Moritz Schlick was the founder of the Vienna Circle, one of the 4 major groups of empirical philosophy in Germany and Austria. In 1936 he was assassinated at the University of Vienna by Johann Nelböck, a former student of his who despised the Circle's opposition to metaphysics.
The case appeared to be open-and-shut. According to Karl Sigmund's book *Exact Thinking in Demented Times*, after shooting Schlick 4 times, Nelböck waited to be arrested, then confessed. He was found guilty of murder and of illegal ownership of a firearm and sentenced to ten years in prison.
What happened next was, in my opinion (and probably no one else's), one of the great turning points of history.
German and Austrian philosophers were divided in a great contest between the reactionary, spiritualist, generally Luddite and 100% batshit crazy metaphysicians; and the empiricists, who sought to reform philosophy after the manner of science. Schlick, one of the most-prominent empiricists, was hated by the metaphysicians, and after Nelböck assassinated his body, they set to assassinating his character. They united with Nelböck in calling not just Schlick, but all empiricists, deniers of objective morality and babblers of purely logical constructs devoid of any reference to the eternal sources of meaning. They called his anti-metaphysical views anti-spiritual (which they were) and thus immoral (which they were not), and said Nelböck had been driven insane by "the radically devastating philosophy professed by Dr. Schlick."
This wasn't the first attack on empiricism under the Nazis; the Ernst Mach Society had already been outlawed and its doctrines prohibited "because they corrupted the people and the culture".
The empiricist circles included a large number of Jews. Though Schlick wasn't Jewish, he was nonetheless damned by public opinion after death for associating with Jews, and Nelböck was hailed by many as a hero of the people. Metaphysicians called for all philosophy chairs at the U of Vienna to be filled by Christians.
I call this a turning point in history because it marked the creation of continental philosophy as we know it today. Yes, there were "continental philosophers" before the Nazis. But "continental philosophy" became the monolithic block of lunatics that it is today only after the great purge of empiricists from the continent, which the Nazis had already begun, and which attained its full force from this incident. Just a few years later, metaphysicians and phenomenologists stood unchallenged across Germany and Austria, as they would soon stand unchallenged everywhere the Nazi armies went. Under the Nazis, students were taught social constructivism and a phenomenological epistemology which together taught people to scorn "cold" data and objective observations, and "awaken" to the "authenticity" of their "lived experience", to define their identity by their race, and to take "racial truths" as foundational rather than seeking objective truths.
18 months after the assassination, the public sympathy for the assassin was so great that Nelböck was released, which helped bring in the next phase of Nazism, in which the law was to follow Nazi principles rather than legal codes. The Nazi view was that that laws and human rights were obstructions in the path to "social justice" (which meant not a just society, but race-based justice), because they protected evil-doers from quick retribution by the will of the people. Hitler said that the Jews introduced law to protect themselves from social justice.
After the war, the Allies occupied the continent, but nobody ever brought back the empiricist philosophers. Nelböck's conviction for murder was expunged from the penal record in 1947 under the Soviets. Nazi philosophy continued to be taught all across Europe, and French students of Nazi teachers spelled out some of the consequences of these Nazi doctrines in the philosophy we now call "post-modernism".
But that was 90 years ago. Surely it has nothing to do with today.
Oh! You wrote something in this same vein a few months ago. This is legitimately fascinating, I bet if you were to put together a dozen posts of about this length that poked at this concept and gave similar examples (or modern repercussions) you'd have a *major* cultural contribution on your hands. :)
I agree that it is dumb to murder insurance CEOs. When insurance companies turn down 30% of claims and only have 2% growth, is obvious that there is not enough money.
At the same time, there are so many problems in society that are caused by corporations ability to lobby politicians, that I think this not getting expressed is crazy.
When TurboTax prevents Americans from getting a tax bill and has them do their own tax calculations instead, costing taxpayers millions each year, it's hard to not notice:
I know the incentives are bad, but politicians could choose to not do this. The CEO of TurboTax could just choose to not lobby to do this antisocial thing. It's seems like the rich really do literally have more power in America to set policy even when the policy is bad for most Americans.
True. "It's not me, it's the person who bribed me!" or blaming opponents is... Well, it's annoying to me that it works.
I expect a lot of finger pointing at CEOs comes from them being a convenient symbol for capitalism. A lot of writers want a human target rather than an impersonal system being to blame.
For anyone that gets a W2 (which is most Americans) the government already knows what you make and what you owe. They could simply tell you. Instead they make you figure it out yourself because you have to pay for help to do that. This is directly related to the fact that TurboTax spends millions on lobbying against such simplification whenever it comes up in congress because that would bankrupt them.
Nope, it's the same psychological mechanism. If people had antibodies to this there wouldn't be genocides. It's good to fight it everywhere to prevent it anywhere.
This is not a valid comparison. Jews were scapegoated for every societal ill from bad crops to new illnesses. They were not in any way responsible for these problems, they were simply blamed so wealthy and powerful Christians could convince poor and powerless Christians that all their problems were the fault of a minority group who could not fight back.
