My schedule is going to be wonky until Wednesday or Thursday of next week, so bear with me as I do my best (I fly home on Tuesday but have a doctor’s appointment on Thursday).
Here is the best I can do with a truncated nooz and photo post.
*The cops in New York are putting huge effort into trying to catch the man who shot Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. The shooter was very clever, having planned the assassination in advance and having taken great care to pay in cash and not speak to anyone. But they’ve found a backpack in Central Park that may have been abandoned by him. It went straight to forensics without being opened.
What appalls me about this is that so many people are actually celebrating the killing, as if Thompson deserved to die for what his organization did. The man had a wife and two kids, for crying out loud, and what people are cheering for is not just the death penalty, but one inflicted by vigilante justice. If you’re opoposed to the death penalty alone that means you should decry this kind of killing. Kat Rosenfeld at the Free Press talks bout the horror of people who are celebrating Thompson’s death:
The online reaction [to Thompson’s assassination] has been extremely gleeful and extremely dark: “My thoughts and prayers are on hold pending prior authorization,” reads one representative (and massively upvoted) comment on a New York Times Facebook story about the murder. Taylor Lorenz, recently of The Washington Post, wrote, “and they wonder why we want these executives dead” on Bluesky before cross-posting the name and photo of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck to her accounts on multiple platforms (along with a cheeky suggestion that her followers engage in “very peaceful letter writing campaigns” against murderous insurance execs).
In a viral X post, Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus—whose profile describes him as an “anti-violence” “trauma expert”—quipped, “Today, we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down. . . wait, I’m sorry—today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”
. . .Yolonda Wilson, an associate professor who teaches a course on “Law and Morality” at St. Louis University, said she was “not rejoicing” in the brutal murder of this father of two—even as she implied he deserved it. “I’m not sad about it, either,” she added. “Chickens come home to roost.”
This practice of celebrating the destruction of one individual person as a scapegoat for whatever systemic injustice—racism, or sexism, or in this case, corporate greed—has been a recurring cultural phenomenon since roughly the first Trump administration, one in which Trump himself had been both chief enforcer and prime target, depending on the day. The popularity of this Manichaean brand of thinking shouldn’t surprise us: It has always been human nature to hunt for witches, particularly in moments when everything seems to be either broken or falling apart. When people feel scared and out of control (as anyone who has ever had the displeasure of tangling with a health insurance conglomerate in the midst of a medical crisis surely has), it’s strangely soothing to imagine that every harm, every injustice, can be traced back to the depravity of a single, mustache-twirling villain who feasts while decent people starve.
The only problem is, it’s not true.
The implicit lawlessness of this kind of celebration chills me to the marrow, for we are a nation of laws, not vigilantes. If you want to see a disgusting display of immoral celebration from the American blogosphere, you can go here.
I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Pardon Me?” (archived here).
→ Biden’s staff tie up loose ends: Biden fell completely asleep in a meeting this week, also known as a standard workday for Dr. Jill. The video is great because our president is really, fully asleep and honestly looks cozy. He looks happy. Let him snuggle up. This poor man. First of all: Why is his staff sending him to the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor Summit in Lobito, Angola? We couldn’t catapult Jake Sullivan to this one? (That’s where he fell asleep. Angola! Our sweet Joe! He was tired.) Second of all: The meeting did sound boring, and I nearly fell asleep watching the clip.
Anyway, with the president largely out of the picture, his staff and Dr. Jill are doing what they do best: spending money and making sure everyone can work from home forever. Various massive government departments are updating their government-issued forever contracts. From Bloomberg: “The American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing 42,000 Social Security Administration workers, reached an agreement with the agency last week that will protect telework until 2029 in an updated contract.” This is the modern Democrat Party: The number-one priority is work from home. Trump could cut off all aid to veterans and it would be met with a yawn. Cut off work from home and you will see mobs take these streets. Cut off DoorDash and there will be pipe bombs. Make them put on shoes and they will flatten you. (Currently only 6 percent of federal employees work in the office full-time, and that’s almost entirely maintenance and janitorial staff.)
. . . . Meanwhile, Biden did a photo op leaving a bookstore, walking stiffly, holding what no doubt some staffer shoved into his paw. And what is it? A book called The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, about how Israel is an evil settler project. A perfect week for Biden administration priorities.
→ Chase Strangio is on the wrong side of the vibe shift: The Supreme Court this week heard arguments over whether to strike down Tennessee’s ban on medical gender transitions for minors (i.e., no puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries till 18). The ACLU sent their most famous lawyer and the face of the organization, Chase Strangio, to argue the case. Before things started, Chase laid out the stakes to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “These are young people who may have known since they were two years old exactly who they are, who suffered for six, seven years before they had any relief.” So: a two-year-old. When I say to my two-year-old that she’s a funny bunny, she says, “No, kitty cat.” Which to me indicates an extremely advanced and gifted conception of herself. Anyway. Surgery for her tail is next week. She has been consistent that she’s a “kitty cat” for months now. She wears kitty cat ears, a woeful stand-in for the real thing that I’m sure some excellent doctors can arrange.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared banning medical transitions for minors to bans on interracial marriage. I’m no legal scholar, but it honestly must be fun for your job to just come up with crazy analogies and throw them back at terrified lawyers. I’m just not sure I see the connection she’s making, but I also sometimes throw spaghetti at the wall when nothing’s working. It’s my “why not” business strategy. It’s the “you know what else was illegal once? Interracial marriage” approach.
Remember Strangio? He was the man who favored the banning of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage—and he’s an ACLU lawyer!
