A slap on the wrist. After a half million Americans have died from a crisis they helped kickstart, they should be facing criminal charges and jail time. The rich and powerful once again are allowed to buy their freedom.
My mom got hooked in 99 after she slipped on ice at her house in Bluefield, WV.
Became a full blown addict after getting prescribed for the subsequent back injury.
She lost everything, disappeared, became a homeless addict drifting from DC to Baltimore to NYC and back, until she died of an overdose of heroin in a parking lot of a 7-11 in DC in December 2015. Her story and the impact on me and my 4 siblings is a drop in an ocean of suffering these smug assholes inflicted on this country.
This slap on the wrist is an insult to all of us, especially us Appalachians, who saw this starting in the 90s and got ignored because “hillbillies are genetically prone to addiction” as Purdue told the FDA.
The fact that McKinsey directly contributed to the untimely death of a lot of people is widely known. I don't see anything in the HN rules that suggests news of public significance are not an acceptable topic of discussion.
>just like the canadian billionaire couple who ran a drug company got whacked
The Canadian couple got whacked by a competing drug company for selling cheap generic versions of expensive drugs. Or at least that is what most observers believe although last I heard, no one has ever been charged with the murders. Before the murders, people were worried the couple would be killed because they were so good at bringing to market drugs that are much cheaper than any of their competitors, destroying the profit margins of those competitors.
Seems the left were always in favor of Luigi. I'm more surprised by the right in the US. The days just after the shooting, they were all in favor too, but after their media pundits took an opposing stance, they joined the bandwagon and are now ranting about "muh poor CEO".
The period when people have their own reactions, followed by a sudden reset and synchronisation once the taking points get assembled and is really quite fascinating. I would really love to know how centralised the process of defining talking points is, or if it is, itself, emergent behaviour of a distributed system resulting in coherent outcomes.
Yeah, it doesn't have to be centralized. I watched aghast at the narrative building around the Trayvon Martin murder in real-time across Reddit and The Website Which Shall Not Be Named. No one was giving marching orders; it was just a milieu of people throwing out ideas and the most convenient ones propagating outward. "He was slamming his head against the concrete," etc. (How could you possibly know? The word of the accused?)
what an amazing turn of phrase - “reset and synchronization once the talking points get assembled”
Literally describes 99 of the 100 post-jira action items coming out of the clueless PM’s mouthhole.
I think this is the first time I've seen the process of delivering right-wing talking points fail. Right wing media is talking about how bad it is to kill someone, but right wing followers are pushing back and saying they have no sympathy.
Exactly this. It happened during Covid and January 6, too. For brief moments we were united before the talking points emerged. I think this phenomenon is entirely coordinated by right wing media and party elites.
It's a fair comparison. Daniel Penney too. The main difference between the four parties is who killed people who'd killed others, and who killed people who hadn't actually done anything.
And the right wing also platforms, defends, and worships George Zimmerman, who murdered Trayvon Martin in cold blood, paints confederate battle flags, and told the manager who intervened in a violent bar incident he started that "I didn't know you were a n*gger lover".
That offends you??! Then explain why you like racism better than health care, and think platforming and worshipping Kyle Rittenhouse is justified?
The right wing are so thin skinned and hypocritical and allergic to facts, sheez.
Luigi used a gun to murder just like Rittenhouse, so why aren't you whining about his second amendment rights being violated and 3d printed gun being confiscated by the cops? He didn't even eat anyone's dogs or cats, just some McDonald's hash browns.
Get it together dude. You seem irrationally angry to the point of defending blatant hypocrisy and racism. Why does my criticism of it personally hurt your feelings, hmm? Go play Kyle Rittenhouse's Turkey Shoot game about shooting journalists to blow off some steam.
Not enough of it, not hooked into the right systems. It works for Elon Musk because he has a lot more and because he controls critical piece of infrastructure (starlink, SpaceX) that the defense industry needs.
Kim also subtly represents a flavor of (classical) liberal populism that is at odds with the neoliberal empire-making much of the ultra-rich engage in. Both make the bulk of their money by exploiting resources that they have a dubious claim to (from a humanistic perspective), but the people that the latter tend to exploit were instead the beneficiaries of his exploitation. Anyone who flips the script like that is going to find themselves in the crosshairs, because it seeds dangerous ideas about what the average person deserves in the way of dignity and material/cultural goods.
He's also not old money or especially supportive of old money; he's just some script kiddy who scammed his way to the top on the back of the kind of confidence that tends to only come when you're built like an NFL lineman but can also read documentation. The seethe is easy to understand.
Money alone won't buy your entry inside the elite circles of the people with real influence.
Joe Biden just pardoned his son from crimes that would have gotten you and me in jail already.
Similarly, your Clintons, Bushs, Blairs, Bidens, Trumps, none of them or their friends and family will ever see a day in jail no matter their crimes. That's influence money alone can't buy. Those are the 1% of the 1%. They can kill or pardon people, start and end wars without answering to anyone.
> How do companies like McKinsey get away with this?
Because of judiciary, regulatory and congressional capture, of course. This means you it's gotten away with unless someone like Luigi martyrs themselves.
Also I fail to understand why doctors who prescribed opoids are getting away with it. It's well documented by now that many of them were getting bribes, and could clearly see that their patients were becoming addicted which went against the claims that the said opoids were not addictive. Responsibility is not just on the manufacturer and consultants' side...
And in this case, as is almost always the case, the "elites" are not even paying the fine. The Company is. No human being inside the company who made any of the relevant decisions and did any of the wrongdoing will suffer in any way, or have to pay anything.
If you want to kill people and get away with it, just form a corporation and have your CxO and SVP staff make decisions that kill people.
>If you want to kill people and get away with it, just form a corporation and have your CxO and SVP staff make decisions that kill people.
Note this only works for indirect deaths. If you form a corporation and then order a hit on someone, that's still illegal and you'll still go to jail. If you form a corporation, build a coal power plant that follows all regulations, and the particulate pollution sends a few hundred people to their early deaths that's fine.
On the other hand a lot of drug abuse among the homeless is self-medication because of the stress associated with living on the streets or due to untreated mental health issues.
As long as housing and mental health remains an open issue, personally I'd rather have them consume stuff made by an actual pharmaceutical company at pharmaceutical grade instead of completely unregulated dark market stuff that can have absolutely wild (and deadly!) swings in dosage, even from the same batch.
> A slap on the wrist. After a half million Americans have died from a crisis they helped kickstart, they should be facing criminal charges and jail time.
I keep reading people who say, over and over again, that the war on drugs is a failure and that it's a mistake to try criminally prosecute suppliers and send them to prison. People will always find a way to get the drugs if they want them, we're told.
But then I see the same people turn around that McKinsey is responsible for millions of deaths from the opioid crisis, and the execs involved should be held criminally responsible.
