This isn't actually what it looks like (though the jokes day of were hilarious). To understand what it is, it's important to remember that pretty much everyone in the healthcare industry is a bad actor (OK, not nurses), not just insurance companies, and what you're reading is one of the three worst actors -- physicians -- spin on what one of the other bad actors -- insurance companies -- did. In reality, what's happening here is the insurance company is reducing the pay rates for anesthesia to the Medicare rates/rules, which anesthesiologists, who, let's face it, are some of the worst actors among stiff competition*, didn't like, because they make an absurd amount of money and this would mean they make a slightly less absurd amount of money. So anesthesiologists (via the American Society of Anesthesiologists) chose, on probably the best possible day for them to do so, because the evils of health insurance companies had been so successfully highlighted, to spin the hell out of the story to make it seem like insurance companies were saying how long you could be under anesthesia, because let's face it, as evil as that sounds, it wouldn't be the worst thing insurance companies do, so it's pretty believable.
Anyway, to make a long story short, the insurance company did what insurance companies are actually supposed to do: used their buying power to reduce costs. Would it hurt patients? Maybe, because more anesthesiologists will leave the network, but that's as much on the greedy ass anesthesiologists as it is on BCBS.
There's an easy, and obvious solution to all of this, of course, one that would bring our health care industry into the developed world. I hope that these conversations bring back the big conversation we were having in earnest in 2016 and 2020.
*Have you ever had surgery, or since it's all dudes here, known someone who had an epidural, during an insurance-covered procedure, only to find out that the anesthesiologist was out of network? having to pay more for out of network is evil, but so is the fact that anesthesiologists have by and large just refused to join networks.
I was thinking more abstractly: an out of touch ruling elite, an increasingly frustrated petite bourgeoisie (instead of the Russian intelligentia, we have the PMC (though also the universities), and an increasingly class conscious working class. We're definitely too rich for revolution, so we may not even get to 1905, but we've already seen a shot at the czar (that just got his ear), and if people are now gonna go after the princes (like the United Health dude), I think it might be an interesting historical analogy.
Since at least 2016, I've seen people suggest that we are in America's Weimar Republic phase, but perhaps people say that because their historical knowledge is limited, and we're actually in our Russia in the second half of the 19th century phase, and this is the beginning of our age of the Nihilists?
The expert consensus among virologists and epidemiologists is that the overwhelming evidence is for a zoonotic origin, and not a lab leak, but if a 57 page political report says otherwise, we should definitely go with that.
I mean, the lab hypothesis is a conspiracy theory by definition, so #1 is a weird thing to say, regardless of whether it's true (we'll never know for sure, obviously, but the evidence seems pretty overwhelming that it is false).
To add to this, one of the tells is the seemingly universal belief among liberals that the main reason Harris loss is due to misinformation, with "low information voters" being misinformed and manipulated.
To the extent that this is true (e.g., the stoking of immigration fears or the great trans scare), it's true of pretty much everyone, but in a broader sense, people are pretty aware of their bank accounts, their grocery bills, their rent, gas prices, etc., and liberals' insistence than the economy is great, actually, because inflation is down (as though that means the massive rise in prices over the last 2 years disappears) or the stock market's kicking ass, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being manipulated, is pretty insulting.
To be fair to liberals, they also mean poor and working class white people.
And I'd add that, to some extent, they're right. A politics of the upper middle and upper classes, by the upper middle and upper middle classes, for the upper middle and upper classes, results in a lot of just ignoring political discourse outside of those groups, and understandably.
What politically-engaged white, educated, relatively well off liberals really mean is people who don't have the same interests as they do.
I think it's easier to explain Lee's, and probably most liberals', hatred of the left without reference to "The Omnicause." The base hatred doesn't even come from agreement or disagreement, but from failure of the, er, near left (Berniecrats, Naderites, those sorts) to always fall in line electorally. According to the liberal narrative (which I find ridiculous), then, this is why we had Bush Jr and Trump the first time (there seem to be a handful of liberals putting Trump the second time on the near left as well).
Lee's hatred is further strengthened by his belief that the left is antisemitic for opposing occupation, apartheid, and now genocide, but that's not really an omnicause thing, that's a very specific cause thing.
InMD's version of "the omnicause" makes more sense to me, and I actually agree to some extent, but I suspect my solution and his are quite different.
I'm not gonna lie, I tune out pretty much anytime anyone uses the word "omnicause," so I'm not quite sure how that discourse looks, particularly since the people who use it seem just as likely to be upset about uni-causes(?) that they don't like. So I'm not really sure what it's doing here.
