Why are Bernie supporters posting anti-Hillary memes inspired by Trump fans and literal Nazis?

Avid Squirrel,

Are you really going to go there? You’re seriously going to imply that we might commit violence against Jill Stein supporters? If you’ve really lurked hear before you’d know that we’re very against violence against anyone and fuck you very much for implying that we’ve in any way threatened you.

You know you’ve lost the argument when you sound identical to a Scott Adams troll post.

And still no answer about why the Supreme Court and other judicial appointments aren’t important? Still no response to Boobury?

What a shock.

Frankly, I’m becoming increasingly concerned that someone might want to hurt my husband or me in the real world if they see a Jill Stein bumper sticker or yard sign. If they’re convinced Trump will bring on such death and destruction, they might think it justifiable to take out a couple of voters to prevent it.

Hey, fuckmountain.

I’ve been assaulted by strangers three times for being openly gay. This isn’t some melodramatic, passive-aggressive, gaslightarific thought experiment for me. You can JAQ off to your overwritten delusions of martyrdom up there on your ridiculous little cross all you want, but from down here on the ground, you just look like a piece of shit on a stick.

Fucking accusing us of being pre-crime murderers when we’re the ones being attacked and killed… Go to Hell and don’t come back.

I’ve already said I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. I also didn’t perceive a threat from any of you. I’m getting nervous about the way you folks handle someone who’s sincerely trying to communicate, and I’ve seen pretty vicious stuff against people like me elsewhere. That’s what makes me feel uneasy about advertising my political leanings in the real world. Americans are becoming too polarized, and the election is still several months away. I’m afraid it will get worse. For everyone, okay?

No one has been killed at any rallies. I know things got out of hand at some of them, and that bothered me too. I don’t pretend to have all the answers.

As for a question somebody asked, I’m sure I missed a lot. A lot came at me. It’s been quite overwhelming, in more than one way. I’m sorry but I really can’t keep this up, so you’ll have to find someone else to ask.

I know I read like a robot. I always have. I’m probably on the autism spectrum somewhere, but I’ve never been able to find out about that. I do have emotions, though, and I do try to understand other people.

You all did strike me as nice people when I started reading this blog over a year ago.

I’m sad that I wasn’t able to connect with you all here, or to add anything any of you would deem helpful. I’m truly sorry if I hurt any feelings. I don’t know what type of troll I’d be for all this.

Thank you all anyway. Good luck.

@PI

I still feels like it needs to be addressed because there is most assuredly an element of privilege to the idea

True, but, and forgive me my impertinence, there is a time and place to address it. Talking to a woman with a Muslim SO, who are ‘leftists’ in the deep South, maybe isn’t the best opportunity to address it
Thanks for understanding anyway. That was the hardest part of that comment to type. Didn’t want to be splainy or to police people’s justifiable tone

@ Avid Squirrel
The reason Mark got the reception he did was because he came in here and asked us to consider the perspective of the calm, rational, well-considered-opinion-having people who are refusing to vote for a lesser evil, and he did that in a thread about how anti-semitism and misogyny are going completely unchecked in a very large group of Bernie supporters.

As a woman I am completely fed up with people who have no emotional stakes in an issue telling me I’m not allowed to express my emotions and that I need to be more calm and rational (like being calm will magically fix this or get anyone to listen to me, and like being emotional and being rational are mutually exclusive).

So, Avid, you’re not sure that these terrible memes could come from Bernie supporters because how could they think such things(even though Bernie Bros have been showing their asses for a year now) but you think Hillary supporters are going to physically assault you based on nothing?

I can’t take anything you say seriously.

@PI
Okay, nevermind 🙂

Some nice news, cos I think we could use it:
Hillary’s boost in the polls from the convention is lookin pretty massive. Trump’s bounce was ~3 points, Clinton’s looks to settle around 7. He also lost the Veterans of Foreign Wars due to his attacking the Khans. It ain’t looking good for him. Let’s hope he gets skewered (not literally, obvs) in the debates, so we can move the fuck on from his ass

OK, there’s a teal deer in my back yard and she’s coming my way. The problem with Bernie’s people is they seem not to understand the way Republican’ts have leveraged a money advantage, a propaganda machine, and some quirks in the system to pull the country significantly to the right of its political center of gravity and why we can’t have many things that Europeans take for granted.