→ And how are the Jews? I haven’t checked in on the Jews in a bit because it’s too dismal, but a few updates this week, are, I’m sorry, funny. The head of the Cultural Affairs Commission (CAC) at UCLA—Alicia Verdugo—allegedly is running a little judenrein office over there. Noticing some unsavory applicants to the team, she reminded her employees (per a great Commentary story): “please do your research when you look at applicants” because “lots of zionists [sic] are applying.” According to a new lawsuit, applicants who indicated any Jewishness were rejected. And Alicia promised at an upcoming retreat that she would share a “no hire list.” Honey, you don’t need to go through all the trouble of making a list of every lefty Jewish student at UCLA who wants to get involved in the diversity team! Just start playing the Wicked soundtrack and see who sings along with Elphaba the loudest. There you go.
Anyway, the official policy of the UCLA Cultural Affairs Commission is: “We reserve the right to remove any staff member who dispels antiBlackness [sic], colorism, racism, white supremacy, zionism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, misogyny, ableism, and any/all other hateful/bigoted ideologies.” I don’t know that it’s legal to ban “Zionists” at a state-funded school. But it’s the word dispel that kills me. It’s so cute and tells you everything. Groping around, trying to use big-ish words but not knowing what they mean, propped up by government funding, the new movement can’t articulate and yet the point comes across. Because the inability to articulate is a sign of the movement’s success. Words, after all, are violence.
. . . . Speaking of words we can no longer define, Amnesty International declared that Israel is doing a genocide. The 300-page report begins: “On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip (Gaza) of unprecedented magnitude, scale, and duration.” Yes, Israel just randomly embarked on an offensive. Anyway, this is a serious charge and to call the war a genocide, Amenesty changed their own definition of it entirely. The new line is that anytime Israel is fighting, it’s doing genocide. And so even in fighting against Hezbollah, which has been lobbing rockets at Israel for years, what is Israel doing? Say it with me: genocide. Meanwhile, in the British Museum, we get this curious history lesson: “By the beginning of the first millennium BC the Israelites occupied most of Palestine except for the southern coastal strip, which continued to be held by the Philistines.” Yes, the Israelites occupied Palestine even before Christ! Where, pray tell, do they imagine Israelites came from?
*Over at the Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan sees Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter as a harbinger of sorts.
if there were a single constitutional provision that, if abused, could tip the American republic into a post-legal authoritarian system, it would surely be the pardon power. Historically, a presidential pardon was designed to show mercy to a remorseful individual who had usually already paid some price for a crime of some sort. The most recent DOJ regulations, for example, reserve pardons for people who’ve waited at least five years after their conviction or release from prison. In theory, nothing qualifies the power but a president’s civic virtue; in practice, it is usually applied very narrowly.
Previous presidents have abused the power — George HW Bush protected Caspar Weinberger, Clinton saved Marc Rich — even as they also deployed it on traditional lines. Some used it for family members — most obviously Clinton’s pardon of his own half-brother, Roger, and Trump’s pardon of the repulsive Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law. Ford, of course, pardoned Nixon for reasons of state. But it was Donald Trump who first saw the potential for the promise of pardons in advance for individuals prepared to commit crimes for the president. That takes the pardon power to new heights.
A pro-active pardon for criminality ordered by the president is, after all, another phrase for the categorical end of the rule of law. It means that a president’s flunkies — or anyone else in presidential favor — can commit any crime in the secure knowledge there will never be punishment. It thereby puts an entire class of people selected by the president effectively above the rule of law. It makes the president a king.
And what Joe Biden has now done in offering an extraordinarily broad pardon for his own corrupt mess of a son is to thoroughly legitimize this monarchical prerogative. Hunter has been pardoned not just for specific crimes he has committed or was about to be sentenced for (tax avoidance, gun crime, lying on a federal form, etc.); but for anything illegal he might have done in the last eleven years — which covers all of his shady dealings with Burisma, the Ukrainian company that paid him almost $400,000 for … not much in particular. It also covers the years when Hunter’s firm brought in a staggering $11 million from Ukrainian and Chinese business interests.. . .
[After Trump]. . . . The American people are secondly responsible for this mess — by re-electing a man brazenly pledging to violate the rule of law by selectively prosecuting his political enemies. But Biden’s tit-for-tat response and proposed addition of retroactive pardons to Trump’s proactive ones — and the way it has been greeted enthusiastically by many Democratic partisans — completes the circle.
It means we could be moving incrementally from the rule of law to the rule of the executive — a system where those in government are above the law, and each president of either party operates on that understanding. Each POTUS will abuse the system to maximize his own side’s advantage; and then his or her successor will do the same in reverse. We simply alternate elected monarchs — just as the Founders intended!
The Founders are responsible too, of course. They built a system designed to thwart any single individual’s attempt to make himself a king — and then provided a nearly unlimited pardon power that, if abused, could do exactly that.
From Cat Memes; look at this poor kitten!
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
Masih points out a horrific new misogynistic law in Iran:
Shocking News:
Execution for Showing Your Hair: New Hijab Law in IranThe Islamic Republic has taken its war on women and dissent to horrifying new levels. A new law now allows execution for those accused of promoting “nudity, unveiling, or improper attire.” Imagine this:… pic.twitter.com/mGkeEQRPAT
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 6, 2024
Jesse Singal got canceled on Bluesky (called here “Bluehair”), and that just seems unfair to me. It is surely not free speech:
Jesse Singal has been officially labeled intolerant on the BlueHair app. I have plenty of opinions that are out of synch with right-wing orthodoxy. No one tries to cancel me. Jesse is an obedient lib on every issue except trans ideology, and they hate him. pic.twitter.com/dDuYCgNpNA
— Hunter Ash (@ArtemisConsort) December 7, 2024
When I retweeted that, people said it wasn’t true, so here’s Singal’s own verification:
The overall situation is that my entire account has been labeled “Intolerant” by BlueSky because it ostensibly “Discriminat[es] against protected groups.” So every one of my posts has a warning label. Couple samples. pic.twitter.com/yvcdZEttPc
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 7, 2024
From Malcolm; one minute of copy cats.
copy and paste pic.twitter.com/AmuYoDQyE3
— No Cats No Life (@NoCatsNoLife_m) December 1, 2024
From Matthew, who says, “These are all galaxies except for the eight stars that are in our galaxy and have six-pointed refractions because they are so bright.”