It's hard to reconcile the calls for criminal prosecution against McKinsey execs with the argument that drugs should be legalized and that we shouldn't go after other suppliers of drugs.
The shady business practices of McKinsey and Purdue are responsible for getting a lot of people dependent on opioids, but the overdose deaths skyrocketed once doctors were forced to cut patients off of their prescriptions and into the fentanyl-ridden black market due to pressure from DEA. Drug War propaganda has convinced us that addiction is as bad as death, but personally, I would rather live a long, happy and productive life dependent on cheap, legal opioids, like William Stewart Halsted, than die as a casualty of the War on Drugs.
> rather live a long, happy and productive life dependent on cheap, legal opioids
That’s BS. OxyContin addicts tend to experience withdrawal symptoms before the recommended 12 hours is up, they also develop tolerance, so they end up requiring larger and larger dosage with increasing frequency. You’re not going to sustainably live a long, happy and productive life even if you have a cheap, steady, relatively clean supply of it.
It is. The coffee supply chain and economic exploitation of caffeine dependency are considered locked-down enough to tolerate, though (as with alcohol). The problem with many illegal drugs isn't their physiological effects so much as it is who benefits economically from sales, sitting somewhere between "national security threat" and "big pharma not being able to take their cut".
I am waiting (for yeeeears now) for someone to file a lawsuit against Starbucks… if McDonald’s was forced the pay $$ for coffee being too hot prompting every cup in usage in America where hot content is poured to come with a disclaimer, no disclaimer is shown anywhere regarding addictive nature of coffee… all it will take is someone who spends like $3k/year on coffee at Starbucks to convince some hotshot lawyer to start a lawsuit. Easier rags-to-richer story for sure (provided plaintiff is “rags” :) )
Caffeine and sugar are also addictive drugs. Caffeine significantly increases the risk of a heart attack. Refined sugar has numerous slow-motion-car-crash health effects, from tooth damage to obesity to diabetes.
Both would be heavily regulated if they were new prescription medications.
Legalization was popular for weed because weed is relatively benign but decriminalization is what's needed for harder drugs.
People get these mixed up and use them interchangeably but they're very different. There will (and should) never be heroin shops that look like Apple stores like there are for weed.
Decrim can be for production, distribution and possession but people generally use it to mean possession. That means that possession of amounts for personal use are not a criminal matter, which makes sense if we see it as an addiction that needs to be treated. In that scenario, production and distribution can be (and often are) illegal.
There are other nuances in how to handle decriminalization in terms of social services offered and how to disrupt demand.
Hard drugs are already effectively decriminalized in CA. When I see cops literally turn the other way to not have to see someone smoke a rock and have to write them a ticket thats how you know. I can’t say that this policy has lead to anyone getting help. If anything it enables people to slip further into the abyss once they come here from places that would otherwise prosecute that behavior when its done in public in the open like that.
I'm not sure most people are against going after the suppliers, even if they support decriminalization. Decriminalization should mean that users are not prosecuted for simply using drugs, but those participating in the manufacture and distribution are still held responsible.
> I'm not sure most people are against going after the suppliers
I see the claim made often, it even commonly pops up on HN. The claim is that the War on Drugs is a failure, because any prohibition efforts are doomed. Laws against a substance merely push it into the criminal sector and don't actually disrupt the supply. So the only outcome is that we get more crime and suffering, but the amount of people using the drug doesn't change.
We saw a similarly argument often used when marijuana legalization was being discussed - legalization wouldn't actually impact the number of people who used the drugs, because prohibition laws don't stop people from acquiring a substance. Naturally, the validity of marijuana legalization goes well beyond it's impact on the number of users, but there were many claims that it wouldn't impact the number of users.
Of course, one can make the argument that the War on Drugs is a good thing but that it's implementation has often been wrong (for instance, that there should be more effort made on going after suppliers rather than users). But it's very common to see people claim that any attempts at prohibition are doomed to failure and cause more harm with little to no benefit.
Edit: To give an example, here's a HN discussion where most of the people are in favor of fully legalizing all drugs:
attempts against prohibition are doomed to failure because they go against human nature and going against human nature will (almost) always fail. tell teenagers they can’t drink till they are 18… well… tell a kid she/he can’t… well…
humans will do drugs. you have to start there. no matter what you try and “prohibit” this is your ground zero. from here you can decide which policy has the greatest chance of “success” once you define what success means to you.
Decriminalization still means you get prosecuted for using in public. You can’t smoke weed in public or even a cigarette in most public places nor are you allowed to drink in public. Shooting dope in a park will still be illegal.
People involved in the opioid crisis pushed unnecessary and extremely addictive drugs onto unsuspecting people who trusted them with their care, and it was all done through very intentional deception, lies about how these drugs weren't addictive when they absolutely knew that they were, and through corruption by offering doctors kickbacks for getting people hooked on them.
Ignoring everything else, do you really fail to see how bribing doctor to lie to people about the nature of highly addictive drugs is different from a consensual transaction between two adults?
The difference is consent, particularly at the very beginning.
Patients typically have to trust a doctor; the definition of consent in those circumstances is very strict, side effects have to be declared etc etc. Any abuse of that consent, like in this case, must be treated like a crime.
Whereas when it comes to individuals deciding on their own to experience something, it's all about personal responsibility.
> Patients typically have to trust a doctor; the definition of consent in those circumstances is very strict, side effects have to be declared etc etc. Any abuse of that consent, like in this case, must be treated like a crime.
> Whereas when it comes to individuals deciding on their own to experience something, it's all about personal responsibility.
The problem with this framing (and some of the other comments have used this framing as well) is acting as if other drugs would not have the same issues as opioids. But if anything, the opioid epidemic has shown the opposite to be the case - people irresponsibly push drugs onto people even when access is limited to a group like doctors who are supposed to be well educated and discerning.
It's consistent in the sense that people love any angle that removes agency and shifts all responsibility to ephemeral constructs like "big pharma" or "war on drugs". Public flaggelation is not without consequence, however - don't be shocked when you can't find a pharmacy willing to fill a Percocet rx after your next surgery.
To add to other comments, this can also be partly justified by the fact that blue collar crime is the only kind of crime for which prevalence is even partly inversely correlated with the increase in severity in punishment.
> Today’s resolution marks the first time a management consulting firm has been held criminally responsible for advice resulting in the commission of a crime by a client and reflects the Justice Department’s ongoing efforts to hold actors accountable for their roles in the opioid crisis. The resolution is also the largest civil recovery for such conduct.
> Additionally, a former McKinsey senior partner who worked on Purdue matters has been charged with obstruction of justice in federal court in Abingdon, Virginia. Martin E. Elling, 60, a U.S. citizen currently residing in Bangkok, Thailand, has been charged with one count of knowingly destroying records, documents and tangible objects with the intent to impede, obstruct and influence the investigation and proper administration of a matter within the jurisdiction of the Justice Department. Elling has agreed to plead guilty and is expected to appear in federal court in Abingdon to enter his plea and for sentencing at later dates.