I was brought up in politics. My father served 9 years as mayor of my home town over the span of four decades. He also served 18 years in the state House, 1 term in the state Senate, and ran unsuccessfully for governor, US Senate, and Congress (3 times, the last in 1970 as an anti-Vietnam-War candidate). He was the grandson of a millionaire owner of a paper company, a Harvard Law School graduate who went into radical politics, ran for President as the head of his own party (called the National Commoners Party), and got 1500 votes even though he was too young at the time to be elected. (He had a woman as his VP candidate — in 1936.) His own father had inherited a great deal of money and proceeded to speculate in the stock market, becoming a millionaire and then losing it all, borrowing from his brother, then becoming a millionaire and losing it all again. My father blamed Wall Street for enabling the irresponsible gambling (by rich people like his father) that caused the crash of 1929 and so much misery for so many ordinary people who had nothing to do with the Wall Street Casino. “”As I saw it, that was the one institution that contributed more than anything to the imbalance [in wealth],” [he] said in a 1985 interview.” His obituary in the NY Times calls him “a self-described champion of the underdog” He was a Democratic Socialist who strongly favored redistribution of wealth — he was obsessed about inequality 80 years ago — and he served as the New York chairman of Huey Long’s Share Our National Wealth organization. In 1933 he emptied two canisters of tear gas into the ventilator of the New York Stock Exchange, and ended up serving 30 days in the Tombs prison and on Welfare Island. He supported me fully when I decided to refuse to be drafted into the Vietnam War and became a second-generation political prisoner. Whenever I see Bernie Sanders I am reminded of my father — who might have had a career like Bernie’s if he had lived in the present-day Peoples Republic of Vermont instead of the solidly Republican congressional district we lived in then.
So that’s where I come from.

So I have always been a lefty — was brought up to be one. The last 40 years have been tough times for progressives, and most of the Bernie people don’t really seem to understand why. The main reason is that Republican’ts have had a major advantage in money and have used it wisely, to propagandize for “small government” and a crackpot economic theory called Supply Side. There’s a 60s song by the Chad Mitchell Trio, “The John Birch Society,” which says “to get this movement started we’ll need lots of tools and cranks.” In this case the crank is Art Laffer and the tools are pundits like Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore. The single purpose of Supply Side is to justify tax cuts for the rich, which according to Lafferites is the sole path to economic growth — conveniently, because the GOP is the party of the rich. For the last 40 years, Republican’t candidates have had to be vetted by the screening device known as the donor class, who insist on absolute fealty to (1) cutting taxes on the rich, (2) reducing the regulations that try to keep business and finance from acting in anti-social ways, and (3) cutting entitlements (Social Security and Medicare) so that the money can be spent on military materiel. Candidates who don’t support these three items don’t get enough money to be serious contenders in primaries.
However, these policies are not popular with the Republican’t base, which doesn’t give a rodent’s posterior about the tax cuts or the regulations but loves Social Security and Medicare as long as it doesn’t go to Those People. The GOP has been able to stay competitive by cobbling together a coalition of social issue voters (anti-abortion and anti-gay-rights), hard racists (white supremacists), and soft racists (who think of themselves as fair-minded people who believe people of color should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, but fail to recognize how white privilege — and non-white unprivilege — make this possible only for a few exceptional individuals). When necessary, they have appealed to white married women with children — they do horribly with unmarried women — with the idea that they are better at protecting their families, because historically women will sacrifice their own issues if they think it’s for the good of their children. This was a particularly good issue for the GOP in 2004 — in spite of their failure on 9/11.
Trumpelthinskin’s success is based on two factors: (1) the lack of any single gifted candidate to rally behind, largely because to get there a candidate has to pass so many litmus tests — without failing any — that very few people who are not soulless hacks could qualify, and (2) Trump’s ability to get around the Establishment Screening Board because of his access to free media coverage. I see his nomination acceptance speech — and really the whole GOP convention — as an attempt to scare people, and especially white suburban mothers, into thinking that only he can keep their children from being murdered on the way to school by some dark-skinned thug.

