working hard to medicalize normal human experience and sell expensive and unreliable anti-depressants? Do you want yet more chemicals nobody's ever heard of in food to make it slightly cheaper? Should Lockheed Martin lobby for a more hawkish than strictly necessary foreign policy stance? Should Microsoft put yet more spyware in our PCs and sell our data?

I hold Lockheed Martin and Microsoft shares because I've got a certain model of how the world works. But it is not necessarily good when the green line goes up!

Maximizing shareholder value is not the sole goal humanity should have. This is strawman paperclip maximizer talk.

Sure, but one problem is that from what I see, the most common alternative goal to "maximizing shareholder value" ends up being DEI, ESG and "forcing behaviors."

I used to think that the problem was indeed that people are trying to corrupt amoral business with moralism. But the woke are right in that this is just internalizing a different set of morals, not rejecting morality altogether.

There isn't really an escape from the moral landscape and the culture war. Humans can't operate solely as economic units. It's just not something we can possibly do. Some of it may be suspended to allow oneself to trade with strangers, but when you're dealing with something like health, the true nature of our relationships reasserts itself: letting grandma die because saving her isn't worth the price is monstrous even is rational.

In fact in this I think Mises and ancaps are more correct and less ideological than Hayek and neolibs, since their framework of individual action allows for moral tastes.

The neutrality of the 90s that some want back into was not really neutrality, it was a widespread agreement on moral principle (at least outwardly).

Your gripe isn't really that businessmen have to adhere to moral codes, it's that the moral codes are written by your enemies and letting businessmen get away with anything is better than having them do you wrong systematically. But you should want for businessmen to adhere to moral codes that benefit or are neutral towards you, ultimately. Because them getting away with anything is not stable.

Your gripe isn't really that businessmen have to adhere to moral codes, it's that the moral codes are written by your enemies and letting businessmen get away with anything is better than having them do you wrong systematically.

Yes, exactly.

But you should want for businessmen to adhere to moral codes that benefit or are neutral towards you, ultimately.

Sure. But I don't think that's achievable at the moment. So, again that leaves "letting businessmen get away with anything" as a second-best alternative. Come the Reaction, come our Augustus, then we can talk about moral frameworks beyond "shareholder value."

Is there really a convincing utilitarian argument here that health insurance ceos maximizing shareholder value is a net positive?

I can think of much stronger arguments against vigilanteism targeting ceos than bringing up the maxim that ceos are more valuable than plebeians.

Namely, glorifying this guy invites the more lazy ones to act, and a single other targeted ceo will be used to justify additional civilian-focused surveillance.

Why would it be any less than in any other situation? Wouldn't the usual arguments on behalf of capitalism apply here?

There are specific arguments you can make for healthcare being uniquely susceptible to market failure, because the demand side is willing to pay a potentially infinite price and the combination of this with patents means that it is rife for extortion.

This needn't necessarily be a leftward critique that denounces capitalism. You can perfectly make a powerful critique of how corrupt and inefficient the American healthcare system is from the right. Since it's all ultimately enabled by State action.

Does the fact that this is insurance, rather than, say, a drug company make a difference in that?

(I do agree that there are a bunch of ways that our health care system is bad.)

I recall that mutualists specifically criticize for-profit insurance as a concept because it creates hazardous incentives.

Consider that the path that maximizes profit as an insurer is not the one where you faithfully execute your contract, but the one where you create as many possible obstacles to its faithful execution short of doing something illegal, or, well, getting shot down by disgruntled clients.

Unfortunatly the complexity of healthcare creates many situations where this kind of dynamic is a problem, and it's not unique to the insurance model at all (I can think of quite a few ways this applies to the NHS for instance) but I think there is indeed something potentially uniquely sinister about the bureaucracy that has to make the technical decision of whether or not your life is ruined, and may benefit if it is.

I feel like I also need to mention that the converse argument, about the problem with rules that are too loose and let some people leech from the commons and/or control prices in ways that create shortages is also a valid one, even though it's less sympathetic.

More comments

Optimizing a single metric at the expense of anything else is not wise leadership.

Maybe they've been maximizing shareholder value a little too hard. Maybe society would be better off if they didn't maximize as ruthlessly.

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