Tag Archives: Banality of Evil

COVID Politics and Collateral Damage

26 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by in Pandemic, Public Health

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Policymakers, public health experts, and the media responded to the coronavirus in ways that have often undermined public health and magnified the deadly consequences of the pandemic. Below I offer several examples of perverse politics and policy prescriptions, and a few really bad decisions by certain elected officials. Some of the collateral damage was intentional and motivated by an intent to inflict political damage on Donald Trump, and people of good faith should find that grotesque no matter their views on Trump’s presidency.

Politicized Treatment

The smug dismissal of hydroxychloraquine as Trumpian foolishness was a crime against humanity. We now know HCQ works as an early treatment and as a prophylactic against infection. It’s has been partly credited with stanching “hot spots” in India as well as contributing strongly to control of the contagion in Switzerland and in a number of other countries. According to epidemiologist Harvey Risch of the Yale School of Public Health, HCQ could save 75,000 to 100,000 lives if the drug is widely used. This is from Dr. Risch’s OpEd in Newsweek:

“On May 27, I published an article in the American Journal of Epidemiology (AJE) entitled, ‘Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis.’ That article, published in the world’s leading epidemiology journal, analyzed five studies, demonstrating clear-cut and significant benefits to treated patients, plus other very large studies that showed the medication safety. …

Since [then], seven more studies have demonstrated similar benefit. In a lengthy follow-up letter, also published by AJE, I discuss these seven studies and renew my call for the immediate early use of hydroxychloroquine in high-risk patients.”

Risch is careful to couch his statements in forward-looking terms, but this also implies that tens of thousands of lives could have been saved, or patients might have recovered more readily and without lasting harm, had use of the drug not been restricted. The FDA revoked its Emergency Use Authorization for HCQ on June 15th, alleging that it is not safe and has little if any benefit. An important rationale cited in the FDA’s memo was an NIH study of late-stage C19 patients that found no benefit and potential risks to HCQ, but this is of questionable relevance because the benefit appears to be in early-stage treatment or prophylaxis. Poor research design also goes for this study and this study, while this study shared in some shortcomings (e.g., and no use of and/or controls for zinc) and a lack of statistical power. Left-wing outlets like Politico seemed almost gleeful, and blissfully ignorant, in calling those studies “nails in the coffin” for HCQ. Now, I ask: putting the outcomes of the research aside, was it really appropriate to root against a potential treatment for a serious disease, especially back in March and April when there were few treatment options, but even now?

Then we have the state governors who restricted the use of HCQ for treating C19, such as Gretchen Whitmer (MI) and Steve Sisolak (NV). Andrew Cuomo (NY) decided that HCQ could be dispensed only for hospital use, exactly the wrong approach for early stage treatment. And all of this resistance was a reaction to Donald Trump’s optimism about the promise of HCQ. Yes, there was alarm that lupus patients would be left without adequate supplies, but the medication is a very cheap, easy to produce drug, so that was never a real danger. Too much of the media and politicians have been complicit in denying a viable treatment to many thousands of C19 victims. If you were one of the snarky idiots putting it down on social media, you are either complicit or simply a poster child for banal evil.

Seeding the Nursing Homes

The governors of several states issued executive orders to force nursing homes to accept C19 patients, which was against CMS guidance issued in mid-March. The governors were Andrew Cuomo (NY), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), Gavin Newsom (CA), Tom Wolf (PA), and Phil Murphy (PA). This was a case of stupidity more than anything else. These institutions are home to the segment of the population most vulnerable to the virus, and they have accounted for about 40% of all C19 deaths. Nursing homes were ill-prepared to handle these patients, and the governors foolishly and callously ordered them to house patients who required a greater level of care and who represented an extreme hazard to other residents and staff.

Party & Protest On

Then of course we had the mayor of New York City, Bill De Blasio, who urged New Yorkers to get out on the town in early March. That was matched in its stupidity by the array of politicians and health experts who decided, having spent months proselytizing the need to “stay home”, that it was in their best interests to endorse participation in street protests that were often too crowded to maintain effective social distance. That’s not a condemnation of those who sought to protest peacefully against police brutality, but it was not a good or consistent recommendation in the domain of public health. Thankfully, the protests were outside!