There is a basic fact of life in the US system of government that needs to be understood: The demographics of the country strongly favor Republican’ts in Congress. The Democratic Party is largely the party of urban areas in coastal states. There is gerrymandering in many states, — because so many legislatures are controlled by Republican’ts, because that’s where political money REALLY counts — but also there is a strong Republican advantage, because Democrats win seats in urban areas by huge margins while Republican’ts win in suburban and rural areas with much smaller margins. One of the biggest examples of this was in Pennsylvania, where Democratic candidates for Congress got over 51% of the votes but Republican’ts won 13 of 18 (72%) seats. The Senate also favors the GOP by its Constitutional arrangement. The three reliably Republican’t mountain states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming (pop. 3.25 million) have the same representation as the slightly less reliably Democratic states of New York, Pennsylvania, and California (pop. 71.40 million). In the 2000 election, where Al Gore won the popular vote by half a million, he won 20 states and Bush won 30. That implies a “natural” 60-40 GOP advantage in the Senate. This has not happened because the Democrats have repeatedly put up stronger candidates who are not hobbled by the various Republican’t litmus tests. Democrats sometimes have a majority in the Senate, but when this happens there are usual several Democratic Senators from normally Republican’t states that need to be very careful about sliding to the left if they want to have a hope of being re-elected. Anyone who wants to understand US politics needs to understand how the system tends to favor right-wing policies. Democrats (such as HRC) are often accused of being too far to the right when their policies are not really what they want but what they think they can get passed — and in many cases, have been defensive compromises made to avoid even worse Republican’t policies. Democrats are constantly playing defense, swimming upstream, because of this Republican’t advantage in Congress and the fact that the GOP got an advantage in Supreme Court nominations and used it ruthlessly.
Ironically enough, the system has given the Democrats an advantage in the Electoral College. (Anyone who imagines the Founding Fathers were setting up a pure democracy should only have to look at the Electoral College — whose members, once chosen, have no Constitutional obligation to vote for the individual who won the contest in their state.) States that are reliably Democratic yield a much larger number of electoral votes than states that are reliably Republican. For example, Pennsylvania, where Republicans won 13 of 18 House seats, gave all 20 electoral votes to Obama. This advantage — and the miserable performance of the Bush/Cheney regime — is the primary reason that we don’t have total GOP domination of government.

I like Bernie; I like his policies. But I don’t think there’s the slightest chance he could have gotten elected. The main reason he does well in the polls is that nobody has had a reason to go negative on him. HRC wants the votes of his supporters and doesn’t want to alienate them; Republican’ts positively drooled at the thought of getting to run against an atheist socialist candidate that they could easily turn into a “godless communist” — the US version of Castro, Stalin, etc. (He might even be Trotsky’s long-lost grandson by the time they finished.) They were hoping for a wave election where they would be able to dominate the US government for a generation. Now they can only hope not to alienate Bernie supporters into voting for HRC. But they still have a chance. I have always regarded this as a defensive election: since Republicant’s are likely to retain an effective veto in the House, and Democrats are likely to lose the Senate in 2018 no matter what happens this year, this is all about keeping Republican’ts from winning the White House and both Houses of Congress. Whoever won the Democratic primary, Bernie or HRC, was not going to get any significant part of their program through the House. But if the GOP candidate won, you’d see Obamacare fatally damaged by repeal of the individual mandate, Medicare fatally damaged by voucherization or some form of poison pill, Social Security fatally damaged by raising the age to 75 or some other sort of poison pill, the Supreme Court with three Scalias giving the right a 6-3 advantage — which would reverse Roe v. Wade, expand Citizens United, and allow expanded voter suppression — and the final destruction of labor unions. (I posted this list on another blog, and one of the right-wing commenters wrote “We pray for that every day.”) This is what you can expect if Trumpelthinskin wins — and that is the not-so-bad part.

