Policies of envy and malice

I haven't talked politics much of late (for good reason) but we cannot pass this up: James Thompson, "Social Justice or Malicious Envy?". He's summarising Chien-An Lin and Timothy C. Bates, over at Edinburgh.

They take PJ O'Rourke's tack - taxation is involuntary, which means if you don't pay it you go to prison. Either way, you're getting punished until you cough up. It is torture, to be frank. On this assumption I too supported Enhanced Interrogation back in the Cheney years - I cannot see the difference between one punishment or the next, to achieve a given result, except maybe speed. A decade-plus ago I came around to thinking - if you don't want Enhanced Interrogation, don't start a war. But I am going off topic.

Lin and Bates, apud Thompson, then ask, what sort of person would resort to torture? which they boil down to character-traits. Top of the list is malicious envy. Then there is "instrumental harm" which I had trouble with, but it seems to derive from incidental harm: tolerance of an injustice (i.e. hurting an innocent) if by it, from the dragnet, you stop a criminal (by definition, someone else) from doing harm to others. We are all guilty of the latter as long as we accept a justice system of humans, note. Self-interest is third. Last is "communal fairness" which of course doesn't apply to those outside the commune, like a heretic or a racist or something.

So: CoVID Mitigation, usually lumped in as THE LOCKDOWN. All the mitigation options are imposed on others. Even Fauci had to admit your mask saves others, not you; your vaccine helps herd-immunity although it also saves you. Consider taking the tack of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, Dreddful Justice Roberts as some might call him: It's A Tax.

If we who supported mitigation look into our own souls, have we been innocent of these charges? Certainly we accepted a few myocard patients, as long as herd-immunity was attained. We also saved our own skins, lungs anyway.

Were we envious of the loud MAGA-hats who mocked us, and didn't follow the guidelines? In part - I think we were. Mostly, though, it stung when the MAGA-hats were calling us sheep and/or Karens.

This, I think, should be factored into the regression-analysis of support for/against a tax policy. "If you support this tax, you are going to be insulted by group X." If we had come to the conclusion that we needed the tax, in good faith; this little prophetic nugget would, I think, harden our position. We wouldn't be looking at The Mask or The Vaxx anymore - we'd be looking to punish group X. By The Lockdown, that is, to be imposed upon X by preference; to which I'll aver - I NEVER SUPPORTED PREFERENCE. "By preference" means the authorities allow group not-X to riot.