You're supposed to get insurance before you have a "pre-existing" condition. Insurance being tied to employment should, generally, be dismantled anyway. Hell, if we really want affordable healthcare for more people we should all but abolish health insurance.

Like I said,

If there aren’t laws guaranteeing access to insurance for people with pre-existing chronic conditions, there wouldn’t be any laws against dropping customers who develop them, so what does it matter?

agreed but not in the way you mean it.

Canada still has insurance. It’s single payer, but services are provided by for-profit corporations. The result is ****. I don’t have to worry about paying out of pocket for much, but I do have to worry about how much a bottom-feeding corporation is squeezing my doctors for hours or cutting corners on basic sanitation. The #1 way MRSA infections are getting spread around in hospitals here is by dirty mop. So the way I see it, Canadian healthcare would be vastly improved by abolishing insurance and just nationalizing the healthcare industry. Without that, all you’re doing is compounding one market failure (perfectly inelastic demand) with another (monopsony).

But I suspect what you mean to say is that people should just pay for everything out of pocket. Here’s the problem with that: the real (forgotten) purpose of insurance is to protect your wealth against black swan events. Which means there is no way to prohibit health insurance; the terms of health insurance may change, but unless you prohibit all sorts of insurance the category will effectively continue to exist as long as the services cost money and people have wealth to protect. Even if you did somehow manage to outlaw it, healthcare demand is perfectly inelastic so what you’d see even from an efficient competitive market is nigh-infinite prices and rampant price discrimination for poor people (i.e. rich people getting treatment would effectively subsidize poor people on the ledger, although people who cannot be served profitably would be excluded). In simpler terms, the result would be exactly the same. America’s healthcare problems aren’t being caused by minor implementation inefficiencies, they’re being caused by extracted profit full stop.

Well, tbh, I believe I've stated before that I don't like to comment on Obamacare specifically, because it doesn't apply to me, or insurance in general because I've got great insurance for next to nothing in premiums. I'm skeptical of complete government takeover of healthcare for a number of reasons but I detest the inefficiency and overhead that the typical insurance model embeds into the system. I have some ideas but they're not things particularly worth spending a whole lot of mental energy on because it's totally academic. In the context of current political discussions I'm going to side with people that propose to make it easier for the individual to get their own insurance rather than be stuck with whatever their employer or state has available. I don't know if such people actually exist. But, no, I don't see a need to force insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. That's cost sharing, not insurance.

I’ll never understand why people think an organization whose leadership you can’t vote for is so obviously supposed to be better than an organization whose leadership you can. It’s not like we’re even talking about an efficient market where bad actors get driven out.

I mean, monarchists are a thing. Some people like being cucks, I guess.

I wouldn't understand a millenial like you to understand this, but this idea of democracy and choosing who is in charge is an artifact of the ideology being forced on our society by post modern neo marksists that is a part of postmodernism and moral relativism. You see there is a fixed morality present in the fabric of reality placed their by our creator the Demi-oorge, and it needs to be upheld and not subverted by the random will of people via voting, otherwise we end up with things like two dudes kissing while married, and people being called what they are.

Voting for leadership change, which we really don't even get to do much of anyway, doesn't really seem to change bureaucracy or bureaucrats much does it? People can, however, literally put businesses out of business by voting with their money.

The "free" market really doesn't work in the interest of consumers as well as you seem to imagine it does.

That's obviously not true.


What you could say is that the conservative label applies to such a broad diversity of people that it's hard to identify a lot of universal conservative principals.

Good luck voting with your money after your heart attack.

Counterpoint: it obviously is.


A broad diversity of unprincipled authoritarian sadists.

“voting for leadership change doesn’t really seem to change bureaucracy much” is the braying mating call of the white middle class conservative, who makes all of his money from traditional employment / can afford professional tax prep and has therefore never actually seen what his vote has done to the bureaucracy but somehow has an opinion about how ‘the same’ it is.

There's nothing to really argue about here. This is just shows an astonishing inability to empathize with any perspective or experience outside your own. That's really pathetic. I don't think anyone who shares this attitude could possibly understand society or even themselves in any significant way. It's almost like self-imposed autism. I don't think you'll ever be able to appreciate what your sense of superiority has cost you.

It’s adorable that you think authoritarianism and preservation of the existing social order aren’t in the dictionary definition of conservatism, but decidedly less adorable that you (of all people) think you can accuse anyone of self-imposed autism.

UM ACKSHUALLY

Heres a lil social note for you in the future: if you post a vapid dismissal of a deliberate knee-jerk inflammatory comment, you probably shouldn’t be that surprised if you get a knee-jerk inflammatory vapid dismissal in response to it.

Also, Jon usually makes those sorts of posts as troll-lite. Even keeping that in mind it can be tempting to take a post literally or get a little defensive about it but don't. Plenty of us still manage to troll a bit here but I kind of feel that it's all in good fun now. I don't know how others feel about it.