Healthcare company CEO's are actively contributing to the problems with US healthcare, paying off politicians to prevent laws from being passed which would improve the situation in order to protect their profits. The hatred we have for CEO's is in fact deserved as they are one of the primary reasons the system is so bad. The current CEO's didn't cause the failures of the last few centuries, but they are doing their best to make sure those failures cannot be corrected now.
A better argument was made in an interview I attended with Kim Stanley Robinson where he discussed this type of targeted assassination from one of his books: killing CEO's will not solve the problem. The deserved hate we feel towards CEO's would be best spent joining organizations advocating for change, volunteering with non profits or working towards moving to countries with better healthcare systems.
Acting like CEO's are just innocent bystanders being blamed for a situation they have nothing to do with is disingenuous.
> The hatred we have for CEO's is in fact deserved as they are one of the primary reasons the system is so bad.
How much hate belongs to the CEO vs the actuaries in the company vs the law makers that entangled public and private interests to this amount vs the customers who commit fraud vs the customers who don't commit fraud but act in ways they never would if they paid for their own medical care vs the doctors/nurses/surgeons/ambulance EMTs who want to be paid more than people can afford vs the educational institutions that restrict entry of new physicians vs the current physicians who support this vs the FDA that makes new drug research so expensive and regulates simple machines like they're nuclear reactors vs people who are willing to bankrupt themselves for an extra two months of life in their 80s vs lobbyists?
Seriously though, what was the mechanism by which you allocated blame among all these persons? Do you have one? I suspect you are simply going along with the dominant paradigm of "choose scapegoats rather than allocating blame" and just giving the currently acceptable excuse for why this time it REALLY IS ok to hate the Jew. You certainly aren't alone in history for giving reasons everyone believes are actually true and valid.
I allocate blame based on actual power. How many millions of dollars has the EMT, doctor or sick person who has the audacity to actually be ill spent to bribe the government in order to rig the system in their favor?
This is like saying a soldier who joined the army 6 weeks before the war in Iraq began because he had no job, no money and no prospects is at least as much to blame for the war as the US President who declared war.
You keep acting like the noble and the peasant are equally to blame for feudalism when one has an army and the other barely has enough food to eat.
You bring up the actuaries in the company and lobbyists like they are independent agents rather than employees working at the behest of the CEO's you keep trying to claim are just innocent bystanders looking at our train wreck of a healthcare system from the sidelines unable to do a thing to help.
In previous posts, you spoke out against laws passed to make the lives of sex workers harder. I did not read any anger towards the police officers or district attorneys enforcing these laws. Why is it that you see a distinction there and not between the wealthy CEO's buying a system that hurts almost everyone and the rest of society trying to live in a system they have little to no say in?
Why are you so attached to the idea that some of the wealthiest, most powerful people on earth are a persecuted minority?
> This is like saying a soldier who joined the army 6 weeks before the war in Iraq began because he had no job, no money and no prospects is at least as much to blame for the war as the US President who declared war.
An interesting comparison. Are you saying that soldiers aren't responsible for the civilians they kill? Or are you saying a CEO is as powerful as the commander of the US Military?
> You keep acting like the noble and the peasant are equally to blame for feudalism when one has an army and the other barely has enough food to eat.
This sentence reveals that you don't really want to understand systems at all, you just want to find a Jew to blame. Trying to sort individuals into the innocent persecuted minority vs the oppressor who caused all this is your frame, not mine. I'm pointing out that this is what you're doing. You think I'm trying to say that some wealthy people with corporate power are an innocent persecuted minority because I'm saying "this Evil Oppressor vs Innocent Victim frame is literally the thing responsible for the worst evils of the Christian-descendant western world" and there's no other way for someone so deeply bought into that frame to understand that claim.
>An interesting comparison. Are you saying that soldiers aren't responsible for the civilians they kill? Or are you saying a CEO is as powerful as the commander of the US Military?
I did not state a CEO is as powerful as the commander in chief of the US military nor did I say soldiers are not responsible for civilians they kill. The point is the commander in chief is primarily responsible for the war they declared just as the CEO is primarily responsible for the terrible system they use their considerable wealth and power to maintain despite the harm it causes.
As I stated at the beginning of this, I am sorting between those who are primarily responsible and those who are not. Your argument that if 900 people are each 0.01% responsible for something then we cannot focus our blame on the 5 people who are each 18.2% responsible because somehow that is the equivalent of persecuting Jews.
>Trying to sort individuals into the innocent persecuted minority vs the oppressor who caused all this is your frame, not mine.
Let's try this again.
Jews were not responsible in any, way shape or form for the things they were blamed for. Jews did not cause the black plague, blight crops to cause famine, etc. Anti-antisemitism is quite literally the process of taking innocent victims and scapegoating them as evil oppressors as a way to deflect blame for problems that were either natural disasters or the fault of unrelated groups. You are trying to compare this to blaming healthcare CEO's for problems they have deliberately and intentionally used their considerable wealth and influence to continue for their personal gain.
Now tell me again, since you are so interested in understanding systems, how these two things are even remotely comparable?
