I think the article has some flaws because it seems like the point of the article seems to try and link the sentiment given to people who commit deliberate unethical/corrupt behavior to non-deliberate and otherwise less-fortunate people, which I think is a bit of a disingenuous argument.
Its a deliberate conflation, a sleight of hand that happens in American discourse all the time.
As an example, Americans are hostages to your incredibly inefficient health care system. Not only is reasonable discussion of public health outside your overton window, the reason it stays outside is the instant clamour of voices saying "free stuff is bad and you are bad for advocating it".
The only way to get access to reasonable care seems to be either military service or full employment. The rest of the world is incredulous that losing your job means losing access to healthcare.
That truly strange conception of "freedom" americans are always so afraid of losing is a massive illusion for the majority of a population deathly afraid of the financial ramifications of a health crisis.
Yet you have no functional way of talking about it, because of the sleight of hand discourse exemplified by the article.
There's still moral hazard there, because no doubt many people already had the sense that the government would do something like that, so intentionally didn't pay their rent.
these are just edge cases that get a lot of media coverage. By in large, people in tech, law, finance , etc. are making a lot of money and while being ethical and hard-working. The fear that society is overflowing with opportunists who are just looting the system or getting by without work, is overblown. I understand the author's frustration, but incompetence, favoritism, lying (except perjury), and nepotism are generally not crimes, and very few people are able to get by without doing the necessary work. Also, plenty of non-famous people also engage in shitty behavior too but it's not newsworthy.
Similarly, I think powerful people have always behaved as poorly as in the examples he mentioned. It's just that nowadays, data-driven traditional and social media uses the outrage to make money. This does unfortunately lead more people to think that cheating is OK, but I think for the most part, our systems do eventually work to correct that.
Certainly even the Founding Fathers had a lot of business entanglements that would lead one to seriously question whether they didn't have a conflict of interest (e.g., how much was Washington's decision to mount an army to secure the Ohio territory influenced by his own significant personal holdings there?). But it feels to me like at one point we had, to some extent, mastered this problem, and now we've moved away from even trying.
Probably. Maybe it didn't have that much of an impact on society because it wasn't known. E.g. in Germany during Covid-19 measures, multiple CDU politicians got caught doing shady deals with companies, either by having the state overpay for masks for a kickback, by pushing for emergency certifications for some tests (again for cash), and other corrupt behaviors.
This wouldn't be a large issue if nobody had known - even if the state had overpaid by half a billion, that's not even a day's worth of money. However, since it came out, there has been a massive loss of trust in politicians and public institutions. Those who doubted before now saw proof that it's all just a scheme, and others just lost a lot of trust.
We'll have to see whether anything happens beyond the accused promising to donate the proceeds, but I'm not holding my breath.
if you dig deep and long enough you will find examples for any group at all levels..
the examples he gives are weak. For example, Trump's hotels saw an increase in business after he became president. Is this a surprise or a bad thing, given all the media coverage he got? Of all the things we can fault trump on, is this the most damning, which was not even under his control?
This is a pretty good example of the Overton window moving. It used to be common for Presidents to divest direct control of their assets (e.g. Carter’s peanut farm). Trump never did that and it was a huge issue for many at the start of his presidency.
Never stopped being an issue of some magnitude to me. Sadly it was followed up with issues of much larger magnitude, resulting in a redefinition of “huge”. Which kind of makes your point about Overton windows.
So people are expected to liquidate their life holdings and give up their interests and businesses in order to hold a political office like President for a few years? Doesn’t that penalize potential candidates and limit the pool of people?
Seriously, what type of person is willing to run for office under these expectations? I don’t see a long line of Mother Theresa’s seeking office. People willing to accept the conditions of running for office are most likely so desperate for power that they are willing to do anything like upend their financial lives and submit to invasive and potentially embarrassing scrutiny. Are these the type of people we want to lead a country?
Yes, I think the requirements to hold literally the most powerful office on earth should be extraordinary. Realistically anyone who does it is set for life with five-figure speaking fees anyway so boohoo about their businesses.
That’s not good behavior but I think it’s not really the same phenomenon. That’s more of a coordinated action/tragedy of the commons problem where people want to bury their heads in the sand and do nothing because the problem can be mostly ignored for now.
This dog-eat-dog "if you don't steal, you won't survive" endemic level of corruption and ubiquitous legal broken windows is IME not uncommon in shitty third-world countries (of one of which I'm an expat) where scarcity leads people to prioritize their own needs over common decency and consideration towards others. The "everybody else is cheating, this is the baseline" attitude always felt wrong, but, just like the article said, you were made to feel a fool if you didn't participate in it. The US felt like a place that, while not immune to cheating, had strong social and legal norms around it.
The most recent phenomenon of this kind I can recall was people lying to vaccination centers about having medical conditions that would help them skip the line ahead of everybody else. I was and still am vehemently opposed to lying about that, despite having been told numerous times that the government would have just thrown the doses away if nobody used them up by lying about their status. Again, you were made to feel a sucker.
> This dog-eat-dog "if you don't steal, you won't survive" endemic level of corruption and ubiquitous legal broken windows is IME not uncommon in shitty third-world countries
You're also a sucker if you don't invest in crypto. This "sucker" trick is very primitive, it's common to see that teenagers use it to control each other. What's horrible is that significant power structures in our world use it to control the population. This is a huge marking of cultural degradation, in my opinion.
I hated the vaccination thing sooo much. I was already annoyed that the US is becoming a communist country where all the most valuable goods (e.g. vaccines) are given to powerful politicians (members of Congress) instead of letting people in the private sector buy them with their own money. The fact that people started lying to jump the line ahead of all the honest people in addition to the people who would’ve paid for them with their hard-earned money pissed me off royally. It made me feel like a sucker for working and paying taxes. I identify very strongly with the author of this article.
High-trust vs low-trust societies. In a high trust society you can generally get more things done more quickly and easily because you can spend less time and effort on trust structures; you can hire strangers rather than family members, etc. The downside is that there's a bigger, less heavily guarded return to cheating. And every effort to cheat to win that pot pushes the society closer to low-trust.
Do you follow Elizabeth Warren on Twitter? She is one of the most obnoxious political blowhards on the website, tweeting stuff about how high gas and milk prices are the result of executive greed and other innumerate, populist pablum.
I don’t watch Fox News, so I have no idea what they say about her. I do know that when I read what she actually writes she sounds like a disingenuous liar.
As a point of calibration, if I were to point out that she cynically lied about her Native American heritage, would you also respond by telling me that’s a Fox News talking point? Because, again, while I can imagine what Fox News has to say about it, I know better what I am able to conclude all on my own.
What’s to get? “He “dunked” on her in a way lots of people found funny. She comes off looking kind of silly and weak and he comes off looking clever and acerbic.
Now, look, it’s tantamount to a schoolyard spat. I’m not saying it needs to mean anything more than that. But evaluating it as a spat, most people who read that exchange come away thinking he won it.
> All that is required to beat this, honestly, is a few people serving as positive role models with transparency and not abusing their authority. I can manage my little corner of the universe but I’m not holding my breath on the rest of the country.
Totally lost me in the last paragraph.
Can't everyone agree that these role models already exist? They're just hard to name because they don't do anything outrageous to steal our attention. The problem isn't that we don't know how to act properly -- the problem isn't that we need role models. The problem is that there's no reason to follow their lead.
The solution is nothing short of punishment of these people and enforcement of the law. The problem is the bad people.
> The solution is nothing short of punishment of these people and enforcement of the law. The problem is the bad people.
I have yet to meet a completely good or completely bad person. Most people I’ve ever met are both at different times and in different situations. Is a single mother stealing baby formula to feed her child a bad person? An addict breaking into cars to feed an addiction?
People in desperate situations do desperate things, and I think we can all agree that the legal system is applied rather unevenly to those without the resources to appear sympathetic in court (who also tend to be more desperate than the average person). We effectively criminalize being poor, so I’m not sure more criminal laws or more police will help that problem.
The examples from the article are almost all rich people getting away with greedy behavior, not at all comparable to desperate crimes of the poor. Absolutely we need more enforcement of good behavior and punishment of bad behavior at the top (role models), not the bottom.
Yeah, transparency and honesty doesn't win elections. It's hilarious that this is a conservative posting this, since Trump spend 4 years wiping his ass with norms and revealing how broken the system is, and how all the "rules" were just suggestions he could abuse freely and half the USA still approved of him.
Why is that hilarious? As a conservative, it’s worth noting there’s truly nothing substantially conservative about Trump. He singlehandedly did more damage to the Republican Party than anyone since Nixon, and I would say more. Purge is an ugly word, but absent wholesale house cleaning of Trumpist grifters from the party I don’t see a useful future for it.