Clean, high-resolution image of the deep universe from the previous post.🔭 🧪
— Jwst Feed (@jwstfeed.bsky.social) 2024-12-04T15:06:07.955Z
Also from Matthew: a lovely embroidered tabby:
He’s finished! I love embroidering a tabby. 🪡 🧵
The Free Press’s Biden Derangement Syndrome is getting tiresome and predictable.
I don’t like The Free Press. There’s a right wing stench about the place. Or maybe it’s populated by conservative Democrats. Anyway, I don’t like Bari Weiss.
Also, people on the right have twisted the meaning of the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It refers to Trump’s SUPPORTERS, not to his detractors. After all, you have to be deranged to support Trump.
And I still have zero issues with Biden pardoning his son. Two comments from Mikel Jollett on Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/mikeljollett.bsky.social/post/3lcg6q4iars2p
https://bsky.app/profile/mikeljollett.bsky.social/post/3lcgdxiy6ik2p
Here’s another take on Biden’s pardon:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/joe-biden-hunter-pardon-was-right-mystal/
I don’t think you’re right about Trump Derangement Syndrome. As far as I know, all “Derangement Syndromes” are ones in which people are driven to extremes by their hatred.
Do you think half of Americans are deranged?
And I have lots of issues with Biden pardoning his son, for one thing his lying about it. If you read Bowles’s full column you’ll see lots of quotes from the liberal press praising Biden for saying he would NOT pardon his son. The moment he did, they did a 180 and started saying, like you, that the pardon was the right thing to do. Nothing changed; it was sheer hypocrisy.
I’ve thought the same, that TDS refers to those who hate T, as if being appalled by him is somehow irrational. That his supporters think so suggests they are the deranged ones – and so it’s easy to confuse the meaning of the term.
Roughly half of Americans voted for Trump. They’re either deranged or woefully under- or ill-educated. It’s probably a mix of both (thank you, Fox News). “Driven to extremes with their hatred” of Trump? Great! But what “extremes” beyond deserved verbal and written commentary? I would have welcomed more for this vile, odious, and repellent man.
I’m unable to post a screenshot, but here’s what one psychologist posted on Twitter on October 19, 2019: “Trump Derangement Syndrome: A pervasive psychological need to identify with Donald J. Trump and his policies. This syndrome includes irrational subservience to authority, deficits in critical thinking, and a morbid investment of one’s personal identity in Donald Trump.”
Did Biden “lie”? No. Biden changed his mind, post-election, once he realized that Republican ghouls would go after Hunter on trumped-up charges (deliberate pun). Okay, maybe not “trumped-up,” which explicitly means “false charges,” but the larger fact remains: Kash Patel or whoever gets the gig would have hounded HB forever. HB’s offenses were mainly fineable ones, and the man certainly would not have received the same treatment if he had been an “ordinary” citizen. The gun charge was asinine, and the guy paid back the taxes he owed with all the expected fines and penalties!
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic wrote a piece that excoriated Biden for his decision. Charlie Sykes wrote something similar at Substack. In both cases, most (but not all) readers pummeled both men for their takes. I find that interesting.
I’ve got a friend who doesn’t do social media at all. I liked what Angelo said about all this in an email to me:
It’s pretty clear that many in the MSM have bought into a lot of the standard right wing canards about the Democrats. These people continue to hold Dems to a set of “rules” that Republicans routinely ignore, or gleefully violate. What’s worse though, is that a lot of elected Democrats have internalized these lines of bullshit. Trumps pardons, past and upcoming, are passed over as what we all expect from Trump, so they’re not subject to criticism. Biden, in spite of the policies he pursued as President, has always been a milquetoast institutionalist, that’s why we have Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. But as a parent who saw his son being prosecuted just because he was the son-of-the-President, he had the power to make the prosecution disappear. And, out of character as it was, as contrary to what he’d said about the case previously, he did the right thing. If he wanted to nail everyone to the wall about this uproar in the press he could address it with a simple “fuck you all.” It’s just unfortunate that this kind of thing would never occur to him.
And then, after I followed up with him:
Yeah, the RULES only apply to Democrats.
There are a lot of things I would condemn Biden for, and you know them all. But this doesn’t even get near the list. But you can bet when Fuckhead starts springing the J6 rioters from prison this is the first excuse all his minions will cite. We’re going to relive the German experience of 1933 before this is all over, and I have no idea how it will all end. But unless there’s a mass revolt within the government that he wants to overthrow, and the judiciary that he relies on for cover, I don’t see a lot of hope.
I did not know that Trump Derangement Syndrome started as irrational subservience to all things Trump. All I’ve heard was that it was left wing hatred for all things Trump.
It works both ways, I guess.
Since you seem fond of psychology and sociology, you might appreciate this:
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people-are-especially-prone
” Nothing changed”
But that’s not true.
Trump started appointing vindictive minions to Justice posts.
The term “Bush Derangement Syndrome” was coined by Charles Krauthammer.
Bush Derangement Syndrome: The acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.
A good example of TDS:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for an extraordinary congressional session to investigate the ever-growing crisis in the U.S. Postal Service as accusations mount that the Trump administration is trying to undermine the agency to rig the November election.
https://www.insideedition.com/whats-happening-to-the-post-office-mail-boxes-trucks-disappear-amid-trumps-unproven-voter-fraud
Related to BDS and TDS is the “Fox News Fallacy”:
The Fox News Fallacy is having a dire effect on many Democrats. This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it. That depends on the issue. If there is something to the issue and persuadable voters have real concerns, you will not allay those concerns by embracing the Fox News Fallacy. In fact, you’ll probably intensify them by giving such voters the impression that Democrats simply don’t care about their concerns and will do nothing to address them.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-fox-news-fallacy
Absolutely correct.