I do assume that part of the reason Saul is saying I am just disagreeing because I dislike liberals is because my framework means I frequently disagree with liberals, but I'm not sure if that's what you're saying or not.
Both my attempts at posting this with links have been miserable failures, so:
Unlike a lot of conservatives, I am not motivated by an anti-liberal contrarianism. I'm happy to agree with them when they're right.
I'm currently part of two reading groups formed from, let's call it my extended grad school social circle (grad school friends, and friends they've made since we were in grad school), both groups focused on, er, "heterodox" political and economic views, though from different angles (one's all leftists, one a weird mixture of political ideologies). Anyway, the leftist group has been reading a bunch about the post-WWII order and its inevitable collapse (it's a matter of when, not if, but that's just the way history works), and one of my favorite books we've read in that context is The Long 20th Century by Giovanni Arrighi, published in 1994, when Trump was still just a rich dude whose businesses regularly went bankrupt, and who showed up at high profile boxing matches (I can't remember when he did the wrestling stuff, but it might have been around then too). While I don't agree with everything Arrighi says, my views on the collapse of the post-WWII order are heavily shaped by that; my views on what might come after are shaped by other books I've read with that group, like The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World by Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Neither of these books are particularly worried about opposing liberals (though the latter has a lot to say about them). Throw in the excellent Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey by Anthony Brewer as another influence, along with many of the authors discussed therein.
Anyway, I recommend all of these, especially to liberals. It helps to have an actual framework for thinking about the world order, its positive and negative effects, its collapse, and what might potentially come after it, instead of just doomerism.
At this point, I think we have to call this sort of thinking Trump-doomerism, or something similar, because we have to admit that either the post-WWII order is so fragile that a half-senile old clown with a massive hair piece could destroy it, or admit that to the extent that it is at risk of collapsing, it is so because of a lot of things that have little to do with Trump, and at most electing Trump took our fingers out of some holes in the dam.
That said, American conservatism, which is dominant across its narrow and flat political spectrum, always leads to one form of doomerism or another, whether it's Red Scares (that lead to multiple wars and massive destruction across the globe), or fear of global terrorism (that led to multiple wars and massive destruction across large swaths of the globe), or now fear of Chinese manufacturing and Russia's imperial death throes (which threatens to lead us into regional and possibly even global wars), so at some point we have to admit that the Pax Americana is a largely Euro-American peace built on our violent reactions to a perpetual fear everywhere else, and maybe we should think about what "Pax" means, whether the "Americana" part is central, and whether there might be better, more robust ways of going about the "Pax" part, if not the "Americana" part. Obviously Trump is not going to lead us to that level of anti-doomerism, but if the world order really is at risk of collapsing, maybe Americans, or at least American liberals, can shed some of their conservatism and start thinking about what they would want the subsequent world order to look like, and how we can get there.
Have we given Ukraine ICBMs, or does he mean the short-range tactical ballistic missiles Ukraine has already fired into Russia (ATACMS)? The distinction is massive, obviously.
Honestly, as someone who believes that gender is a social construct in a fairly extreme sense, I don't think that most people who use it, either to say that it is a social construct or to say that it isn't, understand that "social construct" doesn't = not real.
I'm sure what the Democrats need is more right wing takes from people who can't stand them. "Why not just be the Republican Party-lite? I mean, it's failed every time, but if you want swing voters, the key is to not distinguish yourself from the other party."
I think the role of wokeness in Democrats' electoral fortunes is vastly overestimated by extremely online people who for whatever reason feel like wokeness is anti-them personally, for whatever reason. It's a form of insecurity, resulting in projection.
There is a related, broader narrative among conservatives, which I first saw during the first Obama term, which says that by talking about race at all, Democrats are dividing people by race. Meanwhile, conservatives were showing up to political rallies during the '08 election with monkey dolls standing in for Obama, but they weren't creating any racial divisions.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “From the New York Post: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops”
This isn't actually what it looks like (though the jokes day of were hilarious). To understand what it is, it's important to remember that pretty much everyone in the healthcare industry is a bad actor (OK, not nurses), not just insurance companies, and what you're reading is one of the three worst actors -- physicians -- spin on what one of the other bad actors -- insurance companies -- did. In reality, what's happening here is the insurance company is reducing the pay rates for anesthesia to the Medicare rates/rules, which anesthesiologists, who, let's face it, are some of the worst actors among stiff competition*, didn't like, because they make an absurd amount of money and this would mean they make a slightly less absurd amount of money. So anesthesiologists (via the American Society of Anesthesiologists) chose, on probably the best possible day for them to do so, because the evils of health insurance companies had been so successfully highlighted, to spin the hell out of the story to make it seem like insurance companies were saying how long you could be under anesthesia, because let's face it, as evil as that sounds, it wouldn't be the worst thing insurance companies do, so it's pretty believable.