Testing, Our Way Or the Highway

The FDA and CDC were guilty of regulatory overreach in preventing early testing for C19, and were responsible for many lives lost early in the pandemic. By the time the approved CDC tests revealed that the virus was ramping up drastically in March, the country was already behind in getting a handle on the spread of the virus, quarantining the infected, and tracing their contacts. There is no question that this cost lives.

Masks… Maybe, But Our Way Or the Highway

U.S. public health authorities were guilty of confused messaging on the efficacy of masks early in the pandemic. As Joel Zinberg notes in City Journal, Anthony Fauci admitted that his own minimization of the effectiveness of masks was motivated by a desire to prevent a shortage of PPE for health care workers:

“In discouraging mask use, Fauci—for decades, the nation’s foremost expert on viral infectious diseases—was not acting as a neutral interpreter of settled science but as a policymaker, concerned with maximizing the utility of the limited supply of a critical item. An economist could have told him that there was no need to misinform the public. Letting market mechanisms work and relaxing counterproductive regulations would ease shortages. Masks for health-care workers would be available if we were willing to pay higher prices; those higher prices, in turn, would elicit more mask production.”

Indeed, regulators made acquisition of adequate supplies of PPE more difficult than necessary via compliance requirements, “price gouging” rules, and import controls.

Bans on Elective Surgery

Another series of unnecessary deaths was caused by various bans on elective surgeries across the U.S. (also see here), and we’re now in danger of repeating that mistake. These bans were thought to be helpful in preserving hospital capacity, but hospitals were significantly underutilized for much of the pandemic. Add to that the fright inspired by official reaction to C19, which keeps emergency rooms empty, and you have a universe of diverse public health problems to grapple with. As I said on this blog a couple of months ago:

“… months of undiagnosed cardiac and stroke symptoms; no cancer screenings, putting patients months behind on the survival curve; deferred procedures of all kinds; run-of-the-mill infections gone untreated; palsy and other neurological symptoms anxiously discounted by victims at home; a hold on treatments for all sorts of other progressive diseases; and patients ordinarily requiring hospitalization sent home. And to start back up, new health problems must compete with all that deferred care. Do you dare tally the death and other worsened outcomes? Both are no doubt significant.”

Lockdowns

The lockdowns were unnecessary and ineffectual in their ability to control the spread of the virus. A study of 50 countries published by The Lancet last week found the following:

“Increasing COVID-19 caseloads were associated with countries with higher obesity … median population age … and longer time to border closures from the first reported case…. Increased mortality per million was significantly associated with higher obesity prevalence … and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) …. Reduced income dispersion reduced mortality … and the number of critical cases …. Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.”

That should have been obvious for a virus that holds little danger for prime working-age cohorts who are most impacted by economic lockdowns.

Like the moratoria on elective surgeries, lockdowns did more harm than good. Livelihoods disappeared, business were ruined, savings were destroyed, dreams were shattered, isolation set in, and it continues today. These kinds of problems are strongly associated with health troubles, family dysfunction, drug and alcohol abuse, and even suicide. It’s ironic that those charged with advising on matters pertaining to public health should focus exclusively on a single risk, recommending solutions that carry great risk themselves without a second thought. After all, the protocol in reviewing new treatments sets the first hurdle as patient safety, but apparently that didn’t apply in the case of shutdowns.

Even as efforts were made to reopen, faulty epidemiological models were used to predict calamitous outcomes. While case counts have risen in many states in the U.S. in June and July, deaths remain far below model predictions and far below deaths recorded during the spring in the northeast.

One last note: I almost titled this post “Attack of the Killer Morons”, but as a concession to what is surely a vain hope, I decided not to alienate certain readers right from the start.