“And I have lots of issues with Biden pardoning his son, for one thing his lying about it.”
Wasn’t his announcement that he would let the case run its course made before the election (quite a while before if memory serves)? If he was lying about it that would mean he intended to issue the pardon at the point he said he wouldn’t, which I doubt is the case. If Harris had been elected, I’ve no doubt Biden would have let the case go on without interference, because he could trust that it would be handled by people who didn’t have a partisan reason to persecute his son. But with Trump elected, the facts of the case have changed: the case will now be in the hands of people determined to prosecute him for purely vindictive reasons (since Hunter Biden, unlike many of Trump’s family members, has never been a part of his father’s presidential administration). So I think a change of mind is quite reasonable.
I believe that Joe Biden made the promise, being sure that Harris would win and pardon his son; but with her losing, he had to do the job himself.
Since everyone is only able to speculate about what Biden’s intention was, my opinion is that he fully intended to pardon his son, and did indeed lie about it in order to avoid causing controversy during the election.
Spot on with regard the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” claim. You only have to accurately describe Trump as a liar, a crook, and a disaster for American democracy, and suddenly they start crying about TDS and ramble on forever about “Hunter’s laptop”! They most often throw the TDS label at Sam Harris, because instead of fawning over Trump, he calls his BS out.
As for Free Press, I’ve only watch their stuff examining the pro-Hamas fascist apologia on campuses. I avoid the rest of their output. Same with Weiss – she’s OK on the antisemitism issue, less convincing elsewhere.
This (and many of the follow up comments about how eg pardoning Hunter was the best ever) is a great example of the nonsense that comes with viewing journalism tactically. That reporting and commentary should serve political interests.
When evil people die it’s difficult to be sorry. The slain manager was certainly guilty of many deaths and I don’t think he was not responsible of decisions that costed the lives of people insured. He was CEO, so pretty much decided what his company had to do or not do
Sorry, but I don’t want people on this site saying it’s okay to murder people. Do you think it was okay for that guy to be killed. If not, what would you suggest?
I don’t think anybody has to show sympathy for anybody. What I find fascinating is that some of the people celebrating his death, and using the excuse you give (i.e. he is responsible for thousands of deaths), will celebrate, defend, and support Joseph Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Che Guevara, Lenin, and Mao…
It’s a mad, mad world, my masters.
You can’t know that the company’s denial of coverage ahead of time or refusal to reimburse after the fact of care led to any deaths. You would have to have a much greater faith in the magnitude of the effect of elective medical care on preventable death than those of us who worked in it do. We are talking about denial of marginal cases where the judgement of what is low-value care is going to be coloured by whether you are the recipient of a free service of doubtful value, the recipient of dollars of definite value for providing the free service of doubtful value, or whether you have to pay dollars for someone else’s free service of doubtful value. When you transfer the responsibility for payment to a third party, that third party decides what it will pay for. Doctor and patient no longer do.
Advocacy groups for doctors and for patients are allied with each other in an adversarial relationship with third-party payers whether public or private-sector. Everything the doctor and patient groups say about insurance companies should be regarded as propaganda. Not to say some stories aren’t true, but all stories are spun relentlessly as part of the long struggle to put insurance companies out of business and replace them with ….. what? Doctors and patients will both face onerous government restrictions and caps on total funding under Medicare-for-all. Be careful what you wish for. No one is going to let everyone have unlimited free medical care.
Whatever skulduggery Mr. Thompson might have been up to it can’t justify vigilante murder just because he helped make his company vastly profitable. His assailant was probably some Antifa Marxist scum looking to off a rich guy, not a hero of the medical proletariat.
This company used an AI to deny legitimate claims. Additionally, ever since this happened, people have been unleashing their fury at the US healthcare system. That should tell you something about how corrupt it is. People don’t normally cheer on assassinations, but the fact they are here is telling. They’re sick of suffering and dying so billionaires can become richer.
The profit margins of the ultra-rich are not more important than the lives of poor people. If you think they are, then you’ve been duped by the propaganda fed to you by the ultra-rich oligarchy.
Why can’t there be quality health care for all? The only reason is that it won’t make billionaires even richer. There are many countries with better healthcare systems than the US.
The only reason things will not improve in the US is that the CEOs of insurance companies won’t allow it. They need to make their billions of dollars, and if people die for it, they don’t care.
As it turns out he definitely isn’t an Antifa Marxist. Funny how much criticism the woke got for this. Others have pointed out that based on one of the photos on his Twitter account, it looks like he had some kind of spinal surgery. The guy looked very fit. I’m definitely speculating now, but he may have had some sport related injury and got screwed on the cost.
The problem with that statement is in who gets to define “evil”.
M. Gessen had an op-ed in the “paper of record” about the Supreme Court case, expressing admiration for Brown’s comparison between bans on interracial marriage and Tennessee’s ban on medical sex-change procedures with minors. The op-ed included some other questionable assertions, that I discussed on my substack:
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/dissecting-m-gessens-nytimes-op-ed
Thanks for linking. That’s a very helpful piece about the Gessen op-ed.
That’s a useful and enlightening analysis of the NYTimes op-ed. Thanks much for the link.
“This practice of celebrating the destruction of one individual person as a scapegoat for whatever systemic injustice—racism, or sexism, or in this case, corporate greed—has been a recurring cultural phenomenon since roughly the first Trump administration, one in which Trump himself had been both chief enforcer and prime target, depending on the day.”
Ah, yes, it must be Trump’s fault. What will these lazy-minded people do when the man is gone? And then we immediately read the following sentence:
“The popularity of this Manichaean brand of thinking shouldn’t surprise us: It has always been human nature to hunt for witches, particularly in moments when everything seems to be either broken or falling apart.”