Anyway, to make a long story short, the insurance company did what insurance companies are actually supposed to do: used their buying power to reduce costs. Would it hurt patients? Maybe, because more anesthesiologists will leave the network, but that's as much on the greedy ass anesthesiologists as it is on BCBS.
There's an easy, and obvious solution to all of this, of course, one that would bring our health care industry into the developed world. I hope that these conversations bring back the big conversation we were having in earnest in 2016 and 2020.
*Have you ever had surgery, or since it's all dudes here, known someone who had an epidural, during an insurance-covered procedure, only to find out that the anesthesiologist was out of network? having to pay more for out of network is evil, but so is the fact that anesthesiologists have by and large just refused to join networks.
"
I was thinking more abstractly: an out of touch ruling elite, an increasingly frustrated petite bourgeoisie (instead of the Russian intelligentia, we have the PMC (though also the universities), and an increasingly class conscious working class. We're definitely too rich for revolution, so we may not even get to 1905, but we've already seen a shot at the czar (that just got his ear), and if people are now gonna go after the princes (like the United Health dude), I think it might be an interesting historical analogy.
"
What would we be reforming?
"
Since at least 2016, I've seen people suggest that we are in America's Weimar Republic phase, but perhaps people say that because their historical knowledge is limited, and we're actually in our Russia in the second half of the 19th century phase, and this is the beginning of our age of the Nihilists?
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024”
The expert consensus among virologists and epidemiologists is that the overwhelming evidence is for a zoonotic origin, and not a lab leak, but if a 57 page political report says otherwise, we should definitely go with that.
"
I mean, the lab hypothesis is a conspiracy theory by definition, so #1 is a weird thing to say, regardless of whether it's true (we'll never know for sure, obviously, but the evidence seems pretty overwhelming that it is false).
On “Huffpo reports that Harris internals *NEVER* had her ahead.”
To add to this, one of the tells is the seemingly universal belief among liberals that the main reason Harris loss is due to misinformation, with "low information voters" being misinformed and manipulated.
To the extent that this is true (e.g., the stoking of immigration fears or the great trans scare), it's true of pretty much everyone, but in a broader sense, people are pretty aware of their bank accounts, their grocery bills, their rent, gas prices, etc., and liberals' insistence than the economy is great, actually, because inflation is down (as though that means the massive rise in prices over the last 2 years disappears) or the stock market's kicking ass, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being manipulated, is pretty insulting.
"
To be fair to liberals, they also mean poor and working class white people.
And I'd add that, to some extent, they're right. A politics of the upper middle and upper classes, by the upper middle and upper middle classes, for the upper middle and upper classes, results in a lot of just ignoring political discourse outside of those groups, and understandably.
What politically-engaged white, educated, relatively well off liberals really mean is people who don't have the same interests as they do.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024”
I think it's easier to explain Lee's, and probably most liberals', hatred of the left without reference to "The Omnicause." The base hatred doesn't even come from agreement or disagreement, but from failure of the, er, near left (Berniecrats, Naderites, those sorts) to always fall in line electorally. According to the liberal narrative (which I find ridiculous), then, this is why we had Bush Jr and Trump the first time (there seem to be a handful of liberals putting Trump the second time on the near left as well).
Lee's hatred is further strengthened by his belief that the left is antisemitic for opposing occupation, apartheid, and now genocide, but that's not really an omnicause thing, that's a very specific cause thing.
InMD's version of "the omnicause" makes more sense to me, and I actually agree to some extent, but I suspect my solution and his are quite different.
"
I'm not gonna lie, I tune out pretty much anytime anyone uses the word "omnicause," so I'm not quite sure how that discourse looks, particularly since the people who use it seem just as likely to be upset about uni-causes(?) that they don't like. So I'm not really sure what it's doing here.
I do assume that part of the reason Saul is saying I am just disagreeing because I dislike liberals is because my framework means I frequently disagree with liberals, but I'm not sure if that's what you're saying or not.
"
Both my attempts at posting this with links have been miserable failures, so:
Unlike a lot of conservatives, I am not motivated by an anti-liberal contrarianism. I'm happy to agree with them when they're right.