Or better yet, please give me the exact percentage of blame you assign to Jews for the crimes they have been made to suffer for (i.e. the black plague, bad harvests, Germany losing WWI, etc.)?
> the CEO is primarily responsible for the terrible system they use their considerable wealth and power to maintain
wonderful sentence, perfectly captures the essence of the Hateful Oppressor frame!
> problems they have deliberately and intentionally used their considerable wealth and influence to continue for their personal gain.
All those things that you claim the Jews weren't responsible for? All the Christians around them knew without a shadow of a doubt that they WERE responsible for them. And that They were perpetuating those miseries for Their personal gain.
"No but really, I'm actually right about Them being responsible for The Misery for reals this time!"
The average person can't understand the actual causes because the system is too complex, they really do think the Hateful Oppressor *really is* responsible.
>All those things that you claim the Jews weren't responsible for? All the Christians around them knew without a shadow of a doubt that they WERE responsible for them.
I'm sorry, the things I claim the Jews weren't responsible for?
If this is just a claim I am making, do you plan on answering my question on what percentage of culpability Jews have for the black plague for example?
Also, did all the Christians KNOW this or were the wealthy and powerful Christians knowingly lying to scapegoat innocent people?
>"No but really, I'm actually right about Them being responsible for The Misery for reals this time!"
Care to provide some actual evidence for why I am wrong as opposed to straw manning me as an inarticulate person while you ignore my actual points as to the basis for my conclusion as to how responsible CEO's actually are?
"Healthcare company CEO's are actively contributing to the problems with US healthcare, paying off politicians to prevent laws from being passed which would improve the situation in order to protect their profits."
What evidence have you got for this claim?
It seems to me that the problem with US healthcare is the government regulation that the people asked for. That is certainly why new pharmaceuticals are so expensive, and why each doctor now needs a support staff of about 4 office workers who mostly just fill out forms. The mandating of employers to provide insurance created a bizarre system in which there are no market prices, no way of finding out how much things will cost, and prices charged to different people for the same procedures that range across 6 orders of magnitude. Not to mention the regulations that restrict the number of MDs graduated each year to far less than are needed.
I don't /know/ all that for sure, but at the moment it seems a lot more plausible than "insurance companies are somehow fooling everyone in America into buying insurance policies that are bad for them."
I think creating grass-roots organizations for change will make things worse in this case unless those organizations actually /understand why healthcare is expensive/. This is a real problem, because the system is so complicated now that only professionals in the healthcare industry can understand it. I don't think we can improve it without simplifying it first. And setting instrumental, intermediary goals like that is a thing "organizations for change" have never done.
Look up healthcare insurance lobbying. They spend millions of dollars a year to get laws passed to keep their profits up.
The main problem with US healthcare is the regulations the insurance companies bribed the government for. It is why we pay more for drugs than any other developed country, why hospitals have whole departments tasked with nothing but determining how much they can charge each person based on their insurance and why we lead the developed world in medical bankruptcies..
I have no idea why anything seems plausible to you, but you don't have a very good understanding of US healthcare. We have been relying mainly on insurance provided by employers since the end of World War II, long before mandates existed. Treating buying health insurance as a commodity no different from buying gas isn't realistic. People need affordable healthcare as a basic necessity. Yet between co-pays, different costs at different hospitals, the fact insurance companies can effectively label any treatment as "experimental" and the fact that medical treatment is a life and death issue this is not practical.
People are rarely buying insurance policies, they get insurance with very limited options through their employers.
I'm curious what country you live in given you don't know the basics on how US healthcare works?
Most of the problems with FDA regulations are not the fault of Congress, but of the FDA's continual imperialistic quest to expand their territory. In the area of medical devices, if you read the legislation that the FDA cites, you'll find it was clearly originally meant to protect consumers from dangerous products, not from the emotional trauma of hearing bad news, or from their own poor judgement, or from receiving information that wasn't 100% reliable. In that domain, the FDA is operating far beyond the bounds prescribed to it by the actual law, and that expansion was initiated entirely by the FDA itself.
Even in the matter of actual safety testing, the FDA's philosophical culture itself is to blame for the abuse of the law. That culture has for a long time been that of "zero tolerance", which effectively meant that any detectable negative effect justified a complete ban. Lives saved, or quality-of-life gained, are not weighted against lives lost; patients are not allowed to make their own risk-tolerance judgements. One of my best friends, Bernie Statland, was key in the fight against this point of view. To quote MD+DI Online (https://www.mddionline.com/regulatory-quality/fda-s-statland-leaves-lasting-mark):
"The disagreement reflected an intractable ideological split over the role of health product regulation. Statland's decision was a defeat for those who believe FDA's role is, or ought to be, to ensure absolute device safety and effectiveness. Instead, he sided with those who believe that the best that FDA can do is ensure full disclosure of information to the real risk takers: patients and their physicians."
I've been victim to that same ideology myself in my work on NIH bioinformatics projects. I was every day forced to write bad algorithms that produced bad output because the "zero errors" ideology forbade balancing false negatives against false positives, or using Bayesian methods, which are literally the one mathematically correct way of dealing with problems with multiple uncertain sources of information.
