If anyone wants to talk about the debates, or anything else vaguely political, have at it here!
Also, I’m not exactly sure why someone wanted to make wax Romney and Obama heads, but I figured I’d put these up in case any of you were ever wondering what that would look like.
@Ice – I found a Steinbeck quote the other day that I think beautifully sums up the American mindset towards pretty much everything:
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
And to diogenes’ point about charity vs. government intervention – yes, private charities can definitely take care of all the world’s ills. That’s why if you look at the history of the world no one was EVER hungry or homeless prior to 1900, and the only reason we started weaving social safety nets in the twentieth century was in an evil Marxist effort to make folks more dependent on the nation-state. Wake,up sheeple!
All right, off to get the kids ready for school.
@nat
A lot of classical Greek philosophers were like that. At least in my experience, you’d get Socrates who would constantly interrupt people to ask about the meaning of what it is to be good. You’d get the Stoics who were decidedly…interesting, in their actions. To be honest, I think ancient Greece as a whole would have been an interesting place and time to live.
@aworld
I’ve spent too much time around budding political philosophers to have any truck with those kind of hijinks 😉
Fourty years ago, health insurance was 1/4 the price of today in adjusted dollars. Everyone was just as healthy, if not more so. Everyone had more choices, and, any health insurance was accepted pretty much everywhere. Fourty years later, with all the state involvement, it’s waaaay more expensive and less effecient. In fact, you get only get about 1/4 the bang for your buck. I guess everything we’ve done since then is the exact wrong thing to do.
Of course the state will tell you that you need them, they work for the elite so the elite get wealthier. Obamacare is handled by the federal reserve, which is owned by the rockefellers. The rockefellers and rothchilds have joined into a solid block a few months ago. All news is filtered through reuters, which is owned by the rothchilds.
Rothchild, Rockefeller, Windsor, Warburg, Oppenhiemer, Moan, Loeb, Morgan, Lehman, Monsato and a few others. Put together, they own your insurances, shipping, big pharma, all the worlds banking, the food industry, the war machine, the media, the education system. Actually everything. With every new state policy the gulf between the elite and the rest of us widens. Whoever controls the wealth controls the world.
Over on Gawker, someone in comments asked why we need the safety net when we did “just fine in the 30’s and 40’s.” Yup, we did JUST FINE when 9 MILLION PEOPLE DIED OF STARVATION during the Great Depression. Oh yeah, and what pulled us out of the Depression? Was it charity? No, it was the creation of the entitlement programs and federal work programs that we supposedly don’t need. His response to the twenty or so people who pointed out what a inane comment he’d made? Obviously, he was talking about AFTER the Great Depression. OMFG. I often wonder how young these trolls are. If they aren’t teenagers, they have no excuse.
And a few days ago another commenter over there said that we should just cut off the healthcare benefits of 80 year olds and let them die because they’re too expensive and they won’t be around much longer anyway. You Randoids need to go Galt already. Get an island, go there, and fully support yourselves without any assistance from the outside world. Society will be just fine without you. And I give you about a year.
I’m not ‘greedy and uncharitable’ with my money. But I prefer to save my time and my energy in making decisions that I’m actually competent to make.
What you’re suggesting is that everyone should be spending lots of their time balancing out the competing needs of sick children, recovering alcoholics, victims of crime, dementing elderly, services to the blind, early childhood intervention, cancer prevention, organ donation, mental health and on and on and on and on.
I’d much rather hand over the money to people who are paid to deal with the sick, the distressed, the helpless along with all the others. Taxes are the best way to do that. I can spend my time and effort on things that I’m competent or interested or otherwise willing to engage in. Or spend my life playing with children or kittens or with my head in a book.
@blitzgal – You’re a lot more generous than I am. I was thinking things would go all Lord of the Flies after the two week mark. That’s when everyone would run out of clean underwear and then realize that Mom wasn’t there to do the laundry.
Mansplaining – the U.S. right-wing internet version!