…
> Elling faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine up to $250,000 for the obstruction of justice charge
The only way to kill 500,000 people practically is to do it by the letter of the law. Murder (especially for money) doesn't scale without being a state or quasi state actor, or something on that tier.
The Nuremberg trials were a slap on the wrist compared to what the collective perpetrators, beneficiaries, and active agents of the war and the associated genocide deserved.
The broader cultural impact of them (and of the war guilt) imposed on Germany landed fairly well, though. Unfortunately, it is possible that it might have landed less well if the punishments actually fit the crimes.
Observe and contrast it to Japan's take on its war guilt, and its less-than-enthusiastic attitude towards taking responsibility.
> During the past two decades, Elling has spread nearly $2 million among dozens of federal-level political committees, almost all Democratic. The political committees of President Joe Biden and dozens of US Senate and House candidates have benefited from Elling's contributions.
The prosecution of Elling has the same vibe as that of Calley [1] after the vietnam war, and that of the small group of soldiers involved in the Mahmudiyah rape [2] during the second gulf war.
Viewed in isolation, the atrocities committed by these men deserve punishment. But in the bigger picture, the function these trials serve is for the institution in charge to be able to say "see? We do hold ourselves accountable" even though the vast majority of war crimes went uninvestigated and unpunished.
More heads, and more important heads, should roll. Not just that of one fall guy. Tens of thousands of deaths every year, and even more lives ruined. But we all know what side the US government is on, so I'm not holding my breath.
You are not wrong here, capitalism is the rule to make as much money as possible (be it by selling legal drugs, weapons, food, gambling, insurance).
The role of a state and it's laws is to control and limit these companies.
A lot of people think it's good to assassinate the CEO of an insurance company, but then I ask, where are the checks and balances, where is the state?
If you have to have insurance, the state has to make rules where it's almost impossible for the insurance company not to pay the necessary actions (like in Europe).
With McKinsey...what did the FDA do wrong here would be my first question.
Don't hate the companies, criticise the state (who is the responsible blob to keep a society healthy).
> If you have to have insurance, the state has to make rules where it's almost impossible for the insurance company not to pay the necessary actions (like in Europe).
Exactly.
Capitalism without rules ends up with situations that we would like to avoid as a society. Thus the government should step in create guard rails and enforce them.
The government, through the FDA and DEA, played a large role in the huge increase in the abuse of Oxycontin during the 90's.
When OxyContin entered the market in 1996, the FDA approved its original label, which stated that iatrogenic addiction was “very rare” if opioids were legitimately used in the management of pain. In July 2001, to reflect the available scientific evidence, the label was modified to state that data were not available for establishing the true incidence of addiction in chronic-pain patients. The 2001 labeling also deleted the original statement that the delayed absorption of OxyContin was believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug.19
It makes the incredulity over the recent unpleasantness all the more... something. What world do you have to live in NOT to see the rationale? People have set themselves on fire over causes they felt passionately about, to get essentially no attention from the media. Hurting powerful people appears to many the only remaining avenue. Even that seems less impactful than the gleeful memes that followed. The elite are having their "Okay Boomer" moment and they really don't like it.
Rajup had posted about a CEO getting unalived, as an example of the rich facing consequences. I had misread your post as agreeing with him, like this Luigi thing was a continuation of a phenomena.
My bad. I see you were disagreeing with the poster sarcastically.
A little unrelated to this whole thing, which does hit me a bit personally since my cousin back in Iowa died of opioid-related dependency issues, but I have interviewed a lot of consultants over the years for various roles and they are without question the most consistently bad interviews. It's funny, when I was in business school years ago (please forgive me) getting a job at McKinsey or BCG was more or less the crème de la crème of post-MBA gigs. Now, when I interview these people it's so transparent that yeah they're very smart, but they literally know nothing. They've spent years cycling in and out of "client engagements", so they can give you a 30k foot view of what's going on, on a dozen different things, but when you try to dig into the details there's not a lot there.
I'm probably casting a wide net since my sample size is large, and I'm sure there are great consultants at these places who have spent more than a few months on something, and could do good work in tech or hardware. But so far for me it's something like 1/70.
I've also interviewed many consultants over the years. It strongly depends on what you are interviewing them for. If you want people with deep industry expertise and a strong fit for a fairly narrow role, then yes of course the consulting kids are going to suck. If you want people who can learn quickly and look more broadly than a specific department to do things like strategic or financial planning then consultants can be a good fit.
These kinds of consultants have the same issue as LLMs: they say the maximally plausible thing without knowing (or necessarily caring) if what they are saying is actually true.
I don't think strategy advice is worth much unless it's coming from people who stuck around and lived with the consequences (i.e, tested their ideas against reality).
>and look more broadly than a specific department to do things like strategic or financial planning then consultants can be a good fit.
I disagree with this, but I definitely understand your argument. I just don't see how someone who oscillates back and forth from various clients, even if they're all in the same industry, can get enough deep background to be able to coherently make recommendations about business strategy.
I am grateful for McKinsey and BCG because when I dropped out of my postdoc in 2009 and was looking for a job, I went to probably 20 or 30 of their lunch events at Wharton where I absolutely stuffed myself and my pockets, despite having no intention whatsoever of joining them.
> It's funny, when I was in business school years ago (please forgive me) getting a job at McKinsey or BCG was more or less the crème de la crème of post-MBA gigs.
Still is though right? Just now you have enough experience to be wise enough to know what is important.
McKinsey is sweatshop but with good pay. The work conditions are atrocious and they grind through naive young people like Verdun.
Some people have argued on HN that the consultants are cya and political support for things the management class allready know they want. That seem about right.
I've always been unclear on this. Various careers are famed for extremely long hours, but I don't know just what it is they do for all that time. Consultants, financeers, etc.
I know that I have only so much brain power to spend a day. I can work longer, but at best you're going to get more grind, not quality.
I keep wondering if these consultants could accomplish as much in fewer hours if they weren't so intent on being the one who puts in so many hours.
I know almost nothing about what they do so I'm just guessing. But I find it hard to square so much effort with results that don't seem to merit it.
I am a McKinsey consultant, and I tend to think the people putting in those insane hours are shooting themselves in the foot.
It is easier to work longer hours when a hotel takes care of everything for you, but if you’re bragging about how little sleep you get you’re just teetering on the edge of burnout and American Psycho neuroticism.
Not really what I meant. It is up or out, but I don’t really believe the long hours are an effective way to achieve the up. It’s just something a lot of people impose on themselves.
The sales and management part only really comes in after you’ve passed the team manager level which is fairly advanced.