I don't have numbers telling what fraction of the laws regulating insurance were desired by insurance companies, versus what fraction were /not/ desired by them. If you do, please tell me. My impression is that regulations are usually enacted as the result of public scandals or popular demand, eg thalidomide babies, the Tylenol poisoner, and the Affordable Care Act. That latter involved a great deal of compromise, and I'd be interested if anyone can break it down into a count of clauses that insurance companies wanted, and ones they didn't want.
I live in the US, and I don't know why you think I don't "know the basics on how US healthcare works." I disagree with your conclusions, not with facts about healthcare. Insurance offered by employers is not at all the same as mandated insurance provided by employers.
I would like to see numbers for how many people have been covered by health insurance in the US by decade. I can't find these figures on the Internet for any year before 1987.
Why do you think health insurance is such a wreck, while auto insurance, life insurance, and every other kind of insurance are not? If it were the case that the healthcare industry made bigger profits by lobbying for more regulation, then why haven't other insurance industries done the same thing as effectively?
If health insurance is a wreck because the health insurance industry has lobbied for more regulation, why does the health insurance industry have a lower profit-to-earnings ratio than other insurance industries? Google Gemini says the weighted average P/E ratio for the property and casualty insurance industry is 12.65, for life insurance is 15.42, for motor vehicle insurance is 15.20, and for life and health insurance companies is 8.57.
My only hypothesis is that health insurance is a mess because of public demands. That's the only major distinction I'm aware of. People don't demand legislative protection in those other areas nearly as much, and so those insurance industries aren't as highly regulated.
Not sure why you want the number of people covered in the US by insurance by decade, since I was discussing employer provided health insurance it seems that would be the more important number. Also, given changes in rules for medicaid and medicare I am not sure going back more than 30 years is all that helpful.
Regardless, I find it ironic you actually answered your own question. Health insurance is incredibly complicated. Health insurance companies can leverage uncertainties on efficacy of treatments to claim drugs, medical devices, new surgeries, etc. are experimental in a way that auto insurance companies cannot.
I never said health insurance companies make bigger profits by lobbying, I stated they maintain a system rigged in their favor by lobbying. Take a look at Canada or any other developed country. They provide healthcare for all with excellent results at rock bottom prices through top down regulations which benefit the actual people living their rather than the corporations. In the US insurance is number three in terms of dollars spent on lobbyists because the health insurance racket can only exist as long as they are bribing everyone they can to keep sane regulations out.
Comparing health insurance, a basic necessity people need to receive life saving care to life insurance, something which is an option designed solely to provide some benefit to surviving relatives when you die, is a very bad comparison. You may as well be comparing the rise in cost of open heart surgery (a life and death situation) to lasik eye surgery (a choice between needing glasses or not).
If US health insurance is a mess because of public demands, why is this not the case in dozens of other countries, is the US public just less intelligent than the public in Canada or Singapore? How do you defend your hypothesis based on this comparison?
A friend of mine in Canada has been living with four severely impacted wisdom teeth for years. A friend of his waited 11 years for a knee replacement. A relative of his died of treatable cancer simply by not getting any care for many years while the government deferred treatment.
But I guess if the government health care system kills you from lack of treatment it's different.
Not sure what point you are making here, are you saying because no system is perfect then we cannot assign blame to people primarily responsible for the problems in any system? Or that we should be basing our determinations on the relative quality of healthcare using anecdotes from people we have never met?
As someone who is interested in systems, I base my views on actual numbers such as relatives costs, overall outcomes, life expectancy, etc.
I did find the comment on medical tourism interesting, given that this is something people around the world do to find lower cost or better quality treatment. In the US hundreds of thousands of people leave the country annually seeking medical treatment abroad, for example. Ironically Mexico is one of the top destinations.
I would need to know more about how it works in other countries. In countries where the medicine is really socialized.
I think "they maintain a system rigged in their favor" implies "high profits". Healthcare in the US is much more expensive, and yet very little of that money is going to the insurance companies, so I still don't buy the story that they're to blame. Follow the money. Where does it go?
I see the disconnect here. I completely disagree that a rigged system implies high profits. My two favorite examples of rigged systems in the US are industries that are not very profitable: taxis and agriculture.
Prior to Uber and Lyft, taxi companies were near monopolies in many parts of the US because they paid off government officials to rig the system in their favor, not because they made huge profits, but because they knew those profits would be even lower otherwise.
Agriculture is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the US, they spent around $500 million this year alone buying off politicians despite the fact that most US farms are not profitable and do not expect to. become profitable. Without government regulations, bailouts and loans most US farms would have gone under long ago.
Moritz Schlick was the founder of the Vienna Circle, one of the 4 major groups of empirical philosophy in Germany and Austria. In 1936 he was assassinated at the University of Vienna by Johann Nelböck, a former student of his who despised the Circle's opposition to metaphysics.