Oh, what? Always with us? You mean, before Trump started identifying systemic injustice (!!) and scapegoating people? Kat Rosenfeld hasn’t surrendered her mind; she is simply diversifying her potential audience.
Agree. Trump doesn’t have anything to do with this particular case.
Contrary to what some commenters above say, The Free Press are not Trump supporters.
In fact their comment section is full of complaints about that. It’s so pronounced that one of them quit and started her own pro-Trump Substack.
After reading Kats’ piece I looked at the comments and someone in response to her saying Trump had been both chief enforcer and PRIME TARGET. She mentioned he was also a target (!) and then one of the (pro Trump in this case, although there is a diversity of opinion) commenters said she should check her TDS, because the commenter thought she was blaming everything on Donald. I was going to reply to this comment but I figured there was no point. And is there any point responding to the other side? Even after the Dems lost the election? I never liked Trump because he was so divisive but progressives are almost as bad and are the reason he is president. Well not the only reason but I have seen this coming for years and now it has happened.
.
Frau Katze, the error in your assertion that The Free Press are not Trump supporters is that for many people, including many of the readers of this site, any criticism of Democrats or any slight agreement with a Republican position is viewed as being a Trump supporter. Trump is Hitler (see the other comment referencing 1933 Germany) and any deviation from this view will not be tolerated, and any action taken by Biden, even outright reversal of previously-stated principles, such as not pardoning his son, will be vociferously excused and supported.
Good point.
As a medically-qualified reader in New Zealand, it’s ‘interesting’ to read about reactions to the involuntary euthanasia of US Health industry bosses. The ‘Economist’ this week has their Word of the Year. We need something chipper to suit the mood in 2025 onwards, eg ‘Pharma Karma’.
Now, who would be distraught over Musk being ‘rendered permanently unable to sire any more children?’ Of curse, I’m thinking of condoms shaped like mini versions of the Jeff Bezos Space Rocket.
“Involuntary euthanasia”? Funny phrase, I’ll agree, but it’s murder. Cold-blooded, deliberate homicide. It’s not actually funny at all.
‘Pharma Karma’
UnitedHealthcare is not a Pharma company. Outpatient prescription drugs probably make up 10% – 15% of United’s expenditures.
I guess even the Economist is not above debasing itself to make a funny.
One of the useful parts about freedom of speech is giving people the ability to make absolute fools of themselves. Joking about murder and castration from a health professional (do no harm?) does the job nicely.
I chemically castrated then euthanised my ‘internet moral high horse’ back in November 2016. I have a medical school reunion next year. Looking at the class photo, I realised all of my peers who had no discernible sense of humour ( ill-conditioned or otherwise ) as students have either killed themselves, become an academic, or left clinical medicine altogether. Come late January 2025, I shall most assuredly be perpetrating medicine until at least November 2028. After emotionally tough hours in the consult room, at the end of each day I shall be able to turn on the TV and be wildly entertained by the unpredictable reality show of the US government. Please migrate to Australia or NZ, morally upstanding Americans, and increase our per capita GDP! I can show you around NZ, except for its fine mountains, for if I step on snowy elevations, I start punching myself because my Indian and Chinese halves think this is the Himalayas.
Ok, so dark humour then. Fair enough. No qualms with that.
This is a terribly misleading and disingenuous statement by Sullivan, especially in juxtaposition with his comment about Trump’s pardon of Kushner. It implies that Trump has given proactive pardons. He has not. And Kushner, unlike Hunter Biden, was convicted and served his sentence before Trump pardoned him.
There needs to be some rationing of health care. Do people really want the government making these decisions?
Do we really want MRI approval decisions made by the same government bureaucrats who are now “de-banking” their political opponents?
Maybe not. But do we want profit-motivated parasites making these decisions? I don’t.
What a curious comment, Lysander. The healthcare systems of almost all advanced countries around the world give such decisions neither to “government bureaucrats” nor to the insurance industry, but to the people properly qualified to make them, i.e. medical staff, and those directly managing healthcare facilities.
Health care rationing decisions involve cost-benefit comparisons. Why do you think medical staff are the right people to make such decisions?
I think medical staff should be focused on patient care and not on rationing decisions. I want my doctor to be working on my behalf.
So you don’t want physicians to make rationing decisions, and you don’t want government bureaucrats to make rationing decisions, yet you insist that rationing decisions must be made.
Surely there is another option than AI modules programmed to maximize middleman profits. Right?
Cost-benefit decisions depend on the measurements used. Are costs=money? And what about benefits…some epidemiological unit like days-of-healthy-life-lost?
I don’t know. I’m leaning strongly toward the (medically knowledgable) bureaucrats here.
Lysander, your straightforward comment has attracted rebuttals that miss the mark. No system of payment can provide everything demanded by a patient upon the recommendation of his doctor. Not only does there need to be some rationing of health care — there already is, as with all transactions for things of value (i.e., produced with labour or capital.) Where only buyer and seller contract, the rationing instrument is the agreed price…and sometime the price is zero. (In those cases the doctor rations the amount of free care he is willing to provide.)
When third parties promise to pay for the service (to correct perceived market failure), the decision whether to pay (and how much) is not, contra Jonathan Dore, at all up to the recommending doctor. It is exclusively up to the third party. No third party, whether an agency of the taxpayers or a corporation of shareholders, will agree to an open-ended commitment to pay without limit whatever doctors might, in all their avarice, inventiveness, and expert knowledge of all that medicine can do, recommend that their patients should consume. The person writing the cheque is always going to be in the position to say No. And that means rationing. All we’re arguing about is the rules of engagement. But the payer always decides. If the payer is forced to pay too much, he will leave the market and dispose his taxes or his capital to some other pursuit.