However, it seems your point us that you fundamentally agree with OPs central thesis, but that you can’t believe someone politically aligned differently than you can have possibly made that argument.
At this point it's very difficult to take that kind of comment seriously. The actions of the mainstream libertarian movement has fallen in line with conservatives and been co-opted so consistently by the worst reactionaries in the conservative movement that, regardless of philosophical underpinnings, it's a distinction without a difference.
My vote in 2016 was a single-issue vote against involvement in a war in Syria. I feel totally vindicated 5 years later. If being antiwar is bad, I don’t want to be right.
> Innumerate politicians who themselves mandate harsh covid restrictions living their lives ignoring their own mandates - serial violators Gavin Newsom and Phil Murphy got re-elected!
In the Newsom case, his opponent was someone claiming it was all a bunch of nonsense and if elected he'd do away with all restrictions immediately, so not a very strong vote for the person who's upset that he didn't take the whole thing seriously enough.
If Newsom says that you'll probably die if somebody without a mask stands next to you, and he stands next to you without a mask, then either he's a liar or he doesn't care about your life. If his opponent says you'll almost certainly not die just because somebody without a mask stands next to you, and he stands next to you without a mask, he can still care about your life and be honest.
Well yes, if you replace the actual claims about coronavirus and masks with different, absurd ones, then the argument is simple to counter. What if you didn't do that, though?
I would guess many voters don't want to vote for someone they saw as a lunatic, even if he acts in a way that's very consistent with his own beliefs. Exit polling showed coronavirus was a big issue for voters and they didn’t think Newsom went far enough.
The point is that Newsom is in the wrong whether or not you believe masks are important to keep people safe. If they are important, then he's in the wrong for not wearing one himself. If they're not, then he's in the wrong for issuing the mandate.
Yes. But my point is voters who are concerned about COVID had the choice between a guy who had their preferred policies, but was a hypocrite, or a different guy who was sincerely committed to policies they thought were wrongheaded and dangerous. Why would they ever choose the latter, if these are the only options?
Yet states and countries that did not have significant Covid restrictions have not suffered at the level politicians like Newsom and Fauci were implying they would.
It’s easy to be outraged at examples of hypocrisy. They piss me off too. But looking at the bigger picture, everybody is a hypocrite. I’m not sure it’s even possible to have a fully consistent moral philosophy, let alone always act in accordance with it.
I don't agree with that. I think you can have a moral philosophy that makes allowances.
Using an example from a commentor above, the woman who steals baby formula so her child can survive. My philosophy can hold the idea that stealing is wrong but that it is justified if a life will be lost due to the failings of the wealthy and greater society to have put that person in that difficult situation.
That's not hypocritical, that is a philosophy that allows for nuance.
Yes, but I don't think that's the idea. If you look at the body of work of any essayist, sermon-writer, etc., you'll find that eventually they end up contradicting themselves somehow. It's really hard not to.
> The psychological effect on most is that they start to feel like suckers for not pushing the envelope themselves and it’s dangerous because a country of jaded people is not one that can work together to solve common problems.
Absolutely. Thank you for hitting the nail on the head!
Problem is, the looting can only last so long, until everything has been looted.
I suspect not much longer; if you put some of your wealth someplace undebase-able (say, gold or crypto), there is a chance you will make it to the other side.
See also Atlas Shrugged, where the producers keeping the world afloat ("Atlas") decide to go on strike and hide due to populist politics bleeding them dry of their hard work ("shrugged").
Neither gold nor crypto will bring you to what ever "the other side" is (so much wistles).
Crypto currencies are bound to a functioning infrastructure and can be unpredictably volatile.
Gold is no currency at all in the sense of a common trade value and this is the essence of it all. No, actually its labor. Labor is the only kind of value and any "worth" (eg money) has to be translatable to that. Crypto and gold is not.
What I mean here concretely is failure/bankruptcy of the current system after people get fed up, and re-emergence/prioritization of institutions of justice and rule of law.
This may be just a dream however. Don't hold your breath.
> Gold is no currency at all in the sense of a common trade value
I don't mind it not being a commonly transacted medium if I can buy and sell it without a lot of fees. For my purposes, even cheap good cars or real estate constitute a store of value, albeit less liquid ones.
> Labor is the only kind of value and any "worth"
Value is in the eye of the beholder. If I value my productivity less than you do yours, I might not accept payment in work.
This is a common true-ish sentence but too vague and in fact inadequate in this topic. The problem lies in how value is measured and this is imo the root of nowadays turmoil.
Ultimately valuable is, what satisfies essential needs (food, shelter, clothing, meds, etc), this is the bottom line. Gold is worthless on its own. Every society revolves around these needs and if not, that society may not last any longer. Only labor provides those values and thus sustains a society but not all members profit from it, "measured", the same way. Income from capital extracts out from labor value. The poor get poorer, while the rich get lazier.
I assume your plan with crypto/gold is to dodge a financial crisis but why should a future society respect the profiteers of the exploitative former? Maybe invest in something that enables labor, eg. land.
> The problem lies in how value is measured and this is imo the root of nowadays turmoil.
People have always had differing values, this is nothing new.
When people believe that only x is ultimately valuable, and y is not, It allows for people who understand that people have always valued things differently to exploit that for their own gain.
The people who understand that not all food, all shelter, all clothing, all meds, all land, all x is valued by everyone the same will forever have the upper hand against those who are ultimately convinced of the absoluteness of their values.
> Labor is the only kind of value and any "worth" (eg money) has to be translatable to that. Crypto and gold is not.
crypto and gold can be exchanged for labor products in much the same way that other wealth can be (a house, stocks, bonds) — by first being exchanged for money. what do you mean when you say these things aren’t “translatable” into labor?
> Neither gold nor crypto will bring you to what ever "the other side"
If only there was some kind of marketplace where you could make incredible amounts of money with your 100% certain understanding of the future, this would be incredibly useful knowledge!
Alas, it doesn't exist and all there is to do is impotently yell at other people on the internet that they are wrong.
>Labor is the only kind of value
I wonder if we took a survey of professional economists how many would agree with this statement. I'm going to say less then 1%.
Sadly every half wit middle manager & pencil pusher thinks that they're atlas, meanwhile there org survives on tacit knowledge of underlings who don't 'work to rule'
> See also Atlas Shrugged, where the producers keeping the world afloat ("Atlas") decide to go on strike and hide due to populist politics bleeding them dry of their hard work ("shrugged").
And the former aristocrat from Tsarist Russia shrugged, went to America and made mediocre literature and a widely discredited philosophy.
Can you provide a link to the list with Atlas Shrugged at #2? I’m not asking because I don’t believe you, I do believe you. I just want to see the list so I can avoid reading any of the other books on it.
Atlas Shrugged is a semi-coherent libertarian screed written by someone who fetishized STEM but lacked any hard skills. The characters have the emotional depth of a wet paper bag.
> This only gets worse if we do something crazy like forgive massive amounts of debt, whether it’s student or mortgage. The psychological effect on the people who have lived within their means and met their obligations will be radicalizing.
> The psychological effect on the people who have lived within their means and met their obligations will be radicalizing.
First, this entry tries to conflate student loan forgiveness with a potpourri of ethical issues. It is not similar to the other examples.
It is reasonable to question the structure of US policy toward student loan programs. They are predatory compared with those of other nations.
If the US comes to terms with this problem, and major restructuring is done, is debt forgiveness on loans that are no longer even possible to get some massive psychological burden?
It seems more like sour grapes of having to run your own loans through bad policy.
The psychological fallout will be immense if an entire generation who have had their lives destroyed by and are still on the hook for these loans sees everyone else go to school for free, relatively or in fact.
My (grand?)parent's generation had the G.I. Bill. Sadly I had to pay my own way through college (and pay back the loans). I am not sure there is any psychological fallout I am suffering. In fact, I feel I had it easy — going to college in the 80's — I have no idea how this current generation can afford it.
Nonetheless, skimming the Wikipedia article, seems the G.I. Bill may have greatly benefited the country.
This example is imo not relevant because the G.I. Bill wasn’t “free” or universally offered (recipients had to fight in the war), the order is reversed (I’m talking specifically about an older generation in debt seeing the following generation get to go debt-free), and the amount of debt someone who attended college in the 80s accumulated is far less than that of someone who attended in the past decade or two.
> Sadly I had to pay my own way through college
Without qualifiers, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It becomes wrong when “pay my own way” means “convinced when I was still a child by all the adults around me to take out a predatory loan I have no hope of ever repaying.”