So, then, what about HRC? I’ve been a political junkie for a long time, and I’ve always liked HRC a lot better than WJC. (Part of that was because I thought Bill compromised more than he had to, and part was disgust that as the most powerful man in the world he didn’t have enough sense to keep his pants zipped — he very nearly managed to become the Republican’ts most effective tool.) I’ve always thought of HRC as the true progressive. I’ve watched as the Republican’t slime machine has tried for 25 years to take her down. I’ve watched the endless parade of scandals and come to the conclusion that there’s no there there — or in a few cases, just a smidgen. Nothing that you couldn’t find an equivalent for in anyone else who has been in the political wars that long.
Her first big national project was Hillarycare, and she took quite a beating when the insurance companies spent buckets of money to beat it. (A large part of Obamacare was shaped by the necessity of giving insurance companies enough so that they would not make an effective effort to kill it — which they could have, easily.) The combination of the death of Hillarycare and the slime campaign have made HRC rather defensive, perhaps even somewhat paranoid, but who can really blame her. The press routinely ask her the tough questions that they never ask Trumpelthinskin. I feel that not enough attention is paid to the difficulties of a woman running for the Presidency — she has to be hawkish enough not to be accused of being weak and feckless, but not hawkish enough to turn off her progressive base. (I try to remind people that if Obama hadn’t promised to keep fighting in Afghanistan, we would have President McCain; if he hadn’t kept making drone strikes, we would have President Romney.) She has to be tough enough to face down the big boys on the world stage, but inevitably a woman who does that is going to be called “unlikable” (because she’s not a sweet and submissive lady) or even a “castrating b*tch.” But, yes, if you’re going to be Leader of the Free World, you’re going to have to be a castrating b*tch at times. I’m not surprised that so many men don’t seem to be able to cut her slack on this point; I am surprised that there are so many women that don’t.
She was my preferred candidate in 2008, because I thought Obama was still quite young and could profit from executive experience. My ideal would have been HRC as President and Obama as Secretary of State, then perhaps governor of Illinois. But things fells as they did, and she came out of her term as SoS with a 60% positive rating and the clear inside track to the 2016 Democratic nomination. It was obvious even to dim Republican’t minds that she was a very formidable opponent, and they didn’t have anyone of comparable stature. So they did what they could: they revved up the slime machine. That I expected. I’m sure HRC prepared herself mentally for the onslaught that was certain to occur. (I have nothing but admiration for her mental toughness.) This basically was what Benghazi and the email scandal were about — trying to get her negatives high enough so that whatever yokel the Republican’ts nominated would have a chance.

I think the Benghazi “scandal” is typical of the crap that has been thrown at her. In the first place, this was a covert CIA operation, and by nature you can’t protect your people in that sort of operation. They know and accept that they’re in harm’s way. In the second place, Congress slashed the State Dept.’s security budget, and places like Benghazi couldn’t be a high priority. In third place, the Islamic world was in an uproar that night, and the military couldn’t send assets to Benghazi when there could be an attack in a place like Cairo. The SoS is not in control of military operations, she could not have sent help there herself, and the military authorities decided it wasn’t feasible. Obama could have overruled them, of course, but he would have been a fool to do so. She made statements to the public and to families of the dead men that were based on what US intelligence believed at the time but turned out to be not 100% accurate. (In my experience, these first reports are nearly always inaccurate, because officials are pressured to make statements before all the facts are known.) And now some people are actually claiming that she spat on the coffins of the dead.
I always expect that of the Republicans; what bothers me is how many Sanders supporters have repeated Republican’t propaganda — and still continue to repeat it.
HRC is not a pure angel. No pure angel could get to where she has gotten. She has competed in a system where progressives have been forced to move to the right and forced to play footsie with wealthy and powerful interests if they want to have any chance of getting to a place where they can have any effect on policy. Yes, it’s been a tough 40 years for progressives. HRC is one of the few who have managed to survive and fight on. As to Bernie, he’s a good guy, but he comes from the only state of the 50 where he would have had even a chance to get elected to the Senate. Vermont is not a microcosm of the US. And anybody who thinks that losing this election to Trumpster is a viable option is a privileged white person. People of color know that they will bear the brunt of Trumpster’s policies, which is why they back Hillary at such a tremendous rate.
I continue to believe that the key to this election is constantly reminding women of what Trumpster thinks of them and what would happen to their issues in a Trumpster regime. Trumpster wants to scare women into thinking that the country is in desperate shape and only he can protect their families. Don’t let him. Friends don’t let friends vote for Trumpster.

And for someone like Avid Squirrel whose personal feelings are more important than the welfare of minorities and poor people, I hope you don’t have to live with the knowledge that you have helped a man like Trumpster destroy millions of lives. People like me refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968 because of his support for LBJ’s Vietnam policy, so we got Nixon and five more years of war, 25,000 more Americans killed, and countless Vietnamese killed and their land devastated with bombs and chemicals.