> I don’t really believe the long hours are an effective way to achieve the up.
That is an interesting comment. I think you are right. Probably more of a baseline competency but extraordinary 'soft skills'?
I meant team manager as included in 'sales'. Where I've worked as consultant (warm body, not a real consultant) team managers were essentially sales people.
McKinsey is responsible for a lot of crimes, seemingly. Ultimately they just don't seem like a trustworthy company and I think they've avoided accountability by maintaining political connections (and donations). Another example of their untrustworthy practices - I recall accusations from a few years ago where they assured the US government that they were not doing work for the CCP, but then it turned out that they were (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/mckinsey-...). And then earlier this year at a US Senate hearing, it turned out McKinsey has once again been doing dirty work for the CCP by advising a large number of state owned corporations, who are involved in activities like building China's militarized artificial islands: https://youtu.be/tQ5kWfotE8Y
Even amongst management consulting firms McKinsey is known as the unethical one. I know someone who worked for Bain and when I gave him shit for it his answer was always "hey, at least I don't work at McKinsey"
Here's the thing: these firms are set up as partnerships meaning each of the partners (but really the senior partners) has their own little world enabled by their equity and voting power. They each have their own spin on the "values," risk tolerance, communication style, "followers," etc.
Trying to paint the entire firm with the same brush is naive. Like anything else, there are good and there are bad
Plenty of good smart people at each of these firms just trying to do good work and "make it." Then you have the sociopaths willing to trade lives for their own gain who have the benefit of hiding behind brand equity and human shields (aka the other partners)
Prosecutors have to use RICO to charge execs and board members criminally. This is not going to happen, as long as the revolving door (or a sort of collusion between prosecutors and executives) exists.
It’s a partnership. Ultimately the line of people involved in any particular job is extremely short.
Unlike in a tech company where the whole company is building a product, consulting companies are thousands of teams doing projects in a small isolated bubble.
The world needs to adopt some sort of a punitive equivalence principle. Humanity overall has made a lot of progress towards enshrining human rights, but a lack of punitive equivalence is a gaping hole in the right to equality before law. How are two people treated equally if they face different punitive effects for the same act?
What companies use consultants and how? In all my years, I have never seen a consultant or a need for one, so I have a tough time understanding how they make any money, much less a lot of it.
Basically every single large organization inevitably becomes paralyzed by the inability to do anything different from the status quo. When you hear the common complaint that “consultants just tell leadership to do what I was telling them to do for decades” that’s often accurate; because consultants listen to you and have the executive mandate to actually get things done. If you’ve been saying something for ten years and it hasn’t happened, you _need_ a different tool to effect change. Consultants, for better or for worse, are a decent tool for making that happen.
Haven’t you ever wanted research, advice or work done and your coworkers or employees were busy or not quite up to it? White glove consulting is just well-packaged, expensive help.
This line of thinking makes no sense. Why should we care about what their global revenue is? The only thing that matters is how much money they made from opioid consulting. If Amazon did a bad in a small part of their company (eg. they violated labor laws in the state of Washington), why should their punishment be compared to their global revenue?
Because otherwise someone clever could play a shell game where every org does something bad but its split up in such a way to diffuse responsibility across the organization and minimize fines, especially since not all bad things will be caught and fined simultaneously.
>Because otherwise someone clever could play a shell game where every org does something bad but its split up in such a way to diffuse responsibility across the organization and minimize fines,
"We can't figure out who to blame because responsibility is so diffuse, so let's make everyone 100% responsible" makes as much sense as "we can't figure out who the murderers are so let's lock up anyone who vaguely looks like a gangster"[1].
More to the point, it's unclear whether this actually applies in this case. At the very least, you can confine responsibility to the consulting engagements they did with opioid producers. The value McKinsey & Company provides in their management consulting engagements might be questionable, but it's a stretch to claim their engagements with some random fortune 500 (non-pharma) company contributed to the opioid crisis, or need to be punished.
Until you have serious bonus clawbacks for every such case, it is just cost of doing business. Just increasing the fines won't do much, they will just fire more people citing costs and the market will applaud that with rising stock price.
Its complex cause you cant really find one person to blame. What no one really says is we are struggling with complexity overload. And what complicates it is all the people's wealth and status accumulation falsely signals control. When they really have less and less control the more complex the system gets.
When you look at pentagon leaders and afg/iraq or Wall St CEOs and 2008 gfc or the Pope and the peado army or linux kernel maintainers and serious security bugs found everyday the commonality is Complexity.
No one is fit the more complex things gets. So even though we get Tahrir Square once in a while, decade later we still have Generals in charge.
Scaling has become easy but scaling without unintended costs and consequences the past few decades have shown is complex.
It's trivial to find who to blame - just follow the money. Hit the investors with sentences proportional to their stake of ownership, and just like magic, executives who enable criminal behavior will become rather less popular and internal oversight much more so.
Of course this will never happen, since the lack of culpability is the point.
Jailing people just for having a stake in a company that did something illegal could kill the economy. People would be affraid to invest in companies, and move money to simple things like real estate (or to foreign investments).
How would they know that though? It's a huge personal risk that can be alleviated simply by investing in anything else in the world besides US companies.
Is that why you think exonerating, platforming, and worshipping Kyle Rittenhouse is justified? Because you think murdering innocent people in the name of racism should be legal, as well as mass murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people by denying health care in the name of massive profits, earning $10 million per year plus $64 million in UnitedHealth Group stock as blood money?
Please explain your previous statement you posted on that topic, which I asked you to explain but you failed to answer, because I really want to understand how the twisted minds of people like you work, and how you justify such extreme cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy, blatant racism, and cold blooded profiteering murderers, including Brian Thompson, Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, and George Zimmerman?
Daily Show Accuses Right of Hypocrisy With Montage of Pundits Condemning CEO Killer and Celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse:
The Daily Show posted a video of right-wing pundits condemning the praise of the CEO shooter, and juxtaposed it with footage of Kyle Rittenhouse being praised.
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York last week has controversially been celebrated by some who are frustrated with the state of the health insurance industry in the country. That praise has been met with harsh criticism from both Republicans and Democrats.
On Wednesday, The Daily Show published a montage of Fox News pundits criticizing those who are praising accused shooter Luigi Mangione. Directly next to montage, however, was footage of Rittenhouse being introduced at a Turning Point USA event — giving the impression that the pundits are actually calling out the praise for the 21-year-old who killed two protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020.
“Fox News talking about Luigi Mangione, but make the footage Kyle Rittenhouse,” the tweet said.
The video began with Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk saying on stage, “Let’s get loud for Kyle Rittenhouse.” Seconds later, a clip of Sean Hannity talking about Mangione’s praise was shown.
“Murder, assassination, vigilantism,” Hannity said. “It’s wrong; it’s evil; it’s despicable… [He] was no hero… Cheering for the murder of an unarmed man beyond sick.”