The case appeared to be open-and-shut. According to Karl Sigmund's book *Exact Thinking in Demented Times*, after shooting Schlick 4 times, Nelböck waited to be arrested, then confessed. He was found guilty of murder and of illegal ownership of a firearm and sentenced to ten years in prison.
What happened next was, in my opinion (and probably no one else's), one of the great turning points of history.
German and Austrian philosophers were divided in a great contest between the reactionary, spiritualist, generally Luddite and 100% batshit crazy metaphysicians; and the empiricists, who sought to reform philosophy after the manner of science. Schlick, one of the most-prominent empiricists, was hated by the metaphysicians, and after Nelböck assassinated his body, they set to assassinating his character. They united with Nelböck in calling not just Schlick, but all empiricists, deniers of objective morality and babblers of purely logical constructs devoid of any reference to the eternal sources of meaning. They called his anti-metaphysical views anti-spiritual (which they were) and thus immoral (which they were not), and said Nelböck had been driven insane by "the radically devastating philosophy professed by Dr. Schlick."
This wasn't the first attack on empiricism under the Nazis; the Ernst Mach Society had already been outlawed and its doctrines prohibited "because they corrupted the people and the culture".
The empiricist circles included a large number of Jews. Though Schlick wasn't Jewish, he was nonetheless damned by public opinion after death for associating with Jews, and Nelböck was hailed by many as a hero of the people. Metaphysicians called for all philosophy chairs at the U of Vienna to be filled by Christians.
I call this a turning point in history because it marked the creation of continental philosophy as we know it today. Yes, there were "continental philosophers" before the Nazis. But "continental philosophy" became the monolithic block of lunatics that it is today only after the great purge of empiricists from the continent, which the Nazis had already begun, and which attained its full force from this incident. Just a few years later, metaphysicians and phenomenologists stood unchallenged across Germany and Austria, as they would soon stand unchallenged everywhere the Nazi armies went. Under the Nazis, students were taught social constructivism and a phenomenological epistemology which together taught people to scorn "cold" data and objective observations, and "awaken" to the "authenticity" of their "lived experience", to define their identity by their race, and to take "racial truths" as foundational rather than seeking objective truths.
18 months after the assassination, the public sympathy for the assassin was so great that Nelböck was released, which helped bring in the next phase of Nazism, in which the law was to follow Nazi principles rather than legal codes. The Nazi view was that that laws and human rights were obstructions in the path to "social justice" (which meant not a just society, but race-based justice), because they protected evil-doers from quick retribution by the will of the people. Hitler said that the Jews introduced law to protect themselves from social justice.
After the war, the Allies occupied the continent, but nobody ever brought back the empiricist philosophers. Nelböck's conviction for murder was expunged from the penal record in 1947 under the Soviets. Nazi philosophy continued to be taught all across Europe, and French students of Nazi teachers spelled out some of the consequences of these Nazi doctrines in the philosophy we now call "post-modernism".
But that was 90 years ago. Surely it has nothing to do with today.
Oh! You wrote something in this same vein a few months ago. This is legitimately fascinating, I bet if you were to put together a dozen posts of about this length that poked at this concept and gave similar examples (or modern repercussions) you'd have a *major* cultural contribution on your hands. :)
I've been trying to express... basically this, but with more disclaimers and caveats which I now suspect weren't necessary.
Thank you. I'm going to send this to my mom and maybe my dad, and... I don't expect them to *agree*, but I think it'll at least help them understand.
The more of your stuff I read, the more I like it. I haven't found a new rat blog I liked this much in the last... idk, five years maybe?
I agree that it is dumb to murder insurance CEOs. When insurance companies turn down 30% of claims and only have 2% growth, is obvious that there is not enough money.
At the same time, there are so many problems in society that are caused by corporations ability to lobby politicians, that I think this not getting expressed is crazy.
When TurboTax prevents Americans from getting a tax bill and has them do their own tax calculations instead, costing taxpayers millions each year, it's hard to not notice:
I know the incentives are bad, but politicians could choose to not do this. The CEO of TurboTax could just choose to not lobby to do this antisocial thing. It's seems like the rich really do literally have more power in America to set policy even when the policy is bad for most Americans.
I agree, but the politicians are equally to blame here, and whipping up and funneling hate is probably the worst way to address the issue
True. "It's not me, it's the person who bribed me!" or blaming opponents is... Well, it's annoying to me that it works.
I expect a lot of finger pointing at CEOs comes from them being a convenient symbol for capitalism. A lot of writers want a human target rather than an impersonal system being to blame.
What's the TurboTax thing?
For anyone that gets a W2 (which is most Americans) the government already knows what you make and what you owe. They could simply tell you. Instead they make you figure it out yourself because you have to pay for help to do that. This is directly related to the fact that TurboTax spends millions on lobbying against such simplification whenever it comes up in congress because that would bankrupt them.
You don't think that it is perhaps in bad taste to compare the trials of a modern day CEO to what the Jewish people have endured through history?
Nope, it's the same psychological mechanism. If people had antibodies to this there wouldn't be genocides. It's good to fight it everywhere to prevent it anywhere.