There is one other issue, and that is the accusation that HRC is somehow complicit in rapes committed by WJC. The first question you have to ask is “Is WJC a rapist?” Some of his behavior was pretty disgusting, and it is clear that he occasionally hit on a woman who didn’t want his attentions. AFAIK the only case that can be classified as an outright rape was the Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed in 1999 that WJC raped her in 1978. The obvious problem is that there is no way to verify her claim one way or the other after two decades, and what you think about this alleged incident seems to be totally dependent on what you think about WJC. The mainstream press seems to think that her claim has been debunked, while Breitbert et al. accuse them of a cover-up, but there doesn’t really seem to be any real evidence for either side. I sort of come down with the conclusion that WJC had a habit of hitting on women, but they were ones he thought were interested, and I can’t see a pattern that suggests he’s a rapist. Scuzzball, yes; but not a rapist. But clearly others could come to another conclusion — I certainly am no expert on the subject.
Regarding WJC’s other incidents with women, I think HRC deserves some criticism for making unnecessarily harsh statements about the known and alleged victims, but since this would be a difficult thing for any spouse to deal with, I’m inclined to give her a pass on it unless someone can prove she knew WJC raped someone and she attacked the victim anyway.

I continue to believe that the key to this election is constantly reminding women of what Trumpster thinks of them and what would happen to their issues in a Trumpster regime.

Case in fucking point, this is Trump’s answer when he defended Roger Ailes and a reporter asked him if he’d react the same way if it had been his daughter that had been sexually harassed

I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case

So, it’s not the responsibility of men to not harass their employees. It’s up to women to leave their jobs – because he has no idea that some women are not economically in a position to do that – and if they do not find another job or a whole other field, well it’s their own fault they continue to get harassed.

Can anyone truly imagine Hillary Clinton saying this about her own daughter? Yeah, they’re not equivalent. It’s not hard to see why Trump is so beloved in the manosphere with these kinds of statements though!

One positive this about this thread is that it did inspire me to get my shit together an volunteer for the campaign. I did midterm election work in ’14 but haven’t done jack shit this year.

She’s of one of the sharpest and most well-informed posters here and you should really not pick a fight with her.

http://67.media.tumblr.com/10beb6a5f371d28d50a6fcd8fa478b84/tumblr_n7hgp7XP0E1s0teago1_400.gif

Thank you! There are people here more wise and witty than I am, but I’m so used to passionately debating politics that even when I get upset, I can still keep pushing. Especially since I’m relatively privileged. Plus, I don’t mind taking one for the team and being seen as one of the mean ones.

“If someone’s upset about people who’ve actually been killed in wars overseas, they’re accused of using them as a shield, even as they’re also called selfish for not caring more about a hypothetical, worst-case scenario, Trump-related future death or deportation. (That you surely know they don’t believe will happen, otherwise they’d be with you on this!)”

What is even the logic behind this statement? People are so passionate about wanting this candidate to lose because they DON’T truly believe terrible things would happen with him in charge?

Big ol’ teal dear responding to a bunch of posts now I’m home from work.
@Kereea

-Brocialists see any and all societal ills as being related to economic issues. Therefore they think fixing the economy–and fixing it their way–will result in the other issues being fixed.
-Thus they dislike intersectionality and looking at feminism/racism because they see it as merely a distraction from the class struggle which is of course the only real struggle.
-“This cycle has seen brocialists push back, trying desperately to refocus the Democratic Party on the white working class and their economic needs.”

These assholes drive me up a damn wall; there’s no way to fix the economic issues facing the working class without the working class working together, and that means addressing everyone’s damn concerns, not driving wedges into the movements.

@ Avid Squirrel

We know that may only end up helping Trump get elected, but we’ve come to believe that Trump’s a conman who’ll be more of an embarrassment than a danger, despite his hateful rhetoric. He won’t be backed by congress, even if he believes the things he’s been saying.

Funny, that’s what everyone though about Hitler too. And Mussolini. And…
Seriously, have you looked at Congress lately? At some of the actual laws that’ve actually been passed? How many damn times has the Senate voted to end the ACA now?

We want to strengthen third parties so lesser-evilism won’t work on Americans in the future

That will never happen. It’s mathematically impossible for it to do so in our current electoral system.

. But we’ve become more afraid of the well-oiled machine of war and oppression that has a perfect spot waiting to be filled by a Clinton-shaped gear.

Don’t be any more of a chump than you absolutely must, please. Seriously, I disapprove very strongly of Hillary Clinton, for good and sufficient reasons, but warmongering neoliberalism tempered with a desire to appear benevolent is still better than open fascism. You don’t think that Trump will slot in at the top of the war machine? It’ll be just as well oiled for him, you know.

Many people are scared. I understand why. They believe Trump=Death. Literal death.