While the Hannity clip played, the scene at the Turning Point event was jubilant as the crowd cheered for Rittenhouse’s arrival.
“For anyone that sympathizes and empathizes with a murderer,” Fox News contributor Nicole Parker said, “that is completely upside-down in our American society. There are people that need to re-evaluate their inner soul and their moral compass. There is nothing acceptable to me about that.”
Then, one of Kirk’s colleagues began chanting, “Kyle, Kyle, Kyle,” on the Turning Point stage.
“To sympathize with them,” Parker continued, “is just disgusting.”
Sure, attempting to find one or a handful of bad actors to blame may not yield a sufficient result that could convince the public that justice was served appropriately. Yet, the complexity of how to blame should not absolve the crime.
How should society collectively administer punishment to a large complex network of individuals with varying degrees of power and involvement? Reparations and the Nuremberg Trials / Tokyo Trial come to mind for WWII Axis powers. 500k deaths from opiods (taken from top comment) is comparable to the casualties from WWII, within a soberingly low amount of significant digits. Japan was occupied and could not have a military for some time.
Curious if there are other ideas of how to tackle punishment of businesses (not Luigi'ing it).
Well there is the Chinese and Russian example. The power just gets misused and creates it own issues.
People want simple and quick solutions. And they dont like answers they dont want to hear. Specifically about what behavior is rewarded and incentivized. As Veblen pointed out a hundred years ago, the flaw with Marx is not that there are exploiters and the exploited, its that there is the Leisure class and everyone else who given a choice wants that lifestyle.
The entire media and edu system promote consumption, wealth and status accumulation 24x7. When you are constantly hit with these signals punishing a few people here and there is just for show.
You say we can't find anyone responsible as if we haven't settled the question on culpability symbolically since we started leveraging hierarchies. You oversee it. You did it.
Start at the top. Move down. Heavy is the head, as they say.
> Its complex cause you cant really find one person to blame.
When the big bucks go to the very top for a successful year, the penalty should also go to the very top when shit hits the fan. When the CEO/CIO/COO's bonuses are on the hook, I suspect you will suddenly see a great urgency/importance being assigned to doing things correctly and greater penalty being levied down the ranks for doing things wrongly.
These people had too much carrot, time to balance it out with some stick.
With all the overdose deaths and the lives ruined by opioids, I guess I'm a little bit surprised this didn't result in criminal charges for someone at McKinsey. Surely there must be some emails or texts that are inculpating.
As long as you hide behind a corporation, you can do pretty much whatever you want. Worst case, the company will pay a nominal fine as cost of doing business. And maybe somebody gets fired with a large severance.
As killings get normalized they will be more difficult to be caught. Less point blank pistoling, more IEDs and long range rifles is our future imo. The veil has been pierced for at least some people.
Not going to be "the norm" nor will there be an endless stream of vigilantes available to deter this level of sociopathy. Assassinations are obviously not the way we want society to work either, violence to settle grievances etc, no good.
The only way I think we could hope to stem the tide of this level of corruption is through education. I believe it's really in the ruling classes interest to keep as people as dumb as possible though, so I don't think it will happen.
Not sure what else the alternatives could be. Societal collapse?
> According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations." DOJ officials said Elling has agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of obstruction of justice for destroying those company records.
You might've been too busy trying to force "inculpating."
If the company was not meaningfully involved in selling a dangerous addictive substance falsely marketed that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans then they should not face any penalty or fines. On the other hand, if they were, this is on a similar order of magnitude to American losses in World War 2, and their executives should be hung and company ended with shareholders zeroed out.
They could figure out how to divvy up their 65 life sentences.
Why do they get to pay their way out of this?
> According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling [2] "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations."
Corporate laptops are backed up, with backups offsite. I find it hard to believe that the only copy was on his laptop.
From the tweet [2], which has a screenshot of an email presumably sent by Martin Elling, he looks to be directing everyone to start deleting criminal evidence.
> McKinsey's payment, which includes $2 million paid to the Virginia Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, settles federal civil and criminal charges against the firm and includes a "deferred prosecution" agreement. Under the civil settlement, McKinsey is not admitting liability. A copy of the deferred prosecution agreement was not publicly available at the time of publication.
Given the opioid deaths in 2022 alone, McKinsey should be dissolved and the responsible parties serving jail time.
Can someone explain how this [3] is presented as a win, when only money has changed hands. They paid a fee for aiding in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Does this ruling now shield them from any criminal repercussions at the state level?
> Corporate laptops are backed up, with backups offsite. I find it hard to believe that the only copy was on his laptop.
Not defending anyone and maybe McKinsey is different but I have never had a corporate laptop with built-in backup. I am always left to figure that out on my own.
> Amir - going forward it's absolutely essential for the team to only use Box for distribution of documents and all documents have to have appropriate legal disclaimers - at a minimum working draft. Please work with the team to implement ASAP.
So Arnab "Arnie" is facing 20 years [1] for destruction of evidence
But Martin Elling (very much his senior) can only get a maximum of 1 year [2] as per the plea deal.
> A former senior partner at McKinsey, Martin Elling, has also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for destroying records related to McKinsey's work for Purdue, according to court papers. He is scheduled to enter his plea on Jan. 10.
Distribution of documents is not a system backup. I haven't used Box but if it is a distribution mechanism I suspect it is opt-in, as in you have to choose to distribute a document with it. You could still print or email the document, or use any other service. Box is just the mechanism by policy. The policy wouldn't even apply to documents that aren't distributed.
We use Box to store and share virtually everything, not because it is incriminating, but because sending email attachments is not a secure way to send sensitive data.
I've never worked anywhere that backed up laptops. Onedrive, fileshares, cloud storage, servers, sure. I would not want to try managing backups for devices that aren't guaranteed online 24/7. The odd failed server backup is enough work, now apply that to 2000 laptops. Fuck that, save your shit on our backed up infra.
They did, or at least
Some folders (way before iCloud)
During a project, the live documents were on the teams laptops (local encryption). Only key deliverables were uploaded to servers, mostly at the end of the project.
Lots of cruft (client emails, unedited data, etc) stayed behind in people’s laptops.
Your laptop was stolen? No worries, under 24 hrs you get a new one in your hotel with roughly whenever you left off…
PS McK was handing out 3G - 4G PCMIA cards forever (almost 20 y ago), you were only most of the time…
Just remember, it’s never okay for the people to take matters into their own hands. They just need to get out there and vote! Our elected representatives will ensure that justice is served. If they don’t, that just means you didn’t donate enough to the Good Guys.
Payment should not be an option. If people can be executed for a single murder then assisting in starting an epidemic with 640000 casualties (and also serious side effects) should kill the company. Revoke business licenses, seize assets, use it for damage control.
