[650]

This article isn't vague at all. It references various sources, and uses precise language (if you can recognize it) to convey its message. Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but the fact that the government has "lesser" educated Fraud analysts, chooses to ask for reimbursement of overbilling, and many more nuanced topics talked about in the article is not vague.

[sdwr]

It's very indirect. The message is "the government is soft on fraud, partially because of liberal values", but the author does everything possible to not actually say it.

[tptacek]

I don't think that's indirect at all. It's pretty clearly what did in fact happen in Minnesota. I don't read the author as claiming it's endemic to liberal values, any more than the isomorphic pathologies are endemic to the finance industry (which Patrick also writes about), or the defense industry. Again: it's easy to find Democratic sources saying the same thing.

Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge that Minnesota fucked this up badly? What is that going to cost us? The attempts to downplay it seem pretty delusive.

[wredcoll]

Well, we live in a world where someone ran for president on the basis of "stopping welfare fraud" that turned out to be mostly a myth, so, you know, context is a thing.

As the article literally says, a whole bunch of people got sent to prison, that seems like pretty solid evidence.

The question is: now what?

[tptacek]

Run the rest of them down? Figure out the total scope of the fraud, so we can enact countermeasures to prevent anything like it from happening again?

Fraud targeting social welfare programs is a grave crime; it strikes at public support for those programs. It enriches criminals very specifically at the expense of those people who would most benefit from the program.

[wredcoll]

So what is supposed to change based on that? Pay more for better fraud investigators? Accept a lower burden of proof like stripe et al do? What's the take away here?

[nickff]

If you want a TLDR; style take-away, the last paragraph is a good place to start:

>"Responsible actors in civil society have a mandate to aggressively detect and interdict fraud. If they do not, they cede the field to irresponsible demagogues. They will not be careful in their conclusions. They will not be gentle in their proposals. They will not carefully weigh consequences upon the innocent. But they will be telling a truth that the great and the good are not.

The public will believe them, because the public believes its lying eyes."

[wredcoll]

Ahh, reminds me of the classic appeal.

"If you don't do <fascist thing> now, the real fascists will take over!"

[nickff]

Is auditing state-subsidized service providers fascistic?

From this piece, it seems like the state auditor detected some fraud, but there was little follow-up from either the state or 'responsible journalists', so the sensationalists came in with a (predictably) extreme take, after which everyone started slinging mud. The sensationalism could have been forestalled by better auditing by the state, or journalism by large-scale media. I am not sure what part of this is fascist.

[wredcoll]

Except the article does mention a whole bunch of people who were investigated, arrested and convicted.

So again, now what? Are they supposed to hire more investigators? Work harder? Require less evidence? What part of the system is supposed to change and how?

[em-bee]

to aggressively detect and interdict fraud

is fascistic, because being aggressive hurts those that want to do it right but are not trusted. an aspect of fascism is to not trust its own people.

[Redoubts]

Posts like this make it clearer to me every day why Trump won twice

[zahlman]

This is not a reasonable characterization of the text. The proposed action is not at all fascist.

[skybrian]

McKenzie uses paraphrases to avoid writing certain keywords. For example, he never writes "DOGE" or "Elon Musk" in this article. Instead, he writes "We had a poorly-calibrated federal initiative led by a charismatic tech entrepreneur."

If you've been reading the news then you can decode these paraphrases, but they do make his articles significantly harder to read.

I'm tempted to ask an LLM to replace them with more straightforward references.

[wredcoll]

Yeah that part was a bit weird. Is he trying to avoid being sued or something?

[bootsmann]

It references sources that don’t claim what it says they do. Notably the Minnesota report alleging 50% fraud does not say that.