I wouldn’t feel that way. Not paying those loans has a large impact on people’s ability to do relatively normal things like buy a house or get a non-POS credit card. Those effects won’t go away even if their loans are forgiven.
I do think you have a case to feel aggrieved, but at the end of the day you can choose to be someone who lives up to your standards or not. Getting upset about it is as much a choice as anything else you do.
> Picture your cousin invited you to go do a little looting last summer and you demurred. Eventually he shows up with a bunch of new Nikes but is later arrested only to have his charges dropped and record expunged. How does that make you feel?
The clear intent from the author here is to make the reader feel like they too should have gone looting. This implies, to me, that the author perhaps doesn't have a particularly strong moral compass of their own because my honest answer is:
"My cousin is incredibly stupid and lucky that they got away with this, I'm glad I didn't join them because even getting away with it I would hate myself. I'm concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it's time to dial back the contact with them"
I absolutely don't feel: damn I should have gone looting too.
> "I'm concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it's time to dial back the contact with them"
maybe
"I'm concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it's time to consider what the relationship is worth to me, and if its important, attempt to influence better behaviors otherwise dial back contact with them"
You're falling into the trap of thinking that there are "moral" people and "immoral" people and never the twain shall meet. This is empirically false: there are frameworks in which almost nobody will transgress (e.g. North Korea) and frameworks under which almost everybody will transgress (e.g. Nazi Germany). Most people benchmark their behavior from external cues.
> The clear intent from the author here is to make the reader feel like they too should have gone looting.
IDK, I would say that the intent of this kind of writing it so make the reader feel a kind of "righteous anger" response; you know the visceral kind that damps down on slow rational analysis of the argument presented. Propagandising.
>The clear intent from the author here is to make the reader feel like they too should have gone looting. This implies, to me, that the author perhaps doesn't have a particularly strong moral compass of their own because my honest answer is:
It’s a pretty uncharitable article that uses the noisier easier to find “people getting away with it” stories to lay seeds of discontent without producing any data to show how many people are getting away with it. It’s easy to find the stories that make people angry but no where reports “system works as expected 4,000,000 times this year” stories. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t but anecdata to support the authors world view is also uncool.
Also, it might be hard for them to mention the strongest examples of brazen corruption in leadership without being accused of being political, so I don't blame the author for using the even-handed examples drawn from all quarters -- which does make it easier to characterize as cherry-picked noise -- when the thesis of the article is that leadership, a necessarily tiny fraction of the 1% in the public spotlight, are growing increasingly shameless.
But the author well could have mentioned certain boundary-pushing, prosecution-taunting illegality by political actors in the United States, including actions rescued only by equally brazen presidential pardons -- actions in the public sphere that are almost without precedent.
Those kinds of actions, so few in terms of data points, could be characterized as 'noise' for their rareness, but the author's thesis (which seems sufficiently plausible not to be discounted out of hand) is that extremely brazen action by different kinds of leadership are at least leading indicators of institutional inability to deal with corruption and wrongdoing, preceding spillover into society at large -- and that maybe, due to the outsized impact that leaders have on society, those actions have an element of influence or causation.
Well, a thesis like that doesn't, to me, mark the author as being morally dubious himself for having it.
If a society is getting more corrupt, over the short-term, (see [1] for proof that at least some well-informed people think this one is), then an increasing number of individual members of society will be corrupted.
The author simply draws an obvious corollary that we may not have considered: hey, reader -- we are among those members of society. We should assume that we can, and will, be influenced if corruption increases, or if we're exposed to very public and visible examples of it.
That may be uncomfortable to consider, but I'm glad the author helped us consider it. Is it really only other people, other people's children and families, who are corrupted if they live and grow in a society in which corruption is on the rise?
(It's clearly an opinion piece, and I'm not sure how HN-ish it is, but it doesn't seem like a particularly trashy one to me)
As we can see from the title, what matters is not the actual stats, but what people perceive. So if the system works silently and fails loudly, people are going to think it is more broken than it actually is.
That fact doesn't somehow make the author wrong. People don't check the rigorous studies of corruption to decide whether or not they should feel like a sucker.
There are also cases where we can widely observe people being punished or having other problems from some behavior but not the behavior itself. Bribery or drug use are two well studied examples. When you have a public awareness campaign that emphasizes how large the problem is people think "Gosh, I hardly ever see any one getting arrested for bribes or going to the hospital for using drugs, it must actually be safe if everyone is doing it" and the public awareness campaign backfires.
Your moral compass is also not a physical instrument though. If everyone makes a point of adopting an orphan, or feeding the homeless, you'll feel pressure to do that, too. Likewise there are countries where evading tax is a national sport, and countries where people play it straight.
What he's saying is we have established rules that are there to protect a sometimes vague notion of fairness, and when people break the rules or enter a grey zone without punishment, it seems to move the line of what is acceptable, in a way that makes fools of people who thought they understood the rules.
I have a lot of sympathy for his ideas. All those examples are corrosive, and I've been around a few people on the same fringes. Ultimately bad behaviour will push out for behaviour, because it's a lot easier to get money and status that way.
> in a way that makes fools of people who thought they understood the rules
Exactly this. A system that incentivizes bad behavior and fails to protect/reward moral people exerts pressure on those with good morals.
Morals may stop you from repeating such behavior at first, but if it becomes a key to getting ahead then you can bet those morals will be slowly chipped away.
Only if you lack a foundation with deeply-held values.
When you know who you are, and are confident in your values, then no amount of pressure from the outside world can make you bend a knee.
That's not to say I'm there yet. I'm still a wishy-washy moral and ideological coward, but I'm slowly building my foundation through good role models (mainly old books from Russia).
The Russian monks are one example of moral fortitude. Whether or not their morals are agreeable, they certainly are unwavering.
I would wager that almost no statistically significant (what a terrible term) portion of college students know who they are (barring children that have not gone through the gamut of schooling, and have worked most of their lives).
Perhaps replicating the experiment with adults in the 40+ age bracket would yield different results.
I would also like to see this experiment replicated in different countries. The cultural aspect of moral strength cannot be stressed enough (itself a form of peer pressure). But at that point, should we differentiate between morality achieved through individual action vs. morality achieved through one's environment?
Funny you should bring up Russia. In Russia, the only way to get anything done with government bureaucrats was to "lubricate" the wheels with some illegal bribes in the right pockets.
So a regular citizen could stick to his moral compass and spend eternity at the back of the line getting no government services whatsoever, or he could do what the majority of people did and pay the illegal "fees".
Yes. I'm not blind to the fact the Russian people were, at the end of the day, just people going about their lives; and these people were no different than you and I, just doing what they could to survive/thrive.
However, there were a few notable "malcontents" that went against this grain, in spite of the zeitgeist of their time, and the workings of the people around them.
Reading through old non-fiction accounts by Soviet dissidents (mostly lambasting their society), I cannot help but feel there are parallels between their struggle, and ours.
And then you make contact with the real world and realize that, yes, morals are important, but just as holding a Civil War era to our standards is unproductive, you are going to need to pick your battles. There are lines I'm not going to cross. To take a life, or directly hurt others in malicious pleasure, for example. But I'm not going to be so rigid as to imagine that my moral compass can navigate every gray area with certitude. I'll do my best and God can judge me in the end.
>When you know who you are, and are confident in your values, then no amount of pressure from the outside world can make you bend a knee
Works great if you find this magic perfection. But in all likelihood you will not. You will be shaped by the biases of your upbringing and experiences that will put blinders on you. More so you will stick to your convictions with the justification of morality on your side, even when that is not the case.
That everything is essentially predetermined by my genetics, and how my environment has affected their expression; and that my free will and choices are just an elaborate illusion played by my biology.
But something in my biology is telling me to strive for something more.
But I think the combination of a social environment where none of your peers have that thought, and being too young/not trained to think critically results in large groups of people just following their animalistic instincts.
> My cousin is incredibly stupid and lucky that they got away with this...
This little phrase touches on the mismatch between your view and the article. What Joe is arguing is that if people get repeated evidence that it isn't luck, that it is a routine occurrence, then they will shift their view.
At some point, if you see stuff like that happen a few times, you'll have your faith that it is stupid tested. There isn't a natural - or even moral - law saying people can't loot. It all comes down to social standards and law. A society that allows looting is pretty stupid though, it is really destructive.
Where do you get that intent as “clear”? I did not get it.
He is complaining that the absence of the application of the rule of law leads very easily to the elimination of society, because lots of people do not wish to just be suckers.
Would you have the same feeling if the metaphor was closer to home. Making assumptions here, but say a friend that contracts and pays less tax due to it. They are very successful but technically breaking a law or two, but everyone does it so who's the sucker?