So basically we're at 4chan levels of discourse? I.e., calling people autists, wondering aloud what people meant unironically....

Wookie, if there weren't any black people would you support national healthcare?

Conservatives are unprincipled authoritarian sadists.
Classical liberals are principled authoritarian sadists.
Social liberals think half of the camp guards should be women.
Social democrats think the camps should have free daycare.
The only difference between a tankie and a nazi is an income.
Libertarians are anarchists who are scared of a slave revolt.
Nobody knows what socialism is. Not even socialists.

Everybody is garbage. If you can’t accept that you, your beliefs, and most of the people who believe the same things are all deeply flawed I don’t know how you can even call yourself an adult, let alone a functional one.

Meanwhile, in that alternate reality



Meanwhile, in that alternate reality



Meanwhile, in that alternate reality



Meanwhile, in that alternate reality

Over time I've jettisoned various beliefs and ideologies, usually either because my life circumstances made them either a.) inconvenient, or b.) hypocritical. And I imagine somebody exactly like myself but in different circumstances would adopt beliefs different still....

But you know I guess that's just a bunch of relativist post-modern garbage.


(It's also blasphemy to categorically call something created in the image of God garbage!)

Here, I’ll post a nice thing about conservatives:

They’re right about criminal sentencing. For the wrong reasons, of course; for visceral, hateful reasons. But they’re right anyway.

An orderly society requires respect for the law. That means criminal sentencing can’t just consider the “optimal outcome” of rehabilitation, the feelings of the victims, or even deterring similar future crimes. The most important thing is sending a message to the public that Justice Has Been Done; that the system has satisfactorily dealt with the problem. If people view the justice system as unfair, ineffective, or capricious, they learn contempt for it and then eventually society falls apart.


Quick joke break: “Oh you say you hate the police, but if someone breaks into your house who else are you gonna call to show up three hours later and take notes that nobody ever follows up on?”


So rehabilitative sentencing is the Big Thing at the moment. It’s evidence based to reduce recidivism, and it’s certainly the best outcome for the criminal. But these sentences are also radically lenient compared to the expectations of the public. Take notorious rapist Brock Turner, for example: his sentence was probably within guidelines for rehabilitation, but the sentence was also orders of magnitude lower than the public expected. Massive public outrage followed, eventually leading to the judges recall. The California Commission on Judicial Performance deepened the resulting contempt by reviewing the case and insisting the judge ruled appropriately (which he did, for a dubious value of appropriateness). And facts aside, now there’s an entire generation of people who will remember for the rest of their lives that, basically, the US criminal justice system lets rich white boy athletes get away with rape.

What does contempt for the criminal justice system look like? Maybe the next time someone finds the next Brock Turner in an alley, they don’t bother calling the police. They just take care of the problem themselves, because they know the justice system won’t. Is a society like that really better than letting a criminal rot for longer than ‘necessary’?

No, every political philosophy is garbage except for my particular sect of anarcho-primitivist feminist nudism.

That also works in the other way, too harsh sentences for doing ****ing nothing (like 10 years for a small bag of weed) makes people see the justice system as unfair, ineffective and capricious.

Jon, Norway has one of the least punitive criminal justice systems in the world. I don't know if it's the very least punitive in the world, but I'm using Norway as an example because Finland has a pretty unpunitive system as well and yet our cod-gobbling neighbors to the west are even more on the rehabilitative end of the spectrum.

Their system works even better than ours, and ours works relatively well too. They have the lowest recidivism rate in the world. I don't know what the tones in their national dialog of the system are, but they seem to be chugging along really well. No breakdown of the moral fabric, no strident calls to rework the system to better accommodate the people's sense of justice.

So while the balance seems like it should be tipped well toward the rehabilitative end, and considerably more so than in the US for instance, I know you must have something concrete behind that post. You tend to come armed with facts before making any such claims. Perhaps you might talk about them in this case as I'm definitely interested in the topic.

I know nobody here is too invested in the Russia is the most evil country in the world narrative (that’s not what this is about exactly) but Peter Pomerantsav is a good writer: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/27/the-disinformation-age-a-revolution-in-propaganda?CMP=share_btn_tw

“Per my last email...”

I didn’t say criminal justice should be more punitive or less rehabilitative. I said that it needs to put the expectations of the public ahead of all other concerns.

The fact that nobody’s calling to reform your systems suggests that, yes, your systems work great for your people — probably because that’s what your people want and expect out of criminal justice. Meanwhile, in the US and Canada, there are calls from both the right and the left to make our already-inhumane systems less humane. Often the very same people who claim to support evidence-based rehabilitative sentencing react harshly when such a sentence is actually passed, like in the Turner case I mentioned before. So clearly there is a systemic mismatch between actual rehabilitative sentencing and what Americans and Canadians expect.

The solution to this problem if you want a humane, rehabilitation based justice system is to do ~actual politics~ and convince the people that they should want and expect it. Not just in the abstract theory that outcomes are better, in actual practice. Otherwise, see my post above.


