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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30258 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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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.

Fair. I imagine offering a good product would probably be a good selling point for an insurance company, but that might not hold up if there's not enough competition (see, especially, if it's provided by workplaces), or if consumers prospectively (rather than looking back) prefer lower prices and better-sounding promises to actually good coverage.

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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