I’ve already been in that situation and choose every time to pay the tax, keep things clean and straight forward. Our financial advisor used to poke fun at me and my business partner for how straight laced we were.
In year 7 of the company we got pinged for a random HMRC PAYE audit, we passed (with a couple of minor infractions that we simply didnt realise about - like buying bacon sandwiches for your staff every Friday is actually taxable) but it was still pretty stressful. If we had done half the stuff people had suggested we do because “everyone does it” we would have had a much worse time in that audit.
Yeh I have self employed friends and other directors who may or may not be as buttoned down as they should be and I’m sure they will be fine but I’m not wired that way and it’s treated me pretty well in life so far.
I hear from many people that my opinion of them matters to them a lot, that they follow my lead, that they loved working for me, that they think “what would Simon do here?” which is worth way more to me than skirting some rules for an advantage at the cost of my credibility, integrity and self respect.
> If we had done half the stuff people had suggested we do because “everyone does it” we would have had a much worse time in that audit.
you have to mentally remove this paragraph from your story. the scenario is that there are zero repercussions for failing the audit. you might think that it’s irrelevant to you, but the fact you bring it up shows it had at least some impact on you. maybe not enough to impact your actions today, but there’s a large spectrum here where the difference between enforcement or no enforcement is significant enough to impact the behavior of a slightly different person or of your own behavior in a slightly different scenario.
It's not about a moral compass, it's about the "market of deviance" (I don't know how to eloquently put the point I am making, maybe there's a better term).
If let's say, you are an employee of a company in a not-so-ethical market, and everybody around you acts unethically, then you have no way of playing against the market: you will either be fired for not doing your job, or you could call everyone on it, but no one will help you.
There's the other point to be made: if everyone around you acts unethically, then maybe it's your standards that are too high? Or maybe you are just delusional in your thinking about what "ethical" actually means.
I won't feel like that. I don't feel like that. I have felt like it licenses lesser moral transgressions though. "They got away with that, so I should be able to get away with [thing that is wrong but also considerably more mild]."
That isn't right, but it is a feeling. It's a feeling I dismiss. But, still, if it's a feeling I feel then I imagine it's a feeling others feel and I imagine that not everybody dismisses it either.
Corruption of that kind happens very, very slowly.
While having a moral compass is great in this case, because you LOST nothing. Sometimes it's a lot more damaging because in certain environments having it means giving up things to people who don't.
> Yeah, that was my takeaway too. I have never watched looters on TV and wished I were there with them looting.
You've never seen some slimey techbro that knows 10% of what you do technically go on to make million on a more or less worthless app/product/etc? Knowing that what they sold was basically snake oil and now they will never have to work again while you trudge along for the rest of your life "doing the right thing"?
If so, you are basically a saint if you have not considered the grifter path.
Or whatever similar situation applies to you. I doubt you are the type who would benefit greatly in social status by having a bunch of new sneakers like the example was.
The point of the article is we're making grifting more profitable than honest work, and this is a pattern I've been noticing for since I've been alive. Strange only now folks seem to be noticing.
The other point you made was "fear of getting caught" which is simply not a part of the calculation for many in some cities any longer. This part is rapidly eroding into a joke in many communities, and lets just say most do not share your moral and ethical compass but do (so far) share a fear of getting caught.
Grifters have always existed, the decision to be a grifter has always been open to anyone, people who decide to work a more honest living understand that ripping people off is a viable path to enrichment, but they typically find the idea of doing so repugnant.
This is also kind of a non-engineer's way to view the world.
It's like:
1. Something might happen. The outcome could be good or bad.
2. You wait for the outcome.
3. If it's good, you won! If it's bad, you lost. Depending purely on the outcome, you feel good or bad.
Whereas a more engineer-y way to view things is:
1. Something might happen. The outcome could be good or bad.
2. You base your decision - you choose it in advance - based on the odds of the outcome.
3. It's too strong to say "the outcome doesn't matter," but assuming you calculated the odds correctly, there's no regret: the right choice according to the odds is the right choice, period.
I'll say this:
Even if I was a criminal, I would never choose to do something where I got arrested, on the slim chance that the charges would be dropped or expunged.
So in this example - even if I was a professional bad guy! - I would still tell my cousin he made the wrong choice. He chose very poor odds in doing something that got him arrested, and the fact that he came out ahead this one time doesn't change that.
Curious about his examples involving liberal politicians, Chris Brown, and one extremely mild one for Trump. He's not fooling anyone though that this is mainly a hit piece on "libruls".
We live in a time when the anchors on TV as well as the politicians running the government are telling their supporters to break laws.
Be it January 6th or the riots and looting we have seen for the past two years. Both sides have figures in their parties that are advocating for this madness and normalizing it.
I am a bit of a patriot who is pretty intent on leaving the world better than how I found it. I help people. I try to set good examples. This whole behavior of the right and left has left me thinking they are both morally bankrupt.
I disagree with the article. I do not feel like a sucker. I just feel all of this extremism is really sad and depressing.
While difficult to pull up from search engines, throughout the riots and looting sprees and jury trials, there were two things I can roughly quote having heard a number of times from figureheads on the left:
John Lewis's "good trouble"
and
"If we don't get (X), then we need to burn it down!"
and
Also the bizarre stuff where jurors in the Rittenhouse trial were being stalked by an NBC journalist who claimed he was illegally stalking the jurors under company orders (NBC then lawyered up and denies this).
All three of these instances were widely reported at the time and I remember them. They all reak of an authoritarian willingness to trample our traditions and rule of law.
> On the morning of Aug. 25, national correspondent Omar Jimenez was reporting live on a second night of unrest that had followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. As Jimenez stood in front of a raging fire, the chyron at the bottom of the screen read, "FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING."
Tribalism allows such outrages to be celebrated. I guarantee there are tribalists here now who are comfortable rationalizing and excusing the violence, looting, arson, terrorism and trespass.
Yeah, to get too into it is to become part of the problem.
My way of handling it is to not participate and to set a better example for good citizens to follow.
When (X) became part of the internet hate machine last year, I put a filter on my home networks and self hosted search engines that essentially erased their partisan poison from existence.
Using the internet should feel like visiting a library. It shouldn't be an endless firehose of advertisement and partisan hatred.
It isn't enough to see the flaws of one side, you need to step back and see the whole picture. Both sides are frothing at the mouth for their brand of authoritarianism.
> When (X) became part of the internet hate machine last year, I put a filter on my home networks and self hosted search engines that essentially erased their partisan poison from existence.
If you really did that then I tip my hat to you, that is a boss move!
> Using the internet should feel like visiting a library. It shouldn't be an endless firehose of advertisement and partisan hatred.
Ideally, but that's not possible in the world we live in. I am cynical about the hatred and the editorial spin applied to the propaganda that masquerades as news.
In my mind, everyone in media is a paid actor trying to push some agenda and are otherwise empty suits.
If our culture, money, and institutions are based on trust, then the last 5 years of media have run that trust out to the bitter end. The trust is reduced to the notion that "they wouldn't do that". 'That' being egregious awful things. Once 'that' becomes actual in the majority of minds, we're sunk.
I am essentially making a hobby of rebuilding my family's filtered version of the internet, leveraging the same powers as the tech giants.
With my setup, instead of promoting partisan hate, the front ends for search and internet access in my home send us in the direction of improving our focus, improving our connection with our own cultural history, and promoting content that reminds us of the great scientists and inventors that made our world possible...
Why expose my children to content that tells them to hate themself or others? Why expose them to areas of the internet full of foreign disinfo agents and their useful idiots? How about give them the experience I had in the 1990s... Freedom from the noise.
Wow, you have an interesting skillset to pull that off.
Would be a nice little business if you could publish a domain or subsite blacklist that I could subscribe to and somehow plug into my kids' and my browsers to add at least a little friction to their browsing. I'm of the same mind as you, I think, in that you shouldn't allow negativity and hate into your brain or else it will take over. You are taking it to another level by promoting human advancements and nobility.
Please, please publish this. This is something I hope to accomplish and it would be wonderful to understand how you do it and reduce the workload of maintaining a network like that.
Absolutely not. Quite the contrary. They originally dropped the charges against him in agreement for 16 hours of community service and forfeiting his $10,000 bond. He inflamed racial and political tensions for attempted personal gain, which is quite a serious crime.
> My friend, a former Navy SEAL, used to tell his AOICs “If you drink two beers the enlisted guys will drink ten. If you punch a dude in the bar, the guys will kill someone. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it’s a big deal.” At the end of the day, leadership by example is so incredibly important and ours are systematically failing.
Amazing that he takes that list of bad behavior and concludes that “and that’s bad because it means that normal people will do much worse things”.