This is not a valid comparison. Jews were scapegoated for every societal ill from bad crops to new illnesses. They were not in any way responsible for these problems, they were simply blamed so wealthy and powerful Christians could convince poor and powerless Christians that all their problems were the fault of a minority group who could not fight back.
Healthcare company CEO's are actively contributing to the problems with US healthcare, paying off politicians to prevent laws from being passed which would improve the situation in order to protect their profits. The hatred we have for CEO's is in fact deserved as they are one of the primary reasons the system is so bad. The current CEO's didn't cause the failures of the last few centuries, but they are doing their best to make sure those failures cannot be corrected now.
A better argument was made in an interview I attended with Kim Stanley Robinson where he discussed this type of targeted assassination from one of his books: killing CEO's will not solve the problem. The deserved hate we feel towards CEO's would be best spent joining organizations advocating for change, volunteering with non profits or working towards moving to countries with better healthcare systems.
Acting like CEO's are just innocent bystanders being blamed for a situation they have nothing to do with is disingenuous.
> The hatred we have for CEO's is in fact deserved as they are one of the primary reasons the system is so bad.
How much hate belongs to the CEO vs the actuaries in the company vs the law makers that entangled public and private interests to this amount vs the customers who commit fraud vs the customers who don't commit fraud but act in ways they never would if they paid for their own medical care vs the doctors/nurses/surgeons/ambulance EMTs who want to be paid more than people can afford vs the educational institutions that restrict entry of new physicians vs the current physicians who support this vs the FDA that makes new drug research so expensive and regulates simple machines like they're nuclear reactors vs people who are willing to bankrupt themselves for an extra two months of life in their 80s vs lobbyists?
Seriously though, what was the mechanism by which you allocated blame among all these persons? Do you have one? I suspect you are simply going along with the dominant paradigm of "choose scapegoats rather than allocating blame" and just giving the currently acceptable excuse for why this time it REALLY IS ok to hate the Jew. You certainly aren't alone in history for giving reasons everyone believes are actually true and valid.
I allocate blame based on actual power. How many millions of dollars has the EMT, doctor or sick person who has the audacity to actually be ill spent to bribe the government in order to rig the system in their favor?
This is like saying a soldier who joined the army 6 weeks before the war in Iraq began because he had no job, no money and no prospects is at least as much to blame for the war as the US President who declared war.
You keep acting like the noble and the peasant are equally to blame for feudalism when one has an army and the other barely has enough food to eat.
You bring up the actuaries in the company and lobbyists like they are independent agents rather than employees working at the behest of the CEO's you keep trying to claim are just innocent bystanders looking at our train wreck of a healthcare system from the sidelines unable to do a thing to help.
In previous posts, you spoke out against laws passed to make the lives of sex workers harder. I did not read any anger towards the police officers or district attorneys enforcing these laws. Why is it that you see a distinction there and not between the wealthy CEO's buying a system that hurts almost everyone and the rest of society trying to live in a system they have little to no say in?
Why are you so attached to the idea that some of the wealthiest, most powerful people on earth are a persecuted minority?
> This is like saying a soldier who joined the army 6 weeks before the war in Iraq began because he had no job, no money and no prospects is at least as much to blame for the war as the US President who declared war.
An interesting comparison. Are you saying that soldiers aren't responsible for the civilians they kill? Or are you saying a CEO is as powerful as the commander of the US Military?
> You keep acting like the noble and the peasant are equally to blame for feudalism when one has an army and the other barely has enough food to eat.
This sentence reveals that you don't really want to understand systems at all, you just want to find a Jew to blame. Trying to sort individuals into the innocent persecuted minority vs the oppressor who caused all this is your frame, not mine. I'm pointing out that this is what you're doing. You think I'm trying to say that some wealthy people with corporate power are an innocent persecuted minority because I'm saying "this Evil Oppressor vs Innocent Victim frame is literally the thing responsible for the worst evils of the Christian-descendant western world" and there's no other way for someone so deeply bought into that frame to understand that claim.
>An interesting comparison. Are you saying that soldiers aren't responsible for the civilians they kill? Or are you saying a CEO is as powerful as the commander of the US Military?
I did not state a CEO is as powerful as the commander in chief of the US military nor did I say soldiers are not responsible for civilians they kill. The point is the commander in chief is primarily responsible for the war they declared just as the CEO is primarily responsible for the terrible system they use their considerable wealth and power to maintain despite the harm it causes.
As I stated at the beginning of this, I am sorting between those who are primarily responsible and those who are not. Your argument that if 900 people are each 0.01% responsible for something then we cannot focus our blame on the 5 people who are each 18.2% responsible because somehow that is the equivalent of persecuting Jews.
>Trying to sort individuals into the innocent persecuted minority vs the oppressor who caused all this is your frame, not mine.
Let's try this again.
Jews were not responsible in any, way shape or form for the things they were blamed for. Jews did not cause the black plague, blight crops to cause famine, etc. Anti-antisemitism is quite literally the process of taking innocent victims and scapegoating them as evil oppressors as a way to deflect blame for problems that were either natural disasters or the fault of unrelated groups. You are trying to compare this to blaming healthcare CEO's for problems they have deliberately and intentionally used their considerable wealth and influence to continue for their personal gain.