Also, no, I didn’t come armed with facts about this subjective opinion about the politics of criminal justice. I wasn’t aware that was the kind of discussion I was instigating.

He does kind of have a point about America. Americans get really mad when they don't hand down extremely long sentences to their preferred criminal.

If you take even two seconds to think 'how would I want to be treated were I in the position of the criminal', you immediately halve the sentence.. we all intuitively know punishments SHOULD BE MORE until we think about them personally. 'I'd never be in that position' yeah, it's about developing a sense of empathy to all people, even when it's not someone you'd prefer. Extending grace to all, no matter who and what they have done.. pretty much anyone who has ever had anything serious to say about morality has agreed this is necessary.

Facts are subjective anyway.

I’m sorry for the wall of text to follow, and I understand if you don’t want to bother with it. I’m sure I could be more succinct. I’m trying to clarify everything.

First off, I want to point out there are certainly frequent calls to reform the system here. I can’t speak to the Norwegian system, I just know that those Norwegians seem to like it, but Finns generally disagree with the Finnish sentencing of violent sexual crimes. In fact, recent revisions are trying to make that sentencing more compatible with people’s sense of what it should be. We definitely don’t see our criminal justice system as perfect, and I imagine the Norwegians don’t either.

I feel like I got that you didn’t say criminal justice should be more punitive or less rehabilitative. My point was that while the lenient Norwegian system has the best success rate in the world as far as recidivism, the people also seem to be quite happy with it. So that latter part is where I got to my actual response to what you were saying. The fact that our systems work as well as they do (and the Norwegian one seems to work even better than the Finnish one) made me think that some sort of optimal balance, however impossible to determine that may be, should lie somewhere closer to our end of the scale.

I didn’t mean the comment about facts as a dictation of the type of conversation you should be instigating. I failed to communicate what I was really thinking when I wrote that. I merely suspected that you had some societal psychological studies in mind when you presented the view that people will respond aversely to incongruences between their sense of justice and actual criminal sentences, and that such averse response will start to add up and erode the system. Because I suspected you had such studies in mind, I was curious to read about them. I agree that it’s perfectly fine you didn’t have anything specific like that in mind.

I also think your view makes sense, and it also makes sense to me that people’s perceptions of their criminal justice system would be dependent on the context of the specific society. This ties back to the end of the third paragraph of this post: while I think the Nordic criminal justice systems work better than the American one, I realize that a reworking of the American system to more closely resemble ours would face these problems of being at odds with the American public’s perceptions. Your suggested solution of changing those perceptions would be the key in all of this.

Yeah, I mean I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that Nordic countries have struck a better balance than us in most areas. But while I cognitively believe that our countries would be better places to live if we followed similar models, I’m also disappointed any time the penalty for a white collar criminal isn’t being fed through a fine grate. I don’t know the answer but I know I’m probably not gonna be a part of it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm also not sure if Nordic countries (honestly don't know) have significant numbers of offenders from dehumanized demographics. There seems to be a significant group where strength and self are all that matter and even if you rehabilitate an individual from that population I'm skeptical what happens when they are released back to the "wild". This also leads on to the larger issue of what do we as a society or culture do with that demo to begin with. How do we unite or re-unite as a common society?

Enslave them, of course.

Amusingly, it seems that Lincoln was a correspondent and avid reader of Karl Marx. I would never have guessed, but they were contemporaries, so it seems to check out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/27/you-know-who-was-into-karl-marx-no-not-aoc-abraham-lincoln/

It seems as well that socialists of the day were adamantly anti-slavery, and believed that abolishing it would improve labor conditions for all workers.

Kind of sums up everything about the US, doesn’t it? Cynical businessmen taking on the role of preacher, invoking moral decay to take advantage of the masses and make a profit?

I think the injustice about the criminal justice system isn’t as much about people failing to have empathy by failing to imagine what it would be like to be in that position, as much as it’s individuals uncritically following the unwisdom of the crowd, being carried by a wave of self-righteousness and moral condemnation.

Like, what’s happening in the first place that “the public” is getting all bent out of shape about a single criminal case (such as the Brock Turner case)?

Yeah the US has the same problem in re-uniting criminal, veteran, and police populations who share those same values (strength and self) with the common society.

A documentary on the casey anthony case came up that I am watching right now. I remember at the time the trial was going on another Marine was ranting about how broken the criminal justice system was that let her off and I made some comment to the effect that nobody should care about the outcome of the case unless they are going to care about all of the other murdered and missing little girls of varying skin color. You can imagine how that went over.

I’ve never eaten wrench before, howd it taste

Yeah, I wouldn't say that failing to empathize is the cause of it.. empathizing with others is rather the antidote IMO.

People are herd animals in a sense. Not in a fedora way, I just mean people typically go with the societal flow.. even myself tbh, I'm not above it even remotely. The amount of people who actually operate on some set of fixed principles is very small.