Well at least normal people can’t do things like start wars.
It’s only “wrong” in the sense that many people feel like it’s wrong with no objective basis for their beliefs. That said, when enough people feel a certain traffic behavior is wrong, it becomes true despite objective fact. Late merge when the lane you’re in is running 40mph above the lane you’re merging into and you are asking to be rear-ended or worse.
I'm thinking of busy British A roads going from 2 to 1 lane, usually the last merge point is at a standstill. I've witnessed insanely aggressive behaviour by drivers trying to block others' merges.
My driving instructor always told me to behave selfishly, because "courteous" driving (flashing lights, slowing down, waiting for someone to emerge etc) is unpredictable by comparison! Courteous driving becomes its own form of aggression when another driver misunderstands.
The author’s message - which includes concluding that he’s morally superior to most people - is undermined by his blatantly partisan selection of examples.
Personally, I’m of the view it’s a bad idea to spend time documenting in detail how “our tribes have failed to unite, and it is your tribe’s fault”. It implies a lot of pride, and a willingness to turn a blind eye to all sorts of bad behaviour.
I mean, if you just want to criticise a politician or individual you don’t like - fair enough. You should feel free to make a point how you like. No one should be expected to be pain-stakingly fair in every post or comment.
But if you want a grand narrative that includes, say, 10 examples of bad behaviour, demonstrate some thinking has taken place. Include 2 or 3 examples from whoever you consider to be your tribe. Don’t act like all the problems are other people.
Partisan? I'm not from the US so I don't know all intricacies of you politics, but his first 2 examples are Biden's son and Trump. Seems he bashes both side to me.
>> Is Hunter Biden’s son in any position of power?
Well yes, and that is what is corrupt. Neither son of the Vice President nor son of the President should be a position of power, but they have in fact proved to be so.
The author skips over some pretty egregious examples from the past few years in favour of examples that best support their world view.
Where is the outrage over the Trump administration's rollback of consumer protection regulations that protect students from shady practices by for-profit colleges? Students are promised significant income growth, but are actually roped into poorly staffed courses, significant debt, and questionable career advancement.
Instead, the author bangs on about eviction protection for people laid off during the pandemic.
The author bemoans '90% of all charges against rioters and looters' being dropped in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, but links to a news article that only indicates that approximately 90% of all protest related charges were dropped across several jurisdictions. The vast majority of protestors were not engaged in looting or violent acts that would amount to rioting.
However, the author curiously ignores the fact that the vast majority of people that stormed the Capitol building in the hope of preventing the peaceful transfer of power managed to get off with misdemeanours.
Not even to mention that the former President's one-time Svengali, Steve Bannon, suckered Trump's own supporters out of 5 million dollars that he had pledged to use to construct a wall to keep out Mexicans; only to be pardoned for his troubles.
I think it's fair to say that political affiliation coloured this article.
That's a pretty sophomoric response. It's fine to disagree, but I took the time to explain my position in detail, I'd appreciate it if you'd do the same.
Were there any errors of fact in what I said? Or did you take issue with my analysis of those facts?
Do you think degree mills provide a net public good?
Was everybody arrested for protesting after the death of George Floyd actually involved in rioting and looting?
Do you believe the incursion into the Capitol Building was performed by Antifa?
Was Steve Bannon not convicted of wire fraud and money laundering?
I felt the same way reading the article, a focus on “looters” and “rioters” which certainly existed but the vast majority of protests last year were peaceful. I think this particular item felt bad faith because loads of people actually faced charges and missing from the list were the unaccountable, unlawful police. By now people should have been able to peruse the list of >1000 police brutality videos from the protests.
That said, I didn’t have any significant issue with the takeaways in the article and don’t expect every instance of the phenomenon described to make the list.
I mean starting with hunter biden as his first example is pretty obvious dog whistle. The example certainly fits his theory here(which sounds like he’s independently discovering the rule of law), but the level of offense there is so far below numerous individuals with actual power in government or the corporate world.
Indeed. The pattern of societal breakdown goes back much further, in mostly open display with the idea that successful business is self justifying.
The lazy response is to say that lawful business is within the rules of our society. But that only worked when there was still a social check on the specifics of business activities, and the amount of meta activity was small. Once accumulation of money became the success metric itself, it ceased to be useful one. And at this point we're long past it - the hard truth is that empty fraudsters like Michael Milken, Bernie Madoff, and Donald Trump aren't crass deviant outliers but rather the bedrock of our mainstream culture.
The article even uncritically throws out at the end "This only gets worse if we do something crazy like forgive massive amounts of debt, whether it’s student or mortgage", while completely ignoring what happened in 2008! 2008 wasn't straight "forgiveness" per se because the "loans were repaid" (this is likely what keeps the author's cognitive dissonance intact), but artificially low interest loans to prop up investment banks that would have otherwise gone bankrupt is a morally-bankrupt giveaway larger than any "student loan forgiveness" or "flash mob looting" could ever be. Especially considering that if anyone is able to model their future financial position, it should have been investment banks! But as usual, it's the kids^h^h^h^hplebs who are wrong.
Now I personally am still a believer in market economies, and I generally think that looking to the government to supply many services is essentially giving up. But I also believe it is horribly dishonest to advocate this position without continually acknowledging how much the government has wantonly distorted the "economy" for many decades (at least since getting off the gold standard), essentially making Wall Street an insider-benefiting Potemkin Village. At this point anybody talking about needing to respect "the market" while not directing that focus onto government monetary policy (hello no-debate little-media-coverage multi-trillion-dollar March 2020 stonk market bailout with commercial bond buying continuing to this day) or regulatory givewaway to big business, is themselves part of this problem right alongside "Pelosi".
Actually, cutting in at the last minute results in the most efficient traffic flow for everyone. I wish more people would do this, it would help ease traffic!
Is the point of the article that the US, already the absolute worst country in the world, and in history, bar none, for percentage of its population behind bars, should ramp up punishment and somehow jail even more of its own people?
The first example given is about Hunter Biden selling art. So he's not an artist, he's the son of the sitting president, and he manages to sell things for a good price, that mainstream critics don't find interesting or beautiful ("widely panned art show")... Good for him!
Yes, it's quite obvious that some of the buyers are trying to get political favors; but that doesn't mean they will get them! The author just sounds envious.
> percentage of its population behind bars, should ramp up punishment and somehow jail even more of its own people?
Corruption isn't only about who avoids punishment, but also who is the target of punishment. In highly corrupt environments you will often find complex and often contradictory rules, that produce a default state of guilt. The only way to avoid punishment is to participate in the corruption.
> The first example given is about Hunter Biden selling art. So he's not an artist, he's the son of the sitting president, and he manages to sell things for a good price, that mainstream critics don't find interesting or beautiful ("widely panned art show")... Good for him!
You're being naive. Nobody is buying the art, people are buying influence and laundering money. The man isn't selling art, the man is selling influence, and potentially other things. He splashes paint on a canvas to legitimize it for the accountant.
I don't think the point is that the US should jail more people, I think the point is that when lots of people see others getting away with stuff, some of them start to try to do it too, and you have a snowballing societal collapse.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadAs an example, Americans are hostages to your incredibly inefficient health care system. Not only is reasonable discussion of public health outside your overton window, the reason it stays outside is the instant clamour of voices saying "free stuff is bad and you are bad for advocating it".
The only way to get access to reasonable care seems to be either military service or full employment. The rest of the world is incredulous that losing your job means losing access to healthcare.
That truly strange conception of "freedom" americans are always so afraid of losing is a massive illusion for the majority of a population deathly afraid of the financial ramifications of a health crisis.
Yet you have no functional way of talking about it, because of the sleight of hand discourse exemplified by the article.
I truly feel sorry for americans at this point.
Just because welfare cheats exist doesn't make welfare bad. The vast majority of recipients were worthy.
This wouldn't be a large issue if nobody had known - even if the state had overpaid by half a billion, that's not even a day's worth of money. However, since it came out, there has been a massive loss of trust in politicians and public institutions. Those who doubted before now saw proof that it's all just a scheme, and others just lost a lot of trust.
We'll have to see whether anything happens beyond the accused promising to donate the proceeds, but I'm not holding my breath.
the examples he gives are weak. For example, Trump's hotels saw an increase in business after he became president. Is this a surprise or a bad thing, given all the media coverage he got? Of all the things we can fault trump on, is this the most damning, which was not even under his control?