Remember the insurance company gets no value from medical services provided to claimants. It gets value only from premiums. Of course medical care is a “loss” on its books. How could it be other? But then, what value, precisely, do taxpayers get for paying for someone’s knee surgery? Every instance of medical care is a loss for taxpayers, too. In both systems, the agents have an incentive to limit losses. In tax-funded systems, the state has additionally the legislative power on its side, not only to say “No, what you want simply costs too much,” but also to impose price controls on doctors and global budgets on hospitals. These are powerful instruments of rationing that taxpayers generally support in the abstract, even if no one anywhere, once he gets sick, wants to be told flat No or “Sorry, sold out. Come back next fiscal year.”
a) A couple of rhetorical questions thinly veiling an anti- Big-Government agenda does not constitute a “straightforward comment”.
b) I answered the rhetorical questions nevertheless: yes, I’d rather have government bureaucrats deciding than AI algorithms or their profit-motivated corporate programmers.
c) Afrer reading your comment, twice, I still fail to discern the mark purportedly missed.
I don’t want to bicker about this so I’ll just propose we agree that it is an ideological matter as to whether one prefers Big Government or Big Insurance. But if one is going to have it pay for all health care consumed in the country, for free, it’s going to be Big Something.
The other common ground I’d ask for is for us to recognize that the financial managers of any comprehensive third-party payment system, whether government bureaucrats or corporate parasites, are going to have to say No to some (a lot, actually) care that doctors and patients agree is beneficial, just because it costs too much according to the lights of the people paying the bills. Values and preferences alone won’t dictate funding. Not all services that provide some benefit can be funded gratis. Medical services are nowhere an open-ended right to consume as much as you need, any more than food is. Saying No is really hard. Experts whose job it is to say No don’t expect to be loved, just well-paid.
“Terribly misleading” is it ?
The list of pardoned criminals who did Trump’s dirty work is extensive. And doesn’t even include the thousands of insurrectionists – who Trump has promised to pardon – who stormed the Capital Building in order to steal the 2020 election.
Your umbrage at the term “in advance” is, to me, pretty ironic, considering he pardoned Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn. Do you have some special knowledge that he did not discuss Presidential pardons “in advance” with these misfits?
It’s obviously horrifying that the guy was killed and a lot of the responses are really not good. The man being killed is not going to solve the costs. There is a misplaced anger for tragedies and deep frustrations that people have faced with healthcare. There are also some very nasty people on social media. I do think there are some reasonable questions as to how much culpability these CEOs have.
It was interesting that Rosenfield singled out progressives. From her article, “many of them self-described progressive empaths who preach compassion for the marginalized”. It’s the woke Jake. I was just speaking with some Republican friends yesterday about a ridiculous incident I had the night before with a medical bill. I will not get into the lengthy details, but as soon as I described it one of them made a joke about guess what. My other friend then described some unpleasantries he had with a medical bill. Sentiment is bipartisan.
It’s not misplaced anger. It is very justified anger. People are furious that they or their loved ones get to die just so some CEO’s massive bank account can become a little bit bigger.
This particular company was the worst of the worst. They used an inaccurate AI to deny very legitimate claims, just so their twenty-two billion dollar profit number could go up just a bit more.
I think the celebration of Thompson’s death is deplorable. However I fully understand it. This is the age of grievance. Trump rose to power almost solely on grievance. In a sense from the other side so did Bernie Sanders. People across the political spectrum are quite frankly pissed off about the way things work in our society. So when they find out that the head of a company that made 22 billion dollars in 2023 (that’s not a made up figure) with a CEO that made of 10M, and they consider their own struggles with health care costs and coverage, combined with social media which seems to act as a catalyst for rage, what you find is completely predictable.
It is not terribly unusual, or too far from normal usage, for speakers to construe “breaking a promise” as “[retrospectively] having told a lie”; or similarly to construe “changing one’s mind” as “lying”.
My favorite example is unfortunately not well qualified as evidence for this being common usage in contemporary American English, as it comes from French, 19th Century, and written for dramatic [sung] presentation. It’s from the great 10-minute confrontation scene at the end of Carmen:
CARMEN
Tu demandes l’impossible,
Carmen jamais n’a menti ;
son âme reste inflexible.
Entre elle et toi, tout est fini.
Jamais je n’ai menti ;
entre nous, tout est fini.
CARMEN
You ask the impossible,
Carmen has never lied;
her mind is made up.
Between her and you everything’s finished.
I have never lied;
all’s over between us.
+1
I frequent the r/medicine subreddit, and the dominant sentiment amongst health care providers there is not so much joy at the assassination of the CEO of a hated company, but an outpouring of suppressed rage at UHC and health insurance providers, in general. E.g. here’s the text of one doctor’s post:
The rule of law is supposed to obviate the need for vigilante justice. But I think that the lack of condemnation of the assassin – and even outright celebration – is due to a collective sense by the public that the law has totally failed to protect millions of citizens from unjustified financial and medical destruction by insurers. In situations where people can’t get justice from the justice system, they sometimes feel driven to resort to vigilantism…
But this is surprisingly rare. Consider: despite millions of victims, only ONE person has actually gone so far as to take the law into his own hands by carrying out an extra-judicial assassination of the head of a hated corporation that he felt victimized by.
I think you should take heart from that fact – i.e., the fact that, notwithstanding all the violent rhetoric, actual vigilantism is vanishingly rare in this country. That suggests that the vast majority of people really DO value the rule of law.
But at the same time, almost anyone who is involved with the medical system – either as a patient or provider – recognizes that the slimy, unethical, tactics used by insurance companies to deny legitimate claims and boost their profits have reached such a pitch that the amount of suffering they inflict on patients has reached unconscionable levels. And I think that’s where a large part of the glee over this assassination comes from – not from seeing a CEO murdered in cold blood, but from the hope that such a high-profile crime by a victimized consumer might be the jolt to the system that will finally kickstart the long-overdue movement to bring these insurance companies back under the rule of law – in the sense of forcing them to finally honor the rights of consumers and patients.