"More than 645,000 people(opens new window) in the United States have died from overdoses involving opioids since the epidemic began"
McKinsey is a deeply unethical company that has skirted meaningful accountability over the last few decades. I highly recommend reading When McKinsey Comes To Town [1] - it really opened my eyes to how hypocritical and self-serving the culture is at the firm.
Maybe a small aside..but it’s very interesting how we as a society took very little learnings from the Crack epidemic during the early years of the Opioid Crisis. It is frustrating how people would rather bury their heads into the sand and reaffirm existing biases vs interrogating the contributing factors.
You could have other forms of accountability sure: freedom, life, and so on. For several reasons, we have settled on money as the preferred form unless the responsible party has a good chance of harming others in future.
Except the monetary accountability comes from the company, and the people responsible remain rich and successful. In order to put the brakes on unethical and immoral behavior, personal accountability must be a possibility. As in, you will go to jail if you intentionally hurt others via decisions made at work.
> For several reasons, we have settled on money as the preferred form unless the responsible party has a good chance of harming others in future.
Sorry, but in which universe? The people who're responsible for harming millions almost always get away with a fine that can be brushed away as the cost of doing business, and they almost always reoffend precisely because they never have to face justice.
Meanwhile the working class people who haven't harmed anyone regularly get arrested and go to jail for nonviolent offences. If I made $50k a year and killed 1,000 people by poisoning their water supply, do you think I could escape arrest by paying a $1000 fine? Would you feel like that's an appropriate level of accountability if I knew that my actions were killing those people?
This is stupid because the marginal value of money is nothing when you have enough. So it's simply a get out of jail ticket we give to part of the society. The worst part IMHO.
Try to design an alternative though, go and actually give it a try. And you are immediately going to find several historical anecdotes where your idea had gone horribly wrong.
And I bet, for many, when the dust settles, the McKinsey name will still be held in relative high regard, and the opioid affected victims, on the streets, in poverty, will be blamed for ... not pulling themselves together, or as being a drag on society.
Corporations need death sentences. Like the sandy hook parents getting cash for infowars but infowars being allowed to continue its antisocial existence because money is a super fungible commodity with no limits.
I suspect McKinsey is responsible for most predatory behaviour related to Big Food, Big Tech and Big Pharma, just waiting for more of these lawsuits to surface.
Not enough. Executives and consultants need to be sent to jail and held responsible.
For years, the government and court systems have been unable to punish these private corporations. At best, give them a slap on the wrist with these fines. People are tired of this bs. It's no surprise a large majority of the public didn't give 2 shits about a nobody health insurance CEO getting gunned down in the streets but rather unified around the idea of our shitty healthcare system.
You and I destroying evidence when accused of a crime? Tampering, a felony in most states.
Send emails to your team and clients that even explicitly says "We need to eliminate documents and emails about this as the US Attorney has already begun investigating us?"
Oh well, no big deal, just have the company pay a fine.
I think it's a reference to the recent killing of that health insurance CEO, where some folks have taken to referring to the killer as an "adjuster."
It's a play on words from the profession of insurance/claims adjuster, which is someone who who arrives to determine what happened and what damage the insurance company is liable for. Unlike the normal version, there's a very different twist on what kinds of damage, responsibility, and consequences are involved...
Left hand. COVID proved that we could establish safety & efficacy of a medical treatment in about 12 months, to the point where as I recall a lot of the manufacturers have a legal exemption from any liability for damage done by vaccines.
Right hand. There are these opioids have been around for decades and somehow they reached this huge level of damage. Largely the same cultures of people involved.
I still think the authoritarian policies used during COVID were a mistake. The level of compartmentalisation needed to look past scandals like this one and still force people to trust big pharma unconditionally is pretty extreme. People should be allowed to make their own mistakes based on their own flawed judgement, rather than the flawed judgement of the likes of McKinsey & Perdue. It is bad enough when everything is voluntary.
Opioids were known to be harmful. Purdue attacked the gatekeepers and policy makers not the science. It was mostly a story of what happens when a well funded con artist enters an environment built on trust.
Suddenly pain management was viewed as very important by the medical establishment, while mostly paying lip service to all the long term consequences of said actions. After all you can’t actually know how much someone is actually suffering…
So, hypothetically, if a doctor prescribed me opioids I should be allowed to say I don't want to take them? Even if the manufacturers assure me it is safe, effective and they have lots of evidence of the same. Because to me that seems like a logical conclusion. I think that should be a general policy. People should be able to overrule doctors on the subject of how they are treated.
If you work for the FBI you can quit at any time and work for a different companies with different rules. You can’t work for a company that gets to ignore minimum wage laws.
we can go glass-half-full-glass-half-empty back and forth ad nausem here for sure :)
bottom line though, the then government (which is soon to be now government) went full ballistic on us during COVID times and vaccine mandates affected many lives
Only some parts of the government “required” their employees to get vaccinated, the entire US government didn’t. Even those bits only hit ~98% compliance.
When you volunteer to work for someone you’re agreeing to do what they want or quit, that’s by definition a choice. When many private employers had the same requirements complaining about overreach by the government is misplaced, it’s at most overreach by employers.
“only” 98% compliance should tell you all you need to know whether people are “forced” or not… the prospect of losing your job might not be that alarming for HN-average-person but…
Making hard choices inherently implies options. Vaccines saved well over a million people’s lives at negligible heath impact for the wider population, that’s simply what states are going to do in an epidemic.
Okay — but we have more concerns than a single virus.
It’s entirely possible to engage in net-negative behaviors because you fixate on a singular goal — a human version of the “paperclip optimizer”: we became “COVID optimizers” and produced suboptimal results.
Ethics and morals are time-honed heuristics to avoid those failures. “Freedom” is the heuristic that distributed risk assessment and planning out perform centralized versions — and we forgot that in our panic.
And some day there may be another epidemic for which we optimize for freedom, and after which there will be no human left to enjoy the freedom (or those left will be too busy surviving to worry about things such as “freedom”).
It is fortunate that the COVID-19 pandemic did not rise to that level. Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight.
Or some other catastrophe that threatens us. My point is that natural things do not care for artificial concepts such as “freedoms” and “rights” and “morality”.
> Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight.
We knew within two weeks of most major shutdowns that Covid wasn’t even close to as bad as predicted by the Imperial College. Society decided to completely ignore that data and instead doubled down on its hysteria for more than three years.
You say that as if the recommendations for freedom weren’t based on the initial medical data.
But they were and you’re inventing a false dichotomy whereby we had to engage in totalitarianism contrary to evidence of COVID’s deadliness or some hypothetical infinite bad might have happened.
That’s nothing but bullshit, from somebody who was wrong.
> Viruses are not concerned with ethics and morals.
Good thing we aren’t viruses and have intelligence and the ability to step back and think through our actions.