Seriously, what type of person is willing to run for office under these expectations? I don’t see a long line of Mother Theresa’s seeking office. People willing to accept the conditions of running for office are most likely so desperate for power that they are willing to do anything like upend their financial lives and submit to invasive and potentially embarrassing scrutiny. Are these the type of people we want to lead a country?
https://www.britannica.com/topic/broken-windows-theory
The most recent phenomenon of this kind I can recall was people lying to vaccination centers about having medical conditions that would help them skip the line ahead of everybody else. I was and still am vehemently opposed to lying about that, despite having been told numerous times that the government would have just thrown the doses away if nobody used them up by lying about their status. Again, you were made to feel a sucker.
No different in most first world countries
Yes, that's the worst thing Trump got away with, sarcasm off.
How these obvious Trumpists make it to the top of Hackernews shows once again that the nerds really aren't alright anymore.
I don’t watch Fox News, so I have no idea what they say about her. I do know that when I read what she actually writes she sounds like a disingenuous liar.
As a point of calibration, if I were to point out that she cynically lied about her Native American heritage, would you also respond by telling me that’s a Fox News talking point? Because, again, while I can imagine what Fox News has to say about it, I know better what I am able to conclude all on my own.
Now, look, it’s tantamount to a schoolyard spat. I’m not saying it needs to mean anything more than that. But evaluating it as a spat, most people who read that exchange come away thinking he won it.
Totally lost me in the last paragraph.
Can't everyone agree that these role models already exist? They're just hard to name because they don't do anything outrageous to steal our attention. The problem isn't that we don't know how to act properly -- the problem isn't that we need role models. The problem is that there's no reason to follow their lead.
The solution is nothing short of punishment of these people and enforcement of the law. The problem is the bad people.
> one that is guilty of malfeasance
“Malfeasor” is not listed.
I have yet to meet a completely good or completely bad person. Most people I’ve ever met are both at different times and in different situations. Is a single mother stealing baby formula to feed her child a bad person? An addict breaking into cars to feed an addiction?
People in desperate situations do desperate things, and I think we can all agree that the legal system is applied rather unevenly to those without the resources to appear sympathetic in court (who also tend to be more desperate than the average person). We effectively criminalize being poor, so I’m not sure more criminal laws or more police will help that problem.
However, it seems your point us that you fundamentally agree with OPs central thesis, but that you can’t believe someone politically aligned differently than you can have possibly made that argument.
Does Trumps pushing of executive privilege and his profits on his hotels touch the type of corruption that Clinton represents in this email? https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12659
My vote in 2016 was a single-issue vote against involvement in a war in Syria. I feel totally vindicated 5 years later. If being antiwar is bad, I don’t want to be right.
The Pauls have fallen meekly in line behind Trump, like all their, er, colleagues.
In the Newsom case, his opponent was someone claiming it was all a bunch of nonsense and if elected he'd do away with all restrictions immediately, so not a very strong vote for the person who's upset that he didn't take the whole thing seriously enough.
I would guess many voters don't want to vote for someone they saw as a lunatic, even if he acts in a way that's very consistent with his own beliefs. Exit polling showed coronavirus was a big issue for voters and they didn’t think Newsom went far enough.
Using an example from a commentor above, the woman who steals baby formula so her child can survive. My philosophy can hold the idea that stealing is wrong but that it is justified if a life will be lost due to the failings of the wealthy and greater society to have put that person in that difficult situation.
That's not hypocritical, that is a philosophy that allows for nuance.
Absolutely. Thank you for hitting the nail on the head!
Problem is, the looting can only last so long, until everything has been looted.
I suspect not much longer; if you put some of your wealth someplace undebase-able (say, gold or crypto), there is a chance you will make it to the other side.
See also Atlas Shrugged, where the producers keeping the world afloat ("Atlas") decide to go on strike and hide due to populist politics bleeding them dry of their hard work ("shrugged").
Cryptocurrency is maturing, and that might mean we will see less volatility.
https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/volatility-index/
And gold has also fallen 40% from $1825 in Aug 2011 to $1061 in Nov 2015.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...
Crypto currencies are bound to a functioning infrastructure and can be unpredictably volatile. Gold is no currency at all in the sense of a common trade value and this is the essence of it all. No, actually its labor. Labor is the only kind of value and any "worth" (eg money) has to be translatable to that. Crypto and gold is not.
What I mean here concretely is failure/bankruptcy of the current system after people get fed up, and re-emergence/prioritization of institutions of justice and rule of law.
This may be just a dream however. Don't hold your breath.
> Gold is no currency at all in the sense of a common trade value
I don't mind it not being a commonly transacted medium if I can buy and sell it without a lot of fees. For my purposes, even cheap good cars or real estate constitute a store of value, albeit less liquid ones.
> Labor is the only kind of value and any "worth"
Value is in the eye of the beholder. If I value my productivity less than you do yours, I might not accept payment in work.
This is a common true-ish sentence but too vague and in fact inadequate in this topic. The problem lies in how value is measured and this is imo the root of nowadays turmoil.
Ultimately valuable is, what satisfies essential needs (food, shelter, clothing, meds, etc), this is the bottom line. Gold is worthless on its own. Every society revolves around these needs and if not, that society may not last any longer. Only labor provides those values and thus sustains a society but not all members profit from it, "measured", the same way. Income from capital extracts out from labor value. The poor get poorer, while the rich get lazier.
I assume your plan with crypto/gold is to dodge a financial crisis but why should a future society respect the profiteers of the exploitative former? Maybe invest in something that enables labor, eg. land.
People have always had differing values, this is nothing new. When people believe that only x is ultimately valuable, and y is not, It allows for people who understand that people have always valued things differently to exploit that for their own gain.
The people who understand that not all food, all shelter, all clothing, all meds, all land, all x is valued by everyone the same will forever have the upper hand against those who are ultimately convinced of the absoluteness of their values.
crypto and gold can be exchanged for labor products in much the same way that other wealth can be (a house, stocks, bonds) — by first being exchanged for money. what do you mean when you say these things aren’t “translatable” into labor?
If only there was some kind of marketplace where you could make incredible amounts of money with your 100% certain understanding of the future, this would be incredibly useful knowledge!
Alas, it doesn't exist and all there is to do is impotently yell at other people on the internet that they are wrong.
>Labor is the only kind of value
I wonder if we took a survey of professional economists how many would agree with this statement. I'm going to say less then 1%.
For the record: in Antiquity, Atlas doesn't hold the world, but the sky.
See https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2017/02/09/misunderstood-m...
And the former aristocrat from Tsarist Russia shrugged, went to America and made mediocre literature and a widely discredited philosophy.
She’s had a profound positive impact on America, sent countless young men and women into entrepreneurship and wealth creation.
If we had Ayn Rands today, we’d have discontent youth building alternatives instead of throwing tantrums and destroying.
Could entrepeneurs and business leaders be susceptible to mediocre literature and terrible philosophies/ideologies? (Surely not…)
[citation needed]
Can’t debase something that has no base.
Crypto has upper limit on supply (usually) but but no lower limit on demand. It can go to zero tomorrow based on feelings.
Yep.
First, this entry tries to conflate student loan forgiveness with a potpourri of ethical issues. It is not similar to the other examples.
It is reasonable to question the structure of US policy toward student loan programs. They are predatory compared with those of other nations.
If the US comes to terms with this problem, and major restructuring is done, is debt forgiveness on loans that are no longer even possible to get some massive psychological burden?
It seems more like sour grapes of having to run your own loans through bad policy.
The psychological fallout will be immense if an entire generation who have had their lives destroyed by and are still on the hook for these loans sees everyone else go to school for free, relatively or in fact.
Nonetheless, skimming the Wikipedia article, seems the G.I. Bill may have greatly benefited the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill
> Sadly I had to pay my own way through college
Without qualifiers, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It becomes wrong when “pay my own way” means “convinced when I was still a child by all the adults around me to take out a predatory loan I have no hope of ever repaying.”
Hyperbole to sell austerity
I do think you have a case to feel aggrieved, but at the end of the day you can choose to be someone who lives up to your standards or not. Getting upset about it is as much a choice as anything else you do.
The clear intent from the author here is to make the reader feel like they too should have gone looting. This implies, to me, that the author perhaps doesn't have a particularly strong moral compass of their own because my honest answer is:
"My cousin is incredibly stupid and lucky that they got away with this, I'm glad I didn't join them because even getting away with it I would hate myself. I'm concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it's time to dial back the contact with them"
I absolutely don't feel: damn I should have gone looting too.
maybe
"I'm concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it's time to consider what the relationship is worth to me, and if its important, attempt to influence better behaviors otherwise dial back contact with them"
instead
IDK, I would say that the intent of this kind of writing it so make the reader feel a kind of "righteous anger" response; you know the visceral kind that damps down on slow rational analysis of the argument presented. Propagandising.
This is a really uncharitable interpretation.