That reminds me of something I heard during an interview with a British economist (forgive me, I can’t remember who it was). The talk show host asked him about his opinion of the socialized medicine. He said he was in favor personally and professionally, and as aside mentioned that the only horror stories he ever heard about the NHS always came from Americans, while he was in the United States.
Because living with a certain something always gives you a flawed, biased opinion about how it works, and only outsiders who’ve heard some guy on TV talk about it a couple times have the real inside scoop!
@Fitzy
One pundit in America was ranting in the Investor’s Business Daily about the horrors of socialised medicine and informed their readers that in the UK we have ‘death panels’ to decide whether to treat someone or not*, then said “IMAGINE what would have happened if Stephen Hawking was born in England!!!”. Professor Hawking was swift to correct them, but apparently their retraction only clarified that Hawking lives in England, not that the NHS has saved his life on multiple occasions.
(*Basically this was hyperbolically extended from the fact that there’s a group called the National Institute for Clinical Excellence that decides whether new drugs are cost-effective enough to be provided on the NHS. It’s incredibly rare for them to turn one down.)
Horror stories about the NHS…there was that one dinosaur of a doctor who angrily informed me that “this doesn’t hurt” while inserting a speculum, because clearly I was imagining the discomfort and it wasn’t that, well, let’s just say it’s a good thing he didn’t decide to go into surgery? Or the oncologist who went on vacation without telling my mother he was going to in the middle of her cancer treatment?
The second one I can believe might, maybe, have been a bit more polite under a system where patients were paying through the nose. The first one I suspect would have been a jerk regardless of which system he worked under.
Somehow neither of those experiences has convinced me that a system in which some people aren’t eligible for cancer treatment or free smear tests at all is the better option.
@diogenes
I just think that once you consent to statism, its hypocritical to complain about other peoples statism. Just as much as I think conservatives should stay out of the liberals bedrooms, I think liberals should stay out of conservative peoples pockets.
Then why even pay for roads and schools? Sorry, I’m just not buying that taxes=oppression. Taxes are what we pay to have a just and civilized society. Equating the rich having to pay taxes with outlawing gay marriage is just facile false equivalence.
Your example of a mental institution is perfect for this. As much as I wouldn’t like mentally ill people in my neighborhood, I still think its unethical to cage them when they haven’t done anything wrong. Involuntarily institutionalizing people is terrible.
Which just goes to show that you don’t know jack shit about mental health treatment. People generally cannot be involuntarily hospitalized unless they are a danger to self or others, and then only for 72 hours at a space (longer stretches are possible if the danger to self or others continues, but court approval is usually required in these cases. Cuts in mental health, where I am at any rate, usually result in cuts to the programs that keep chronically mentally ill out of the hospital–case management, psychotherapy, etc. Also, what I do is work with families with young children. We do in-home services to help with developmental, behavioral, parenting, and mental health concerns. The fact the you saw “mental health” and went immediately to One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest means you don’t really know anything about mental health as it is practiced today, in the US at any rate.
Like nearly all glibertarians, you know fuck-all about what government you hate actually does.
@thenatfantastic – That reminds me of this stupid chain email I got three or four times in college. They gave you a list of hypothetical pregnancy situations, and asked you to choose whether you would carry on with the pregnancy or abort. When you got to the end, they informed you that you would have terminated Einstein, Mother Theresa, Beethoven, and JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF. I wondered at the time if this was a money-back guarantee that any baby I chose to carry to term would be a genius, a great humanitarian, or the son of god, but I decided no to ask the sender (unlike a certain U.S. pundit, she was a sweet person). You can hypothesize ’till the cats come home, but it doesn’t change a thing in the end.
@Cassandrasays – Similar things have happened to me (uncomfy, rude lady exams) and my dad (oncologists’ office forgetting to call to reschedule his chemo, and us showing up to a closed office) under the U.S. fee-per-service system. Jerks exist and mistakes happen, no matter how everyone is compensated.