There is more to life than exactly one specific myopic focus on a virus. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to believe that the only problem humans can solve for is an exactly one single virus to the exclusion of literally everything else. Massive, massive amounts of privilege to think that way, in fact.
Nothing hypothetical about that, it’s generally how US healthcare works barring people being declared mentally incompetent, court ordered treatment, etc.
To address the seeming contradiction. Vaccination was never imposed by the healthcare system on patients during COVID, it was required by cruse ships, schools, and yes hospitals for staff etc.
Those organizations were doing so by government mandate — at the direction of government healthcare agencies. They didn’t invent those policies on their own.
That’s “imposing” and it speaks to the lack of ethics in the healthcare system they joined in coercing medical treatments rather than refusing to perform treatments people were only accepting under duress.
The alternative of continuing isolation was available though impractical for many.
The ethics around vaccination is it saved well over 1 million US lives without direct force, that’s a clear win by any reasonable ethical system. Being unable to be an unvaccinated healthcare worker is little different than requiring people wash hands, or preventing them from walking around shooting patients.
PS: Actual estimates for lives saved is around 3 million with a fair bit of uncertainty and some wiggle room in terms of definitions. Over 1 million is basically incontrovertible, but in a wider context you need to look at the spike in cancer deaths due to an overworked healthcare system and extrapolate not just consider the individuals who get infected.
> The alternative of continuing isolation was available though impractical for many.
There was, in fact, many alternatives beyond “isolation”. But thanks to society’s hysterical myopic focus and constant propaganda and suppression of information most people were not allowed to discuss them out loud.
How anybody could continue to believe what society did in response to Covid was not only okay but was the only option is absolutely wild to me. It’s a testament to the massive amount of propaganda cranked out by various governments. Their belief is not just wrong it’s insulting to the people who watched the nonsense unfold.
COVID vaccines weren’t believed to be QALY positive for a substantial period of the mandates, according to actuarial estimates.
The vaccines hospitalized at a rate higher than they prevented hospitalizations and the mandates applied to groups who were at virtually no risk.
> The ethics around vaccination is it saved well over 1 million US lives without direct force, that’s a clear win by any reasonable ethical system.
Except that force was used, to restrict the rights of those who didn’t comply with mandates. And numerous atrocities have been conducted by exactly that utilitarian mindset.
You can claim you needed to violate Nuremberg, but the data doesn’t support that and I’ll continue to think you’re morally defective.
> The vaccines hospitalized at a rate higher than they prevented hospitalizations
The vaccines emptied the hospitals. Literally.
Two weeks after the vaccination (with any of the western trio, or the one China exported), the odds of people being hospitalized felt more than 90% every time somebody measured, everywhere.
The Chinese one was the "bad" one, with the odds falling by not much more than 90%. The other ones were much better.
> weren’t beloved to be QALY positive for a substantial period of the mandates,
False.
> Except that force was used.
Nobody was forcefully vaccinated, and in fact 10’s of millions of Americans never got vaccinated and a vastly larger percentage of them died. The numbers aren’t even vaguely comparable.
Which wasn't justified and should probably be an illegal requirement on privacy grounds. It doesn't make a difference if people doing work were vaccinated or not. It turns out to have had little in-practice effect on transmission, so the only important question is whether the passengers on things like a cruise were vaccinated themselves. They were evidence-free policies.
We had a great natural case study in Australia of COVID through a vaccinated population. Everyone caught it over the course of a month, the vaccines did basically nothing to stop the spread. They were pretty much only useful on an individual level which means there was never a requirement for any coercive measures.
1) Little as in "0, but maybe someone wants to quibble that technically it did something so I'll hedge". As far as I can tell literally everyone I know caught COVID, so it is fair to say the vaccine had no impact on transmission. Raising the obvious question of why it matters where people caught it.
2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now. Factor in that there'd probably be between 40 and 60% uptake of the vaccine just by people being prudent and the authoritarianism was not only a betrayal of the principles our civilisation is supposed to be defending but also ineffective.
And, as the current article showcases, extremely ill-advised.
3) That logic is silly. We don't mandate people do anything special about flus and that'd save far more lives than thousands. Do you consider people who advocate normal life even though influenza exists to be some sort of malign force in society? Even COVID is still killing people. 100s of thousands are still going to die from this thing. But you want to support an abandonment of basic human rights over a few thousand maybe-deaths that can't even be detected? In the extreme, more people have been purposefully murdered to secure basic liberties than that - these aren't the sort of rights that should be casually taken away.
> 1) Little as in "0, but maybe someone wants to quibble that technically it did something so I'll hedge". As far as I can tell literally everyone I know caught COVID, so it is fair to say the vaccine had no impact on transmission. Raising the obvious question of why it matters where people caught it.
Many hospitalizations and deaths from COVID occurred on subsequent infections.
> 2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now.
False, that’s simply not how infection works.
Part of the difference here is viral load on exposure. Vaccines and masks reduced viral loads in the air, which then gave people’s immune system longer to react. The immune system takes time to ramp up, but so do infections. A larger initial exposure can snowball even in reasonably healthy individuals.
So are you advocating authoritarianism on an ongoing plan? Because most COVID infections - and deaths - are still to come in the future. By this ineffective logic you are looking at 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands of deaths because we're reverting to a dignified baseline of respecting civil liberties and human rights. Are you comfortable with that?
> It doesn't make a difference if people doing work were vaccinated or not. It turns out to have had little in-practice effect on transmission
This is because of Delta. The original strain was substantially reduced but an order-of-magnitude efficacy jump made that moot. You’re right, however, that we should have focused on masking and air filtration since that was actually effective at preventing spread in close quarters like a school or workplace.
> We had a great natural case study in Australia of COVID through a vaccinated population. Everyone caught it over the course of a month, the vaccines did basically nothing to stop the spread. They were pretty much only useful on an individual level which means there was never a requirement for any coercive measures.
I am from Australia and this is all nonsense.
a) Vaccines are not designed to prevent transmission. They are designed to stop people from getting seriously ill and dying.
b) Vaccines and lockdowns were vital in high-density areas like Victoria and NSW which saw health care systems almost instantly overwhelmed. This was then causing mass deaths for both COVID and non-COVID cases. It was a public health emergency by every definition.
c) COVID was only allowed to spread once enough of the population was vaccinated. And that was because instead of needing to go into hospital people could stay at home for a few days. And even then it has taken years for the system to recover.
I hate to nitpick but as you called the previous comment nonsense
> Vaccines are not designed to prevent transmission. They are designed to stop people from getting seriously ill and dying.
Vaccines are commonly designed to prevent transmission. For example it is a critical aspect of the measles vaccine [1]. If a magic wand could've been waved the covid vaccines would've worked that way too, and that is why they were sold to the public as reducing transmission.