See [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/report-transparency-int...
Also, it might be hard for them to mention the strongest examples of brazen corruption in leadership without being accused of being political, so I don't blame the author for using the even-handed examples drawn from all quarters -- which does make it easier to characterize as cherry-picked noise -- when the thesis of the article is that leadership, a necessarily tiny fraction of the 1% in the public spotlight, are growing increasingly shameless.
But the author well could have mentioned certain boundary-pushing, prosecution-taunting illegality by political actors in the United States, including actions rescued only by equally brazen presidential pardons -- actions in the public sphere that are almost without precedent.
Those kinds of actions, so few in terms of data points, could be characterized as 'noise' for their rareness, but the author's thesis (which seems sufficiently plausible not to be discounted out of hand) is that extremely brazen action by different kinds of leadership are at least leading indicators of institutional inability to deal with corruption and wrongdoing, preceding spillover into society at large -- and that maybe, due to the outsized impact that leaders have on society, those actions have an element of influence or causation.
Well, a thesis like that doesn't, to me, mark the author as being morally dubious himself for having it.
If a society is getting more corrupt, over the short-term, (see [1] for proof that at least some well-informed people think this one is), then an increasing number of individual members of society will be corrupted.
The author simply draws an obvious corollary that we may not have considered: hey, reader -- we are among those members of society. We should assume that we can, and will, be influenced if corruption increases, or if we're exposed to very public and visible examples of it.
That may be uncomfortable to consider, but I'm glad the author helped us consider it. Is it really only other people, other people's children and families, who are corrupted if they live and grow in a society in which corruption is on the rise?
(It's clearly an opinion piece, and I'm not sure how HN-ish it is, but it doesn't seem like a particularly trashy one to me)
This dude had to cherry pick harder than an industrial farm machine so that he could all but ignore the elephants in the room.
As we can see from the title, what matters is not the actual stats, but what people perceive. So if the system works silently and fails loudly, people are going to think it is more broken than it actually is.
That fact doesn't somehow make the author wrong. People don't check the rigorous studies of corruption to decide whether or not they should feel like a sucker.
What he's saying is we have established rules that are there to protect a sometimes vague notion of fairness, and when people break the rules or enter a grey zone without punishment, it seems to move the line of what is acceptable, in a way that makes fools of people who thought they understood the rules.
I have a lot of sympathy for his ideas. All those examples are corrosive, and I've been around a few people on the same fringes. Ultimately bad behaviour will push out for behaviour, because it's a lot easier to get money and status that way.
Exactly this. A system that incentivizes bad behavior and fails to protect/reward moral people exerts pressure on those with good morals.
Morals may stop you from repeating such behavior at first, but if it becomes a key to getting ahead then you can bet those morals will be slowly chipped away.
When you know who you are, and are confident in your values, then no amount of pressure from the outside world can make you bend a knee.
That's not to say I'm there yet. I'm still a wishy-washy moral and ideological coward, but I'm slowly building my foundation through good role models (mainly old books from Russia).
The Russian monks are one example of moral fortitude. Whether or not their morals are agreeable, they certainly are unwavering.
Another would be Diogenes.
You should read about the Asch experiments. Unfortunately the majority of people are very likely to succumb to social pressure and to conform.
Perhaps replicating the experiment with adults in the 40+ age bracket would yield different results.
I would also like to see this experiment replicated in different countries. The cultural aspect of moral strength cannot be stressed enough (itself a form of peer pressure). But at that point, should we differentiate between morality achieved through individual action vs. morality achieved through one's environment?
However, there were a few notable "malcontents" that went against this grain, in spite of the zeitgeist of their time, and the workings of the people around them.
Reading through old non-fiction accounts by Soviet dissidents (mostly lambasting their society), I cannot help but feel there are parallels between their struggle, and ours.
I don't have the temperament for it; and just like you I can live my life to the best of my ability, winging it with the best of intentions.
However, after seeing how there are others out there who "push the envelope," and go far and beyond this, I cannot stop myself from feeling emulous.
Works great if you find this magic perfection. But in all likelihood you will not. You will be shaped by the biases of your upbringing and experiences that will put blinders on you. More so you will stick to your convictions with the justification of morality on your side, even when that is not the case.
That everything is essentially predetermined by my genetics, and how my environment has affected their expression; and that my free will and choices are just an elaborate illusion played by my biology.
But something in my biology is telling me to strive for something more.
But I think the combination of a social environment where none of your peers have that thought, and being too young/not trained to think critically results in large groups of people just following their animalistic instincts.
This little phrase touches on the mismatch between your view and the article. What Joe is arguing is that if people get repeated evidence that it isn't luck, that it is a routine occurrence, then they will shift their view.
At some point, if you see stuff like that happen a few times, you'll have your faith that it is stupid tested. There isn't a natural - or even moral - law saying people can't loot. It all comes down to social standards and law. A society that allows looting is pretty stupid though, it is really destructive.
He is complaining that the absence of the application of the rule of law leads very easily to the elimination of society, because lots of people do not wish to just be suckers.
It is hard to be a sucker.
In year 7 of the company we got pinged for a random HMRC PAYE audit, we passed (with a couple of minor infractions that we simply didnt realise about - like buying bacon sandwiches for your staff every Friday is actually taxable) but it was still pretty stressful. If we had done half the stuff people had suggested we do because “everyone does it” we would have had a much worse time in that audit.
Yeh I have self employed friends and other directors who may or may not be as buttoned down as they should be and I’m sure they will be fine but I’m not wired that way and it’s treated me pretty well in life so far.
I hear from many people that my opinion of them matters to them a lot, that they follow my lead, that they loved working for me, that they think “what would Simon do here?” which is worth way more to me than skirting some rules for an advantage at the cost of my credibility, integrity and self respect.
you have to mentally remove this paragraph from your story. the scenario is that there are zero repercussions for failing the audit. you might think that it’s irrelevant to you, but the fact you bring it up shows it had at least some impact on you. maybe not enough to impact your actions today, but there’s a large spectrum here where the difference between enforcement or no enforcement is significant enough to impact the behavior of a slightly different person or of your own behavior in a slightly different scenario.
If let's say, you are an employee of a company in a not-so-ethical market, and everybody around you acts unethically, then you have no way of playing against the market: you will either be fired for not doing your job, or you could call everyone on it, but no one will help you.
There's the other point to be made: if everyone around you acts unethically, then maybe it's your standards that are too high? Or maybe you are just delusional in your thinking about what "ethical" actually means.
That isn't right, but it is a feeling. It's a feeling I dismiss. But, still, if it's a feeling I feel then I imagine it's a feeling others feel and I imagine that not everybody dismisses it either.
Corruption of that kind happens very, very slowly.
Yeah, that was my takeaway too. I have never watched looters on TV and wished I were there with them looting.
Serial rapist, murderer never caught? Does not make me think, hmmm, why not me?
The whole article is kind of creepy.
You've never seen some slimey techbro that knows 10% of what you do technically go on to make million on a more or less worthless app/product/etc? Knowing that what they sold was basically snake oil and now they will never have to work again while you trudge along for the rest of your life "doing the right thing"?
If so, you are basically a saint if you have not considered the grifter path.
Or whatever similar situation applies to you. I doubt you are the type who would benefit greatly in social status by having a bunch of new sneakers like the example was.
The point of the article is we're making grifting more profitable than honest work, and this is a pattern I've been noticing for since I've been alive. Strange only now folks seem to be noticing.
The other point you made was "fear of getting caught" which is simply not a part of the calculation for many in some cities any longer. This part is rapidly eroding into a joke in many communities, and lets just say most do not share your moral and ethical compass but do (so far) share a fear of getting caught.
Then it is the norm.
The author, I read, has more of a commentary than an argument.
If it's a commentary, then discussion stops there because it's preloaded with bias.
If it's meta, then we're working with inflammatory language like "sucker" which ignores the moral nuance of the subject matter.
The... "looting" that the author is referring to is equivalent to bumping a car when trying to parallel park.
I'm really trying to wrap my head around your comment.
It's like:
1. Something might happen. The outcome could be good or bad.
2. You wait for the outcome.
3. If it's good, you won! If it's bad, you lost. Depending purely on the outcome, you feel good or bad.
Whereas a more engineer-y way to view things is:
1. Something might happen. The outcome could be good or bad.
2. You base your decision - you choose it in advance - based on the odds of the outcome.
3. It's too strong to say "the outcome doesn't matter," but assuming you calculated the odds correctly, there's no regret: the right choice according to the odds is the right choice, period.
I'll say this: Even if I was a criminal, I would never choose to do something where I got arrested, on the slim chance that the charges would be dropped or expunged.