@CassandraSays
My NHS horror stories:
My dad once went into surgery. He was lying in bed weeks later when the surgeon came up to him and said “you know, most of my patients are up and walking around by now!” My dad is quadruplegic.
There was also the time I had to go back to the doctor’s three times because they kept giving me the wrong medication, and by the end it was getting a little scary because I was running out.
Please note the lack of death panels and also the fact that we could still access healthcare.
________________
Also, I really hope I’ve misinterpreted Inky Truff with that last statement…
Oh, and those charities that glibertarians love to talk about? I work for a non-profit charitable organization, a 501(c)(3). Guess what? 95% of our funding comes from the government. I’ve worked for several non-profits and the story is always the same. These organizations would have to shut their doors without government funding. I suppose private donations could make up some of the difference, but I wouldn’t rely on it any more than I’d rely on a unicorn materializing out of nowhere.
This is why I regard libertarianism as a crock. Nearly every libertarian I’ve met doesn’t really know ANYTHING about the services government actually provides or funds. It’s all ignorance and wishful thinking, which is no way to run a society.
@Fitzy — you didn’t misinterpret him. It was a rape joke. Choof is keeping it as classy as ever.
Yeah, I’ve heard lots of stories of NHS doctors who were notably lacking in bedside manner/empathy/basic common decency, but if they choice is between occasionally rude and/or incompetent service or no service at all for a substantial chunk of the population, I’ll take the rude doctors, thanks.
Thing is, unless you’re rich, you’re not likely to be immune from horror stories in a privatized health care system either. Your provider is more likely to spend time talking to you about your insurance than your health.
I have a horror story that I refer to as the “Dental Adventure of Aught Nine” that involves a botched wisdom tooth surgery, a misdiagnosed abscess, being unable to reach my surgeon, spending four days in two different hospitals, three unannounced surgeries under local anesthetic, and being told not to cry while my throat was being cut open from my mouth.
I still have flashbacks. It cost me thousands of dollars. And I was insured.
(USA! USA! USA!)
That’s why I’m saying that the occasional horror story is preferable to not having any medical care available at all. Also I suspect that the patterns by which certain groups of people (young people, fat people, poor people, POC, women) are more likely than, say, wealthy white men to be on the receiving end of rude, unprofessional treatment from medical personnel occur regardless of the way a particular country’s healthcare system is organized, because that part’s not about the system, it’s about some medical personnel taking their prejudices to work with them.
Oh, AIT, the wit! Seriously, you’re wasting yourself here. You should spread a little joy where it would truly be appreciated. We humorless feminists just aren’t up to so much scathingly humorous political commentary.
And Truthie comes in with a prison rape joke, proving yet again what an asshole he is. Bannation time.
LOL! Nah, they’d just wear the same underwear. I figure it’ll go Lord of the Flies after they run out of their stash of processed foodstuffs — you know these guys aren’t going to be tilling the soil themselves. Manual labor is for the underclass, and they are supermen.
@inurashii – Dental care or lack thereof is one of the untold horrors of our current system. I’ve personally worked for two places that offered bare-bones medical coverage, but nada for dental. And every time the nearest big city has a free clinic for the low-income, they fill up the dental appointment roster almost immediately. Even if you do have dental coverage, it usually falls way short of actually paying for anything beyond preventative care (but I don’t have to tell you about that 🙂 ). We just dropped several grand on my husband’s mouth, because a single treatment maxed out his benefit for the year. It’s like we as a society just decided that everything on your body is important but your mouth.
Proof that they’re most likely biomale. In my experience, biofemale underwear gets very icky very quickly and no-one wants to wander around smelling of rancid vaginal fluid.
They’ll all end up trying to kill each other over who took more than his fair share of the daily Twinkie ration.
Cassandra — definitely. What’s more, the variable parameters on insurance mean that marginalized people can get handed insurance that is virtually useless to them (a $2000 deductible basically means no coverage for someone who is low-income) and still count as ‘insured’.
This, of course, means that they don’t seek out care when they need it, which leads to catastrophes.