> Vaccines and lockdowns were vital in high-density areas like Victoria and NSW...
There are enough counterexamples of people and places where different trade-offs were chosen. e.g. Brisbane. To say they were vital is injecting your own opinion.
c) COVID was only allowed to spread once enough of the population was vaccinated... instead of needing to go into hospital people could stay at home... it has taken years for the system to recover.
The overwhelming majority of people were always just going to need to stay at home for a few days, even pre vaccine. The reason the system has taken so long to recover is due to the suboptimal approach we took where we elongated the period of reduced throughput through the hospital system. The effect here was threefold:
1) The backlog of surgeries needed to be cleared.
2) Many patients had worsened over covid and now required more intense treatment.
3) Preventable disease was not being caught in routine checkups etc.
The public policy for individual pain management and the public policy for highly contagious diseases can be different, for logical reasons that I hope are obvious.
Yeah, pain management is even more important and they got that wrong. COVID was just a flash in the pan then it seems to have settled down into the background as an issue, while chronic pain is an ongoing thing that is easier to study.
So even if we assume that they weight their efforts by importance that isn't particularly impressive for the COVID authoritarianism.
Well, yes. We have a society built around concepts of individual liberty and respect for basic human rights. So all the rules were rolled back. The question is why they were rolled out in the first place. Even to this day there is a distinct lack of evidence that any given rule was helpful. We successfully transitioned from a world where everyone was eventually going to get COVID to a world where everyone eventually got COVID and in hindsight it is hard to see what the authoritarian slant of the policies earned anyone. Except perhaps earmarking the people who should be kept out of positions of power.
Contagious diseases aren’t compatible with the fantasy that individual liberty is always the highest good. That is why decades ago our society realized the need for public health authorities that can temporarily override individual liberties to protect society.
Undoubtedly not all the COVID measures were perfect. Some ineffective measures were imposed, and some effective measures were not imposed. You can hindsight armchair quarterback that all you want, but there’s no question the authority to impose such measures is needed. And somebody (who thank heavens isn’t you or me) has to exercise that authority with only the information available at the time, and the highest possible stakes.
I don't think anyone is questioning the existence of the institutions; armies can do what armies want for example and there isn't much anyone can do about it unless the army agrees with their plans. Can't get rid of armies though, we just do what we can and live with the residual risk.
The issue is more that in this case the institutions did act, in a panicky and random fashion that seems to, on balance, not have helped but rather violated a large number of human rights and good principles for no particular gain. The only policies that seemed effective were quarantines, light contact tracing, removing red tape and funding R&D. We can do all those things without unduly coercing anyone, they're pretty minor inconveniences compared to the madness that was actually unleashed.
It seemed like you were questioning the need for the institution, but public health is as needed as defense, so maybe you’re equating them.
You left out vaccinations (obviously effective) and mask mandates (somewhat effective but certainly falls under minor inconvenience) — which are pretty standard public health playbook, so I’m assuming those aren’t considered part of the madness.
The lockdowns were pretty crazy, but recall their goal was mostly to avoid the breakdown of the entire health care system pre-vaccination. There wasn’t any precedent for how to do that.
> You left out vaccinations (obviously effective) and mask mandates (somewhat effective but certainly falls under minor inconvenience)
The authoritarian tactics used to impose both of those were ineffective, or at least can't be justified on the evidence. Otherwise all the people trying to justify their brush with their inner Nazi would be able to put up a good argument for what they advocated for.
Both measures failed to stop the spread of COVID, the evidence they had any effect on the number of people who eventually caught it is hard to some up with even as a thought experiment (elsewhere in the thread Retric theorised that the change in viral load would be significant, which is a weak attempt but the best I've seen so far, and also sounds hard to test for). In many cases the vaccines explicit weren't checked for effects on transmission.
There was a crisis, they banded together, identified the enemy withing and started a campaign to strip them of their rights. They knew they can't get their way with persuasion so they go straight to coercion and might-makes-right logic. Call them what you want, they aren't principled people.
Very much a scum rising to the top scenario. We saw the illiberals making a power play during COVID, they're cut from the same cloth as all the other authoritarians. They were even using the old "you're killing us" logic and people making up a you-struck-first narrative is a reasonable precursor to some really terrible things.
If the plan is to defend authoritarianism, I might just observe that "well they're targeting the right groups this time" is not a line that is going to get much traction with me. The problem here is not a group of people you've decided to dehumanise to the point where their basic rights aren't a factor. The problem is authoritarian tactics being visibly and enthusiastically used by people who's role is to uphold the opposite values.
If you put people in charge who only believe in using one bad tool, they eventually use it on everyone because they don't understand how to do things in a morally reasonable way.
I don't want to argue with you about whether it's authoritarian, I just want to say "Nazi" is overblown and ridiculous in this context.
> "the right groups"
It's not about which groups, it's about how the groups are defined that makes the analogy so broken. Attacking in certain ways based on any nationality is worth a Nazi comparison, while attacking based on mundane choices is not in the same category.
> If you put people in charge who only believe in using one bad tool, they eventually use it on everyone because they don't understand how to do things in a morally reasonable way.
Does this describe what happened? What is the "one bad tool"? I hope you don't mean "authoritarianism" because that's a circular argument.
That legal exemption was made possible by a law passed in 2005 which, at the time, was completely non-controversial. It's only after vaccines have become politicized that it suddenly became problematic for the government to take steps to protect its citizen's lives.
Potential for misuse is sort of a different outcome than traditional approval processes. That said, we have known this about opioids forever. And as far as I know, no one is suggesting there is any kind of addiction mechanism for vaccines.
Remember that the fast tracking of the development of the vaccine was a project of the administration in power at the time. The shifting political narrative has diminished this very important part of the discussion.
> I recall a lot of the manufacturers have a legal exemption from any liability for damage done by vaccines.
Without a liability exemption, no company would manufacture vaccines, the government would need to step in as a manufacturer. With the liability exemption law, the private sector makes the vaccines while the government assumes the liability, which is a pretty good solution in my opinion.
> In the United States, low profit margins and an increase in vaccine-related lawsuits led many manufacturers to stop producing the DPT vaccine by the early 1980s.[4][unreliable source?] By 1985, vaccine manufacturers had difficulty obtaining liability insurance.[10] The price of the DPT vaccine skyrocketed as a result, leading providers to curtail purchases, thus limiting availability. Only one company was still manufacturing pertussis vaccine in the US by the end of 1985.[10] Because of this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) in 1986, establishing a federal no-fault system to compensate victims of injury caused by mandated vaccines.[11][12]
a) Nobody has ever said that pharmaceutical companies should be blindly trusted.
b) The companies only have an exemption for COVID and similar emergencies and only when the damages are not caused by wilful misconduct. The idea being that getting the vaccines out sooner would save more lives than any side effects.