 

 

How Empowered Bleeding Hearts Do Harden

01 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in Collectivism, Socialism, The Road To Serfdom, Tyranny

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Here’s an empirical regularity: altruists attaining power to collectivize society’s productive machinery do not stay nice for long. In fact, aggressive pursuit of their goals might compel them to participate in brutal tyranny. But why? What happens to these sweet egalitarians who are, after all, imbued with the most earnest desire to elevate the common man by equalizing the fruits of society’s bounty?

Bryan Caplan offers Venezuela as Exhibit A in “A Short Hop from Bleeding Heart to Mailed Fist“:

“When Hugo Chavez began ruling Venezuela, he sounded like a classic bleeding-heart – full of pity for the poor and downtrodden. Plenty of people took him at his words – not just Venezuelans, but much of the international bleeding-heart community. … Almost every Communist dictatorship launches with mountains of humanitarian propaganda. Yet ultimately, almost everyone who doesn’t fear for his life wakes up and smells the tyranny.”

Venezuela’s collapse is merely the most recent in a long history of socialist debacles. Authoritarians certainly come in other stripes, but collectivists seem especially prone to the development of vicious alter-egos. But again, why?

Caplan knows the answer, and in something of a dialectical exercise, he proposes several explanations for the nice-to-nasty phenomenon. It’s not the infiltration of “bad guys”. Plenty of evidence suggests that the same people are at both ends of the transition, and for now let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the nicest elements of the avant guarde, or even those who go simply along on the basis of their idealism. It’s implausible that such humanitarian souls could believe it will be necessary, at the outset, to crush their opposition by force. Moreover, that approach risks immediate outcomes that are far too dire. Might an authoritarian or militaristic turn be necessary to deter hostile foreign actors who might attempt to foil collectivization? If so, it still doesn’t explain why subjugation of domestic citizens is ultimately accepted as a legitimate use of force by sincere altruists.

Caplan moves on to more compelling explanations of the disorder. Perhaps the expression of bleeding heart intentions is propaganda from the very start. Perhaps the rhetoric is really just hate speech disguised as noble intent. Surely those two explanations comport with the behavior of those having uglier motives for collectivism: envy and vengeance. And while those elements are certain to be active in any socialist front, they don’t explain why the bleeders also abecome beaters.

The best explanation for the horrid metamorphosis of empowered altruists is that egalitarian policies simply do not work very well. Caplan says:

“Bleeding-heart policies work so poorly that only the mailed fist can sustain them. In this story, the bleeding hearts are at least initially sincere. If their policies worked well enough to inspire broad support, the bleeding hearts would play nice. Unfortunately, bleeding-heart policies are exorbitantly expensive and often directly counter-productive. Pursued aggressively, they predictably lead to disaster. At this point, a saintly bleeding heart will admit error and back off. A pragmatic bleeding heart will compromise. The rest, however, respond to their own failures with rage and scapegoating. Once you institutionalize that rage and scapegoating, the mailed fist has arrived.” [Caplan’s emphasis]

The compulsory nature of policies advocated by leftists makes their system of social organization inherently unstable. With the imposition of every rule limiting the operation of private markets, with every compromise of the price mechanism, and with every new confiscatory policy, the economy becomes more feeble and inflexible. As several commenters on Caplan’s post note, socialists are people who simply do not understand economics.

The path to collectivism always involves promises that are impossible to keep. Personal concerns must be renounced in favor of the collective. Individuals are denied their freedom to act on creative impulses and their ability to cooperate freely with others in pursuit of personal well-being. Those are human rights that are quite unnatural to part with. That means it is impossible to achieve the collective without an implicit or explicit threat of enforcement through violent police power. Bleeding hearts will actually participate in the inevitable tyranny because they are so convinced of the righteousness of their cause.

Whether you call it socialism or social democracy makes no difference. The latter merely cloaks tyranny in a majoritarian dominance that would have enraged our nation’s founders. They understood the despotism inherent in allowing a majority to dictate the existence of basic rights. However, the bleeding hearts are always sure they know “what’s right” without weighing implications beyond the injustice du jour. That demands the application of force. And when confronted with the catastrophic results of their peremptory whimsy, they have no choice but to use still more force.