So in this example - even if I was a professional bad guy! - I would still tell my cousin he made the wrong choice. He chose very poor odds in doing something that got him arrested, and the fact that he came out ahead this one time doesn't change that.
Be it January 6th or the riots and looting we have seen for the past two years. Both sides have figures in their parties that are advocating for this madness and normalizing it.
I am a bit of a patriot who is pretty intent on leaving the world better than how I found it. I help people. I try to set good examples. This whole behavior of the right and left has left me thinking they are both morally bankrupt.
I disagree with the article. I do not feel like a sucker. I just feel all of this extremism is really sad and depressing.
John Lewis's "good trouble"
and
"If we don't get (X), then we need to burn it down!"
and
Also the bizarre stuff where jurors in the Rittenhouse trial were being stalked by an NBC journalist who claimed he was illegally stalking the jurors under company orders (NBC then lawyered up and denies this).
All three of these instances were widely reported at the time and I remember them. They all reak of an authoritarian willingness to trample our traditions and rule of law.
> On the morning of Aug. 25, national correspondent Omar Jimenez was reporting live on a second night of unrest that had followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. As Jimenez stood in front of a raging fire, the chyron at the bottom of the screen read, "FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING."
Tribalism allows such outrages to be celebrated. I guarantee there are tribalists here now who are comfortable rationalizing and excusing the violence, looting, arson, terrorism and trespass.
First, they ignore you ...
My way of handling it is to not participate and to set a better example for good citizens to follow.
When (X) became part of the internet hate machine last year, I put a filter on my home networks and self hosted search engines that essentially erased their partisan poison from existence.
Using the internet should feel like visiting a library. It shouldn't be an endless firehose of advertisement and partisan hatred.
It isn't enough to see the flaws of one side, you need to step back and see the whole picture. Both sides are frothing at the mouth for their brand of authoritarianism.
If you really did that then I tip my hat to you, that is a boss move!
> Using the internet should feel like visiting a library. It shouldn't be an endless firehose of advertisement and partisan hatred.
Ideally, but that's not possible in the world we live in. I am cynical about the hatred and the editorial spin applied to the propaganda that masquerades as news.
In my mind, everyone in media is a paid actor trying to push some agenda and are otherwise empty suits.
If our culture, money, and institutions are based on trust, then the last 5 years of media have run that trust out to the bitter end. The trust is reduced to the notion that "they wouldn't do that". 'That' being egregious awful things. Once 'that' becomes actual in the majority of minds, we're sunk.
Context:
I am essentially making a hobby of rebuilding my family's filtered version of the internet, leveraging the same powers as the tech giants.
With my setup, instead of promoting partisan hate, the front ends for search and internet access in my home send us in the direction of improving our focus, improving our connection with our own cultural history, and promoting content that reminds us of the great scientists and inventors that made our world possible...
Why expose my children to content that tells them to hate themself or others? Why expose them to areas of the internet full of foreign disinfo agents and their useful idiots? How about give them the experience I had in the 1990s... Freedom from the noise.
Would be a nice little business if you could publish a domain or subsite blacklist that I could subscribe to and somehow plug into my kids' and my browsers to add at least a little friction to their browsing. I'm of the same mind as you, I think, in that you shouldn't allow negativity and hate into your brain or else it will take over. You are taking it to another level by promoting human advancements and nobility.
The 90's internet was special, I agree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vavV0Q94MhA&ab_channel=TheDC...
Doesn't the fact he was convicted and received widespread ridicule everywhere disprove the author's point.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/arts/television/jussie-sm...
Jimmy Carter was a good president in an unfavorable period.
Amazing that he takes that list of bad behavior and concludes that “and that’s bad because it means that normal people will do much worse things”.
Well at least normal people can’t do things like start wars.
My driving instructor always told me to behave selfishly, because "courteous" driving (flashing lights, slowing down, waiting for someone to emerge etc) is unpredictable by comparison! Courteous driving becomes its own form of aggression when another driver misunderstands.
Personally, I’m of the view it’s a bad idea to spend time documenting in detail how “our tribes have failed to unite, and it is your tribe’s fault”. It implies a lot of pride, and a willingness to turn a blind eye to all sorts of bad behaviour.
I mean, if you just want to criticise a politician or individual you don’t like - fair enough. You should feel free to make a point how you like. No one should be expected to be pain-stakingly fair in every post or comment.
But if you want a grand narrative that includes, say, 10 examples of bad behaviour, demonstrate some thinking has taken place. Include 2 or 3 examples from whoever you consider to be your tribe. Don’t act like all the problems are other people.
What position of power are looters in?
That was another lie the author hoped to slip through.
Well yes, and that is what is corrupt. Neither son of the Vice President nor son of the President should be a position of power, but they have in fact proved to be so.
Where is the outrage over the Trump administration's rollback of consumer protection regulations that protect students from shady practices by for-profit colleges? Students are promised significant income growth, but are actually roped into poorly staffed courses, significant debt, and questionable career advancement.
Instead, the author bangs on about eviction protection for people laid off during the pandemic.
The author bemoans '90% of all charges against rioters and looters' being dropped in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, but links to a news article that only indicates that approximately 90% of all protest related charges were dropped across several jurisdictions. The vast majority of protestors were not engaged in looting or violent acts that would amount to rioting.
However, the author curiously ignores the fact that the vast majority of people that stormed the Capitol building in the hope of preventing the peaceful transfer of power managed to get off with misdemeanours.
Not even to mention that the former President's one-time Svengali, Steve Bannon, suckered Trump's own supporters out of 5 million dollars that he had pledged to use to construct a wall to keep out Mexicans; only to be pardoned for his troubles.
I think it's fair to say that political affiliation coloured this article.
Were there any errors of fact in what I said? Or did you take issue with my analysis of those facts?
Do you think degree mills provide a net public good?
Was everybody arrested for protesting after the death of George Floyd actually involved in rioting and looting?
Do you believe the incursion into the Capitol Building was performed by Antifa?
Was Steve Bannon not convicted of wire fraud and money laundering?
That said, I didn’t have any significant issue with the takeaways in the article and don’t expect every instance of the phenomenon described to make the list.
The lazy response is to say that lawful business is within the rules of our society. But that only worked when there was still a social check on the specifics of business activities, and the amount of meta activity was small. Once accumulation of money became the success metric itself, it ceased to be useful one. And at this point we're long past it - the hard truth is that empty fraudsters like Michael Milken, Bernie Madoff, and Donald Trump aren't crass deviant outliers but rather the bedrock of our mainstream culture.
The article even uncritically throws out at the end "This only gets worse if we do something crazy like forgive massive amounts of debt, whether it’s student or mortgage", while completely ignoring what happened in 2008! 2008 wasn't straight "forgiveness" per se because the "loans were repaid" (this is likely what keeps the author's cognitive dissonance intact), but artificially low interest loans to prop up investment banks that would have otherwise gone bankrupt is a morally-bankrupt giveaway larger than any "student loan forgiveness" or "flash mob looting" could ever be. Especially considering that if anyone is able to model their future financial position, it should have been investment banks! But as usual, it's the kids^h^h^h^hplebs who are wrong.
Now I personally am still a believer in market economies, and I generally think that looking to the government to supply many services is essentially giving up. But I also believe it is horribly dishonest to advocate this position without continually acknowledging how much the government has wantonly distorted the "economy" for many decades (at least since getting off the gold standard), essentially making Wall Street an insider-benefiting Potemkin Village. At this point anybody talking about needing to respect "the market" while not directing that focus onto government monetary policy (hello no-debate little-media-coverage multi-trillion-dollar March 2020 stonk market bailout with commercial bond buying continuing to this day) or regulatory givewaway to big business, is themselves part of this problem right alongside "Pelosi".
In corrupted countries such people are getting killed.
The first example given is about Hunter Biden selling art. So he's not an artist, he's the son of the sitting president, and he manages to sell things for a good price, that mainstream critics don't find interesting or beautiful ("widely panned art show")... Good for him!
Yes, it's quite obvious that some of the buyers are trying to get political favors; but that doesn't mean they will get them! The author just sounds envious.
Corruption isn't only about who avoids punishment, but also who is the target of punishment. In highly corrupt environments you will often find complex and often contradictory rules, that produce a default state of guilt. The only way to avoid punishment is to participate in the corruption.
You're being naive. Nobody is buying the art, people are buying influence and laundering money. The man isn't selling art, the man is selling influence, and potentially other things. He splashes paint on a canvas to legitimize it for the accountant.
I don't think the point is that the US should jail more people, I think the point is that when lots of people see others getting away with stuff, some of them start to try to do it too, and you have a snowballing societal collapse.