Now tell me again, since you are so interested in understanding systems, how these two things are even remotely comparable?
Or better yet, please give me the exact percentage of blame you assign to Jews for the crimes they have been made to suffer for (i.e. the black plague, bad harvests, Germany losing WWI, etc.)?
> the CEO is primarily responsible for the terrible system they use their considerable wealth and power to maintain
wonderful sentence, perfectly captures the essence of the Hateful Oppressor frame!
> problems they have deliberately and intentionally used their considerable wealth and influence to continue for their personal gain.
All those things that you claim the Jews weren't responsible for? All the Christians around them knew without a shadow of a doubt that they WERE responsible for them. And that They were perpetuating those miseries for Their personal gain.
"No but really, I'm actually right about Them being responsible for The Misery for reals this time!"
The average person can't understand the actual causes because the system is too complex, they really do think the Hateful Oppressor *really is* responsible.
>All those things that you claim the Jews weren't responsible for? All the Christians around them knew without a shadow of a doubt that they WERE responsible for them.
I'm sorry, the things I claim the Jews weren't responsible for?
If this is just a claim I am making, do you plan on answering my question on what percentage of culpability Jews have for the black plague for example?
Also, did all the Christians KNOW this or were the wealthy and powerful Christians knowingly lying to scapegoat innocent people?
>"No but really, I'm actually right about Them being responsible for The Misery for reals this time!"
Care to provide some actual evidence for why I am wrong as opposed to straw manning me as an inarticulate person while you ignore my actual points as to the basis for my conclusion as to how responsible CEO's actually are?
"Healthcare company CEO's are actively contributing to the problems with US healthcare, paying off politicians to prevent laws from being passed which would improve the situation in order to protect their profits."
What evidence have you got for this claim?
It seems to me that the problem with US healthcare is the government regulation that the people asked for. That is certainly why new pharmaceuticals are so expensive, and why each doctor now needs a support staff of about 4 office workers who mostly just fill out forms. The mandating of employers to provide insurance created a bizarre system in which there are no market prices, no way of finding out how much things will cost, and prices charged to different people for the same procedures that range across 6 orders of magnitude. Not to mention the regulations that restrict the number of MDs graduated each year to far less than are needed.
I don't /know/ all that for sure, but at the moment it seems a lot more plausible than "insurance companies are somehow fooling everyone in America into buying insurance policies that are bad for them."
I think creating grass-roots organizations for change will make things worse in this case unless those organizations actually /understand why healthcare is expensive/. This is a real problem, because the system is so complicated now that only professionals in the healthcare industry can understand it. I don't think we can improve it without simplifying it first. And setting instrumental, intermediary goals like that is a thing "organizations for change" have never done.
Look up healthcare insurance lobbying. They spend millions of dollars a year to get laws passed to keep their profits up.
The main problem with US healthcare is the regulations the insurance companies bribed the government for. It is why we pay more for drugs than any other developed country, why hospitals have whole departments tasked with nothing but determining how much they can charge each person based on their insurance and why we lead the developed world in medical bankruptcies..
I have no idea why anything seems plausible to you, but you don't have a very good understanding of US healthcare. We have been relying mainly on insurance provided by employers since the end of World War II, long before mandates existed. Treating buying health insurance as a commodity no different from buying gas isn't realistic. People need affordable healthcare as a basic necessity. Yet between co-pays, different costs at different hospitals, the fact insurance companies can effectively label any treatment as "experimental" and the fact that medical treatment is a life and death issue this is not practical.
People are rarely buying insurance policies, they get insurance with very limited options through their employers.
I'm curious what country you live in given you don't know the basics on how US healthcare works?
Most of the problems with FDA regulations are not the fault of Congress, but of the FDA's continual imperialistic quest to expand their territory. In the area of medical devices, if you read the legislation that the FDA cites, you'll find it was clearly originally meant to protect consumers from dangerous products, not from the emotional trauma of hearing bad news, or from their own poor judgement, or from receiving information that wasn't 100% reliable. In that domain, the FDA is operating far beyond the bounds prescribed to it by the actual law, and that expansion was initiated entirely by the FDA itself.
Even in the matter of actual safety testing, the FDA's philosophical culture itself is to blame for the abuse of the law. That culture has for a long time been that of "zero tolerance", which effectively meant that any detectable negative effect justified a complete ban. Lives saved, or quality-of-life gained, are not weighted against lives lost; patients are not allowed to make their own risk-tolerance judgements. One of my best friends, Bernie Statland, was key in the fight against this point of view. To quote MD+DI Online (https://www.mddionline.com/regulatory-quality/fda-s-statland-leaves-lasting-mark):
"The disagreement reflected an intractable ideological split over the role of health product regulation. Statland's decision was a defeat for those who believe FDA's role is, or ought to be, to ensure absolute device safety and effectiveness. Instead, he sided with those who believe that the best that FDA can do is ensure full disclosure of information to the real risk takers: patients and their physicians."