“…notwithstanding all the violent rhetoric, actual vigilantism is vanishingly rare in this country.”
It appears Americans prefer to take out their rage on easier targets, like school children. Grim observations aside the US system is headed for problems, healthcare insurance costs are rising 5% a year on average (6% and 7% over the last two years), meaning every 15 years insurance costs will double unless companies take steps to reduce costs. Which means higher deductibles, higher premiums and more denials and premiums will still go up. More employers will drop coverage.
If Republicans can get their act together legislatively or they appoint enough of the right judges, they will be able to kill or neuter the Affordable Care Act and even more people will be without healthcare. I have no doubt they have Medicare and Medicaid in their sights as well.
UHC has grown primarily through the acquisition of other healthcare companies during that time, using a lot of leverage, whereas Apple has grown primarily organically with set of consumer products, so it’s not quite a valid comparison. OTOH, an initial investment would have grown that much, so the value is correct. I wish I had bought about 1000 shares at that time (along with about 1000 Bitcoin). Also, regarding returns: over the past 5 years UHC has provided a ~100% rate of return, whereas Apple’s is ~270%.
While much has been made of the billions in profit, UHC’s net income in 2023 was about $22,381,000 on revenue of $367,533,000 for a 6.1% margin. Apple made 24% net income profit in 2024.
Also, keep in mind that doctors are not all angels. Some order extra tests to bump up their own profits. They also order extra tests as a CYA against potential malpractice suits, as malpractice insurance costs continue to rise, which also causes doctors to try to bump up their revenue stream to pay for this by ordering more tests. In other words, not every denied test or procedure is a bad decision from a need/no need perspective. Not arguing that bad decisions are not made, just that there’s always more of the story to consider.
I like the embroidered cat.
Yes, lovely.
It’s a d*g, but this embroidered portrait by the excellent Jess de Wahls is fantastic, too: https://x.com/JessDeWahls/status/1849153526888341599
Amnesty International did NOT change the definition of genocide. They plainly use Article II of the Genocide Convention in section 5.2. The tweet conflates a legal argument about inferring state intent with the long settled issue of the definition of genocide.
“They plainly use Article II of the Genocide Convention in section 5.2.”
According to Google AI, Article II in section 5.2 has to do with:
“forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” as a constituent act of genocide, meaning that intentionally taking children from one protected group and placing them with another group with the intent to destroy that group constitutes a crime of genocide.
Key points about Article II, section 5.2:
Protected groups:
This act applies to any “national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” as defined in the Convention.
Intent requirement:
To be considered genocide, the act of forcibly transferring children must be committed with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the targeted group.
Examples:
This could include situations where children are forcibly removed from their families and placed in institutions or adopted by members of another group with the aim of erasing their cultural identity.”
Perhaps you could elucidate?
“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Amnesty invokes a, b and c,.but not d or e, in their report.
So, since Hamas is a religious “group” of terrorists, killing members of that religious “group” is “genocide” ?
Or, since Hamas is the “national” government of Gaza (even though Gaza is NOT a nation), killing members of that national “group” is genocide?
Do you agree with either definition?
Or do you think, like I happen to believe, that Amnesty International is stretching the definition of “genocide” beyond all reasonable interpretation?
“either definition”? There is only one definition in this discussion, that of Article II of the Genocide Convention, which Amnesty is using verbatim. The report claims Israel is guilty of (a)-(c) against the civilian population of Gaza, with evidence given and source information cited in footnotes.
Section 5.2 was a reference to the report in discussion: “You feel like you are subhuman”, where they cite the Article II definition.
“. The report claims Israel is guilty of (a)-(c) against the civilian population of Gaza, with evidence given and source information cited in footnotes.”
Sorry, not following your argument. You claim Israel is guilty of, with regard to the civilian population of Gaza:
“(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”
And yet, Israel is clearly doing everything possible to minimize civilian casualties, far beyond any historical record of any other nation in urban warfare.
Do YOU think Amnesty International is correct to call Israel’s behavior “genocide” ?
You are missing the point of Gingerbaker’s objections. To be genocide, there has to be the intent, as in the preamble clause of Article II, to destroy the people in whole or in part. None of the lettered specified acts that follow count as genocide without the intent of destroying the people as a people.
There is no evidence adduced that Israel intends to destroy the Palestinians as a people. Therefore there is no genocide no matter which of those specific acts Israel might commit. Which it doesn’t, but that is beside the point for the present. For intent to be evident, Israel would have to be continuing to slaughter unarmed Palestinians by the scores of thousands after their government had stopped using them to cover its armed military action against the State of Israel and against Jews therein. It is not doing that, or anything else that shows intent.
Therefore Amnesty International is out to lunch on the genocide accusation.
I quoted the Article II definition, including the wording on intent. Section 7 in the Amnesty report deals with this exact issue for 80 pages out of 300 total.
Case not made on intent. Not surprisingly, Israel’s executive government doesn’t appear to like Palestinians, doesn’t appear to think much of them, and doesn’t feel sorry for them, nor does anyone else except, maybe, those who find them useful pawns for advancing policy goals. But Section 7 fails to show intent to exterminate them in whole or in part beyond those that need to be killed to advance the military goals, respecting the realities of war. Contempt and callousness, even a pre-existing state of apartheid if that’s what you want to call it, is simply not an intent to exterminate.
Section 7 (Intent) reads like an indictment, allegations not proven, which the prosecutor states he intends to prove in Court and which the defence will have the opportunity to rebut to raise reasonable doubt that the claim of intent is true. The man in the street can believe every word of the indictment or he can believe none of it. The prosecutor might never get to make his case at all, as a result of successful legal tactics by the defence. You can say you believe Amnesty International has made its case. I can say it hasn’t. Neither of our opinions matters. Genocide is a crime that has to be proved in a competent Court, which hasn’t happened yet. Therefore no genocide and no intent to commit it can be accepted as fact.
