AOC's Justifications of Violence

Experiencing the violence: "This collective American experience, which is so twisted to have in the wealthiest nation in the world, all of that pain that people are experiencing is being concentrated on this event," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) to reporters, commenting on the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, presumably at the hand of Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old with chronic pain who was apprehended following the shooting. "This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that ppl interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them. People go homeless over the financial devastation of a diagnosis that doesn't get addressed or the amount they're gonna have to cover with a surprise bill and things like that. And when we kind of talk about how systems are violent in this country in this passive way, our privatized health care system is like that for a huge amount of Americans."

Gets pretty freaky when you realize how long the list is for "things lefties experience as violence." https://t.co/6DuOh2BzBX

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) December 12, 2024

I do not know what "experience as violence" means or how the denial of a health care claim could possibly be considered violence. It's not hard to see the direct lineage of this way of thinking, given that some progressive activists and Democratic politicians and elites in academia have spent the better part of the last decade claiming that words can be violence. The idea of what ought to be considered violence has been expanded—a bit of linguistic trickery that seems hollow and patently false to people who have actual proximity to true violence; pablum that only gets spouted by those who are quite sheltered.

Ocasio-Cortez is not only wrong to justify a murder, but she is also wrong on the merits: Government-run health care (which she supports, citing Canada specifically) does not erase suffering or indignity within the medical system. Sometimes it's the cause.

Take the case of Adam Burgoyne, a man from Montreal who, on the cusp of turning 40, suffered an aneurysm a week ago today. "Had a bit of a health scare last night, but thankfully it wasn't a heart attack," he wrote on December 5. "Not sure what it was, though, because once they made sure I wasn't dying I was thrown out into the waiting room and 6 hours later I said f*ck it and went home. Canadian health care, folks. Best in the world." He died the next day.

Burgoyne's tragic story has been making the rounds on the internet, but it's one of many examples of delayed care that ends up being a denial of care because the person passes away before doctors actually figure out what is wrong with them. "Universal" health care ends up being not so universal after all. Tradeoffs aren't erased in any medical system.

Canadian patients waited longer than ever this year for medical treatment.

Learn more: https://t.co/o4NCdiP2wv pic.twitter.com/KfnufljsW6

— The Fraser Institute (@FraserInstitute) December 12, 2024

Scenes from New York: "N.Y.C. Grocery Prices Are High. Could City-Owned Stores Help?" asks an imbecilic New York Times headline from yesterday. Let me go ahead and save you a click: No, absolutely not. Do not even think about it. This is not the way.

Or, go ahead and do it. Open "five municipal grocery stores—one in each borough" and let me film it for Reason, I dare you.

QUICK HITS

• "A more woo-woo term for complete audience capture…might be egregoric possession," writes Mary Harrington at her Substack on Lily Phillips, the British OnlyFans performer who recently had sex with 100 men in one day. "I've touched on the concept of 'egregores' before: it's a concept that comes out of occult theory, that describes collective entities arising from (or perhaps perceived by) multiple human consciousnesses. The key point is multiplicity: the intuition that a swarm or composite awareness can have agency of a kind, even if this is difficult to parse from the individualistic, human perspective.…I want to consider the possibility that Phillips' stunt is more intelligible understood not in terms of liberal feminism or the sexual revolution or whatever, but as an instance of what we might describe as egregoric capture, and the medievals would have called demonic possession."
• "In another time and place, none of this would have happened to her," writes Louise Perry of the aforementioned stunt. "Phillips is driven by two very modern forces: the OnlyFans business model, which financially rewards this kind of shocking stunt, and the ideology of liberal feminism, which she has absorbed without a moment's thought."
• "Trump's economic advisers are considering doubling the state and local tax deduction, a popular—but expensive—tax break that could deliver big savings to many residents of New York, New Jersey, and California," reports Bloomberg. SALT deductions primarily benefit people who have high property taxes to pay and who incur high income taxes from their states and localities—so high-earners, not low-income people. (I've written about the "working rich" before, also sometimes called HENRYs, and find this topic generally fascinating. Why would we ever want to disincentivize high-earners climbing their way up to the top, living in metropolitan centers, and generating enormous amounts of productivity for their industries (medicine, law, finance) and thus society? This is exactly what we ought to want. And why is it that their states and cities treat them as cash cows instead of people we should want to keep around?)
• New Just Asking Questions on how trans issues have scrambled our politics (and how the left can recover):

• Wild:

Perhaps the funniest day of my life was watching the Facebook lawyers explain to @peterthiel that he counts as diverse under the then-mandatory Nasdaq DEI rules. https://t.co/kpVVwkfkCr

— Marc Andreessen ???????? (@pmarca) December 12, 2024

• Congratulations to Elon Musk! Very cool.

SpaceX HQ will now officially be in the city of Starbase, Texas! https://t.co/zpN4t3mJQT

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 13, 2024