The banality of evil is truly a progressive disease. Fortunately, we have a preventive vaccine: the U.S. Constitution. But it will work only if we’re wise enough to rely on the framer’s original intent.

 

Evil Force Multiplication

15 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Liberty, Socialism, Tyranny

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big-govt compassion

Following up on “Socialism Is Concentrated Power“, check out “Because government is a force multiplier for evil, a vote for the small government candidate is a vote for good” from the Bookworm Room. I’m four days late making my 2nd anniversary post on Sacred Cow Chips, so this is it. I’ll try to keep it brief so I can get it out before bedtime on a school night.

I don’t agree with everything in Bookworm’s analysis, but I certainly agree with the general thrust:

“The problem with government is that, as it grows, no matter the original good intentions behind it, it invariably becomes a force multiplier for evil. Thus, once government power passes a certain point, government becomes the equivalent of a bull in a china shop, with its every motion causing massive damage. Incidentally, the china in that shop is always you — the individual.“

Bookworm discusses two major forms of force multiplication of evil by the state: money and death. Governments are incredible graft machines and resource wastrels. More tragically, the many genocidal acts over the course of history would not have been possible without government as the machine of authority and “legitimization”. Fear of the government’s police power may ultimately spur normal people to participate in “banal” acts of unspeakable evil. And here, Bookworm points out a few ironies about the “nice” people who root for state control:

“A compassionate government will talk itself into euthanizing people who, because they are very old or sick, use up more than their fair share of medical care. This has already happened under England’s National Health Service, which kills off old, sick people, and whose ‘ethicists’ advocate even more killings (out of ‘compassion’ of course).

A compassionate government dedicated to efficiency will convince itself that individuals or organizations that stand in the way of efficiency must be controlled and, if they won’t be controlled, must be destroyed. After all, without mandated efficiency, people will suffer.

A compassionate government dedicated to “fairness” (usually thought of in economic terms), will quickly conclude that it’s entirely unfair that one distinct group or another is wealthier or healthier than the rest. That group must be brought to heel and, failing that, destroyed.

A compassionate government dedicated to national purity will naturally have to kill the impure within its borders and, once that’s done, it would be even more compassionate to extend that purity throughout the world.

Even the most murderous theocracies will argue that compassion guides them. Their tortures, executions, and Holy Wars are meant to bring people closer to God, which is the highest form of human existence. Isn’t that a nice, compassionate thing to do?“

Bookworm offers praise to the genius of the U.S. founding fathers in crafting governing principles designed to limit government power. And Bookworm recognizes Senator Ted Cruz as the only major party candidate to consistently stand for small government and constitutional principles. I’m not all in on this endorsement, as Cruz has taken stands and aligned himself with individuals not supportive of civil liberties such as gay marriage. However, in many important ways, Cruz recognizes the danger of government power. Bookworm might have mentioned Gary Johnson, the likely Libertarian Party nominee, as the most consistent critic of big government among the names likely to appear on presidential ballots in the fall.

Some might object to Bookworm’s discussion of the many failed experiments with government domination of society by noting that he never mentions the alleged success of European social democracies, particularly the Nordic states. Sweden and Denmark are the most cited examples. However, Europe is not an economic success story, with median incomes comparable to states with the lowest incomes in the U.S. Moreover, the “Nordic Nirvana” is something of a myth. In “How Laissez-Faire Made Sweden Rich“, Johan Norberg gives a detailed history of Sweden’s political and economic evolution:

“It was not socialist policies that turned Sweden into one of the world’s richest countries. When Sweden got rich, it had one of the most open and deregulated economies in the world, and taxes were lower than in the United States and most other western countries. The Social Democrats kept most of those policies intact until the 1970s, when they thought that those excellent foundations—unprecedented wealth, a strong work ethic, an educated work force, world-class exports industries, and a relatively honest bureaucracy—were so stable that the government could tax and spend and build a generous cradle-to-grave welfare state on them.