This is not true, despite being widely reported. (It’s just not credible, too — it’s not all office work, there are janitors and security and in-person public-facing roles.)
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/OMB-Report-to-Congress-on-Telework-and-Real-Property.pdf
Page 8
This is not true, despite being widely reported. (And just not credible, I think. Not just maintenance and janitorial, but FBI agents, and national lab technicians, and so on.)
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/OMB-Report-to-Congress-on-Telework-and-Real-Property.pdf
Page 8:
I don’t really think it’s okay to murder people.
However, are you this disgusted over the tens of thousands of deaths that resulted from people being denied health care?
The US is becoming an oligarchy run by the ultra-rich. The CEO who was gunned down became horrendously rich by denying health care to people, many of whom died for that. People aren’t shedding tears for him for the same reason they don’t shed tears when serial killers die. He didn’t directly kill people but the results of his actions were the same – death for innocent people. He made money off of death and suffering in a legal way, but it was still immoral.
Remember, his company used an AI to deny people’s insurance claims. That was to save money. He denied people health care so his vast hoard of money could become a bit bigger. If that isn’t evil, I’m not sure what is.
As I said upthread, you don’t know that the denial of any insurance claim led to a preventable death. In many cases all that happened was that the doctor or hospital didn’t get paid after providing the care, either because the insurance company declined to pay their assigned claim directly or because the company refused to pay the patient’s claim and the patient then couldn’t or wouldn’t pay his bill rendered by the hospital and doctor. Even where reimbursement was denied in advance of the treatment through the pre-approval process (to prevent nasty and expensive surprises), it is a delusion of grandeur for doctors’ lobby groups to argue that every single one of those refused approvals resulted in denial of life-saving care that led to premature death. The great panoply of rich-country medical care is just not that essential to life.
The point of denying reimbursement (or demanding repayment of claims already paid) is to wring care of low value out of the system and to try to make the system produce value for money. Doctors are free to provide care at a price the patient is willing to pay out of pocket if the insurance company won’t.
How do you know I don’t know that? People are coming forward with all sorts of stories of being denied things like breast cancer surgery.
Sorry, but the US health care system is brutal and cold.
If “rich-country” medical care isn’t necessary, why are life expectancies in places like Norway so much higher than in countries with poor medical systems?
Since you ask (I risk an over-comment): Norway doesn’t have a large under-class of unhealthy black or indigenous people dragging down its life expectancy. The United States spends far more per capita on health care than any other country in the world. Life expectancy is only loosely related to the quality and munificence of sickness-care medical systems. What actually happens is that basic public health measures like breast-feeding, keeping sewage out of the drinking water, vaccinations, malaria control, putting children in school instead of in mining and agriculture, and smaller numbers of people sharing each bedroom all bring about lower infant, childhood, and maternal mortality as countries get wealthier. As they get wealthier they become more willing to pay for luxuries like neonatal intensive care for 500-gram infants and multiple lines of chemotherapy for metastatic cancer, or even statins, stents, and boutique insulin for Type 2 diabetes. But none of these things makes the population live any longer in aggregate. That’s determined almost entirely by mortality before age 15 or so. Better, healthier lives, OK. But not longer. Smoking, drug abuse, and obesity are major causes of ill health and are refractory to efforts made by doctors to “cure” them.
Carefully curated anecdotes about denial of payment for breast cancer surgery would have to be examined closely, as coroners do, to determine exactly what happened in each case.
I realize health insurance (and the health care system generally) is a sore point in the United States. It costs an enormous sum, often disappoints on quality, and seems to be populated by large numbers of people making a good living off it while not providing any discernable value to patients (only to shareholders and who cares about them?) No one wants to be denied something that has been sold to him as a basic free human right.
There is something really ghoulish about rejoicing in the death of a husband and father as somehow evening the score against the health-care financing system, though.
How does his having been a husband and father necessarily add to the moral weight of his death? For all we know, he might have been a selfish SOB just wanting to start a dynasty and abuse his dependants, so there might even be a moral net gain in having him gone.
This does not in any way excuse premeditated murder, which in some reasonable ethics is considered to be the same regardless of the history and character of the victim. But it does affect the overall balance.
Why do we even call it “insurance” anymore? Can anyone imagine their car “insurance” paying for their oil changes, tire rotations, and routine brake replacements? I want that insurance there to pay for a catastrophic accident, not to repair the scratch in the side door. I similarly want my health “insurance” to cover significant illnesses or injuries for which there are known, effective treatments or palliative measures, not pay for a throat culture or an unnecessary knee surgery (not that our health industry would do unnecessary knee and hip replacements). I also don’t want my insurance covering pharmaceuticals of dubious (or worse) value—not that the cancer treatment industry has a history of putting out overpriced products with little clinical benefit. There are lots of places one can direct his ire—to include at patients who overuse the system. I simply don’t understand the wrath directed at a single dead man. It is, however, revealing.
Looks like the shooter was just nabbed @ a McDonalds in Altoona.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-latest-net-closing-suspect-new/story?id=116591169
The ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio is a woman who identifies as a man. (Her birth name was Kate Bachrach.) Under questioning from the bench at the Supreme Court Strangio conceded that actual suicides amongst transgender children and young people are, thankfully, very rare – in contradiction to the “do you want a dead son or a live daughter” line often used in gender clinics to emotionally manipulate parents. https://t.co/CWMJ8wloOT
Strangio’s attempt to maintain that gender identity is an immutable characteristic, a key component of the case being argued, was also undermined by questions about “gender fluidity” .
Quotes from Chase Strangio “Abigail Shrier’s book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans,” “We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again. Also stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” The book is based on the research by Lisa Littman (the author give full credit to Lisa Littman).