For some of us, it is. (Incidentally, you’re on that list, and so’s your husband. I’m damn glad my cousin and her husband and kids are the hell out of the country now).
@invivoMark,

I’m sad because I’m being told voting for perpetual war and corruption is a moral imperative.

Right now, this year, it is. It is because progressives have spent the last 50 years fucking up by the numbers, and are starting from way the hell too far back in the running. If we get off our damn asses and take over the democratic Party the way the fascists did the Republicans, then we will be able to vote our consciences because there will be candidates on the fucking ballots worth voting for. There are even a few now, down ballot. Look for them, vote for them, stump for them. Sign up to be a precinct captain or local committeemember. That’s the only way we’re going to get candidates that aren’t total garbage.

I just don’t want to vote for war. Is there any way I can vote against war?

No. There is no way you can vote against war. Sorry.
@Axecalibur

Destroy the Republicans. They’re too strong locally, but they can be dealt with nationally. Either they stop being shit to save themselves, or they fall away to state politics. The Dems are already starting to fracture (only a little bit, thankfully) between the Obama/Clinton wing and the Sanders/Warren wing. It ain’t fast or sexy, but it’s the only reasonably likely way to get a 3rd, more ‘left wing’ party

This too; if the Republicans can be driven out of national politics, then either the Dems split into a neoliberal and progressive wing, or the Greens or the Working Families Party or the like will move in as the left wing party. (I used to be WFP, but then I learned more about how the system works).

@Tessa

I am way out on the far left and didn’t think Bernie was much of a socialist, tbh.

He’s not, he’s a social democrat. His policy platform can be summed up as ‘capitalism with good infrastructure’. Which is a damn sight better than ‘capitalism with some infrastructure’ (Clinton’s platform), and both are better than ‘robber baron police state’, which is the Republican platform. (That’s just on economic issues, of course.)
@Opposablethumbs

Here we have seen the emergence of a principled, honest socialist politician in the labour party,

You bloody well haven’t, you’ve got a social democrat too. (Not saying he’s not principled and honest, just that Corbyn’s not a socialist anymore than Sanders is.)

@Boobury

A lot of the “hawkish” things that people attribute to Hillary seem to be things Bill Clinton or Obama did, too.

And are a big part of the reason I haven’t much respect left for either of them. (None whatsoever for Bill, in fact).

@Hambeast

The thing that’s got my panties in a bunch right now is Trumplethinskin’s deplorable tweets about the Khan family after Mr. Khan’s speech at the DNC convention. To attack a family that made the ultimate sacrifice for this country is low and as a veteran, this offends me to my core.

I’m sorry if this adds to your offence, but they did no such thing. No American soldier has died for anything approaching the good of the American public in my lifetime or probably yours (Assuming that you are less than 70 years old)(and even that’s honestly debatable; the U.S. wasn’t under any military threat in WWII either, although I hold that not having a fascist power occupying Europe actually is a concrete benefit to the U.S., and also that humanitarian concerns justify it anyway. Besides, surely if it’s honorable to sacrifice your life for your ‘own’ people (however that’s defined), surely it’s moreso to do it for strangers. (Viva la Quinta Brigada etc.)). All those asides aside, though, knee-jerk worship of the military and of membership in military organizations is one of the major problems in American society, and I hate to see so-called progressives indulge in this kind of retrograde bullshit.

Re: homeopathy

The official position of our NHS is that homeopathy is rubbish.

However because NHS trusts in different regions are self governing, it is available on the NHS in some areas and we even have a couple of homeopathic hospitals. Some doctors, understandably, think the NHS shouldn’t be giving pseudo-science any credence. The pragmatic approach though is that the placebo effect can be a cheap way of dealing with the ‘worried well’ and it diverts such people away from cluttering up real resources.

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Homeopathy/Pages/Introduction.aspx

I’m going to put in a good word for homeopathy.

Although I’m no expert on the subject, I do know that it’s got a long and venerable history. Much more important to me, it works. I’ve used it for years and it’s helped me tremendously. Not every time because sometimes the prescription isn’t quite right. And not with every practitioner because my issues can be kind of tricky. But often enough for me to be really impressed with the results.

I also appreciate the fact that for some everyday kinds of issues, I can get it over the counter for around $14.

As for helping the “worried well” (no offense, Alan–you’re a smart guy and a good guy), it helps my cats and plants. I don’t think they could be fooled by a placebo.