They couldn’t. At least not without costs. Because that welfare state began to erode the conditions that had made the model viable in the first place. And the fourth richest country became the 14th richest within three decades.“

Fortunately, for more than 70 years, Western Europe has avoided the kind of dire, genocidal consequences that often flow from a dominant state, but Europe has stagnated economically. Hazards await them as a growing and increasingly diverse population competes for diminished economic gains; government control is a dead-weight on their prospects. I hope we can avoid that fate in the U.S., though we’re already far down the road. Like the Bookworm says, vote for small government!

 

 

The Banality of Evil Is No Defense

31 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by in Tyranny

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Conspiracy-film

Psychology is not my usual bailiwick, but this article “questioning the banality of evil” caught my interest. A long-accepted view in the field is that ordinary people are willing to commit heinous acts under authoritative instructions or when they find themselves in certain kinds of roles. Does that view somehow imply that such a perpetrator is less accountable because they were “just following orders”, or because they were overwhelmed by the pressure imposed by their role?

The authors of the article, S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher, cite recent research challenging the standard view. They argue that even when individuals are tasked with doing evil, they are often fully engaged and even creative in the execution of their assignments. They discuss the case of the Nazi tyranny and especially Adolf Eichmann, who was one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. His trial on war crimes, however, originally reinforced the “banality of evil” narrative:

“… Eichmann worked hard to undermine the charge that he was a dangerous fanatic by presenting himself as an inoffensive pen-pusher. … [but] Eichmann [was] a man who identified strongly with anti-semitism and Nazi ideology; a man who did not simply follow orders but who pioneered creative new policies; a man who was well aware of what he was doing and was proud of his murderous ‘achievements’.“

This reminds me of a great film called “Conspiracy“, in which Stanley Tucci is brilliant in the role of Eichmann. The film depicts a meeting of the top echelon of the Nazi bureaucracy, based on actual meeting notes, at which the “Jewish question” is addressed. Anyone who has ever attended a fairly large corporate meeting will experience an eerie familiarity with the banality of the proceedings, at least until a certain point. These are bureaucrats. Soon enough, however, it becomes clear that the participants are discussing something horrific, despite the opaque jargon and their hesitation to give voice to the plain meaning of the agenda. First, a consensus has to be established. But like so many corporate meetings, the consensus and the outcome are preordained. There are objections, and some of the participants voice them more strongly than others. They are ultimately either cajoled or bullied into submission. But those objectors do not blindly accept the evil they are being asked to do. On the other hand, the monsters putting forward the killing agenda, including Eichmann, know exactly what they are doing and believe in it.

Haslam and Reicher insist that “ingenuity” is more descriptive of evil actions performed by individuals under tyranny than “banality”; that’s a takeaway from “Conspiracy” as well. However, Haslam and Reicher present these competing characterizations of evil-doing as if they are mutually exclusive hypotheses. In fact, it’s likely that these two “kinds” of evil coexist and are almost certainly complementary in their effects. Is there any reason to rule out the possibility that some individuals are simply “good” soldiers who faithfully follow orders? Who, like the timid Mr. Twimble in “How To Succeed…”, always play it “the company way”?  They might not be the most intelligent members of society, but there are certainly those who will do as they are told, and there are others who might need motivation to act. In fact, the authors admit as much in their discussion of leadership as a catalyst for action by others:

“… people are surrounded by would-be leaders who tell them what to make of the world around them. For this reason, the study of leadership must be a central component of any analysis of tyranny and outgroup hostility. Indeed, tyrannical leaders only thrive by convincing us that we are in crisis, that we face threat and that we need their strong decisive action to surmount it.“

This is where the distinctions get muddy. I’m no psychologist, but to my way of thinking, further action and support for tyrannical evil by the members of a motivated in-group may be quite banal. Even a conscious decision to follow abhorrent orders in one’s own self-interest may qualify as an act of banality.

A group may well be convinced by their leaders that their actions are right, and that is frightening. Some will act consciously and viciously. Some will attempt to resist. Under great pressure, not all are capable of marshaling sufficient moral or intellectual resistance to the call to participate in evil acts, but none of that that offers justification. Banal or otherwise, participation in heinous acts against an out-group cannot be forgiven by mankind.