I'm currently part of two reading groups formed from, let's call it my extended grad school social circle (grad school friends, and friends they've made since we were in grad school), both groups focused on, er, "heterodox" political and economic views, though from different angles (one's all leftists, one a weird mixture of political ideologies). Anyway, the leftist group has been reading a bunch about the post-WWII order and its inevitable collapse (it's a matter of when, not if, but that's just the way history works), and one of my favorite books we've read in that context is The Long 20th Century by Giovanni Arrighi, published in 1994, when Trump was still just a rich dude whose businesses regularly went bankrupt, and who showed up at high profile boxing matches (I can't remember when he did the wrestling stuff, but it might have been around then too). While I don't agree with everything Arrighi says, my views on the collapse of the post-WWII order are heavily shaped by that; my views on what might come after are shaped by other books I've read with that group, like The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World by Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Neither of these books are particularly worried about opposing liberals (though the latter has a lot to say about them). Throw in the excellent Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey by Anthony Brewer as another influence, along with many of the authors discussed therein.
Anyway, I recommend all of these, especially to liberals. It helps to have an actual framework for thinking about the world order, its positive and negative effects, its collapse, and what might potentially come after it, instead of just doomerism.
"
At this point, I think we have to call this sort of thinking Trump-doomerism, or something similar, because we have to admit that either the post-WWII order is so fragile that a half-senile old clown with a massive hair piece could destroy it, or admit that to the extent that it is at risk of collapsing, it is so because of a lot of things that have little to do with Trump, and at most electing Trump took our fingers out of some holes in the dam.
That said, American conservatism, which is dominant across its narrow and flat political spectrum, always leads to one form of doomerism or another, whether it's Red Scares (that lead to multiple wars and massive destruction across the globe), or fear of global terrorism (that led to multiple wars and massive destruction across large swaths of the globe), or now fear of Chinese manufacturing and Russia's imperial death throes (which threatens to lead us into regional and possibly even global wars), so at some point we have to admit that the Pax Americana is a largely Euro-American peace built on our violent reactions to a perpetual fear everywhere else, and maybe we should think about what "Pax" means, whether the "Americana" part is central, and whether there might be better, more robust ways of going about the "Pax" part, if not the "Americana" part. Obviously Trump is not going to lead us to that level of anti-doomerism, but if the world order really is at risk of collapsing, maybe Americans, or at least American liberals, can shed some of their conservatism and start thinking about what they would want the subsequent world order to look like, and how we can get there.
On “Joe Biden Pardons Local Man”
It's a case of "Everyone who understands this exchange should schedule a colonoscopy."
"
My dad has a 6-pack of Billy Beer that he's saved all these years, but I don't think he'd buy a Hunter Crack Pipe.
"
Maybe we'll get Hunter Beer out of this.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/25/2024”
Whew, worried I'd miss some earth-shatteringly (maybe literally) important news.
"
Have we given Ukraine ICBMs, or does he mean the short-range tactical ballistic missiles Ukraine has already fired into Russia (ATACMS)? The distinction is massive, obviously.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/18/2024”
It was an IRBM. Still nuclear capable, but not quite as scary if you're not in Eastern Europe.
On “The Mandate That Wasn’t”
Honestly, as someone who believes that gender is a social construct in a fairly extreme sense, I don't think that most people who use it, either to say that it is a social construct or to say that it isn't, understand that "social construct" doesn't = not real.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/18/2024”
I mean, I think they want medicare for all, too, based on polls, but I imagine I'm cherry picking polls, even if unconsciously.
"
I'm just amazed at how much every commentator thinks what "swing voters" actually want just happens to be what the commentator wants.
"
I'm sure what the Democrats need is more right wing takes from people who can't stand them. "Why not just be the Republican Party-lite? I mean, it's failed every time, but if you want swing voters, the key is to not distinguish yourself from the other party."
On “The Four Stages of Post-election Cruelty”
The puns are back!
"
Citing Brianna Wu suggests that you're not online enough to know about Wu's right turn.
"
I think the role of wokeness in Democrats' electoral fortunes is vastly overestimated by extremely online people who for whatever reason feel like wokeness is anti-them personally, for whatever reason. It's a form of insecurity, resulting in projection.
There is a related, broader narrative among conservatives, which I first saw during the first Obama term, which says that by talking about race at all, Democrats are dividing people by race. Meanwhile, conservatives were showing up to political rallies during the '08 election with monkey dolls standing in for Obama, but they weren't creating any racial divisions.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.