I've been victim to that same ideology myself in my work on NIH bioinformatics projects. I was every day forced to write bad algorithms that produced bad output because the "zero errors" ideology forbade balancing false negatives against false positives, or using Bayesian methods, which are literally the one mathematically correct way of dealing with problems with multiple uncertain sources of information.
I don't have numbers telling what fraction of the laws regulating insurance were desired by insurance companies, versus what fraction were /not/ desired by them. If you do, please tell me. My impression is that regulations are usually enacted as the result of public scandals or popular demand, eg thalidomide babies, the Tylenol poisoner, and the Affordable Care Act. That latter involved a great deal of compromise, and I'd be interested if anyone can break it down into a count of clauses that insurance companies wanted, and ones they didn't want.
I live in the US, and I don't know why you think I don't "know the basics on how US healthcare works." I disagree with your conclusions, not with facts about healthcare. Insurance offered by employers is not at all the same as mandated insurance provided by employers.
I would like to see numbers for how many people have been covered by health insurance in the US by decade. I can't find these figures on the Internet for any year before 1987.
Why do you think health insurance is such a wreck, while auto insurance, life insurance, and every other kind of insurance are not? If it were the case that the healthcare industry made bigger profits by lobbying for more regulation, then why haven't other insurance industries done the same thing as effectively?
If health insurance is a wreck because the health insurance industry has lobbied for more regulation, why does the health insurance industry have a lower profit-to-earnings ratio than other insurance industries? Google Gemini says the weighted average P/E ratio for the property and casualty insurance industry is 12.65, for life insurance is 15.42, for motor vehicle insurance is 15.20, and for life and health insurance companies is 8.57.
My only hypothesis is that health insurance is a mess because of public demands. That's the only major distinction I'm aware of. People don't demand legislative protection in those other areas nearly as much, and so those insurance industries aren't as highly regulated.
Not sure why you want the number of people covered in the US by insurance by decade, since I was discussing employer provided health insurance it seems that would be the more important number. Also, given changes in rules for medicaid and medicare I am not sure going back more than 30 years is all that helpful.
Regardless, I find it ironic you actually answered your own question. Health insurance is incredibly complicated. Health insurance companies can leverage uncertainties on efficacy of treatments to claim drugs, medical devices, new surgeries, etc. are experimental in a way that auto insurance companies cannot.
I never said health insurance companies make bigger profits by lobbying, I stated they maintain a system rigged in their favor by lobbying. Take a look at Canada or any other developed country. They provide healthcare for all with excellent results at rock bottom prices through top down regulations which benefit the actual people living their rather than the corporations. In the US insurance is number three in terms of dollars spent on lobbyists because the health insurance racket can only exist as long as they are bribing everyone they can to keep sane regulations out.
Comparing health insurance, a basic necessity people need to receive life saving care to life insurance, something which is an option designed solely to provide some benefit to surviving relatives when you die, is a very bad comparison. You may as well be comparing the rise in cost of open heart surgery (a life and death situation) to lasik eye surgery (a choice between needing glasses or not).
If US health insurance is a mess because of public demands, why is this not the case in dozens of other countries, is the US public just less intelligent than the public in Canada or Singapore? How do you defend your hypothesis based on this comparison?
A friend of mine in Canada has been living with four severely impacted wisdom teeth for years. A friend of his waited 11 years for a knee replacement. A relative of his died of treatable cancer simply by not getting any care for many years while the government deferred treatment.
But I guess if the government health care system kills you from lack of treatment it's different.
https://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2024/09/bayes-blast-32-canadian-health-care/
Not sure what point you are making here, are you saying because no system is perfect then we cannot assign blame to people primarily responsible for the problems in any system? Or that we should be basing our determinations on the relative quality of healthcare using anecdotes from people we have never met?
As someone who is interested in systems, I base my views on actual numbers such as relatives costs, overall outcomes, life expectancy, etc.
I did find the comment on medical tourism interesting, given that this is something people around the world do to find lower cost or better quality treatment. In the US hundreds of thousands of people leave the country annually seeking medical treatment abroad, for example. Ironically Mexico is one of the top destinations.
I would need to know more about how it works in other countries. In countries where the medicine is really socialized.
I think "they maintain a system rigged in their favor" implies "high profits". Healthcare in the US is much more expensive, and yet very little of that money is going to the insurance companies, so I still don't buy the story that they're to blame. Follow the money. Where does it go?
I see the disconnect here. I completely disagree that a rigged system implies high profits. My two favorite examples of rigged systems in the US are industries that are not very profitable: taxis and agriculture.
Prior to Uber and Lyft, taxi companies were near monopolies in many parts of the US because they paid off government officials to rig the system in their favor, not because they made huge profits, but because they knew those profits would be even lower otherwise.
Agriculture is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the US, they spent around $500 million this year alone buying off politicians despite the fact that most US farms are not profitable and do not expect to. become profitable. Without government regulations, bailouts and loans most US farms would have gone under long ago.