I know I haven’t posted here about gender in a bit, but I would be greatly remiss if I failed to give Bernie a boost while he still has a (very) slim chance at representing us. The above YouTube focuses on one of the key issues confronting the country that none of the other candidates are likely to do a damn thing about, because to a greater or lesser degree they are bought and paid for by the 1%.
I’m saddened that ostensibly progressive bloggers like Melissa McEwan have embraced what I think of as ‘fauxgressive feminism’ and gone out of their way to snipe at and tear down Bernie Sanders in favor of a thoroughly establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton. Hillary has said she wants to protect the New Deal, but I believe she will almost certainly betray her Democratic constituents by signing some democracy-destroying variant of the TPP “free trade” treaty.
Bernie deserves the country’s support.
ETA: I dashed this off quickly, and I just wanted to clarify that I use the phrase ‘fauxgressive feminism’ to refer to a specific kind of feminism and not to feminism as a whole. There are plenty of feminists who have been enthusiastically supporting Bernie over Hillary, like Nicole Sandler and Deborah Newell.
Also, as good as the YouTube wealth video above is, it does contain a glaring mischaracterization of socialists, who do not seek to make everyone have equal wealth or incomes. (2016/4/26)
As things stand right now, I’d be content with any president whose name doesn’t rhyme with Ronald Slump.
It would be a grave mistake to think that the Donald is that much worse than the other Republican candidates. In fact, given a choice between Trump and Cruz, I’d rather have Trump. It would be hard to overstate just how terrible the Republican field is.
I have read that Trump spends a great deal of time in his stump speeches inveighing against the trade pacts that are almost universally loathed by the American public, and that this is frankly a significant source of his “mysterious” appeal. (It would also explain why he is so reviled by the establishment media, who are much more a mouthpiece for the 1% than is generally realized.) If his opposition to these trade deals is sincere (and it’s hard to know, obviously), that would give him one issue — a major issue — where he’s more progressive than any other Republican and probably Hillary as well.
Just to be clear, he’d still be a horrible president. It’s just not clear he’d be that much more horrible than the rest of the Republicans.
I know the Republican field is awful. There may be an element of “ignorance is bliss” on my part, in that I don’t have much of a sense of the personalities of the others. Kasich comes across as a bit less awful than Cruz. Trump just chills me to the marrow.
Trump is one of the 1%. And I’ve no doubt that he will govern in what he perceives to be his own best interest, which is more likely to be aligned to those of other 1%ers, than it is to the rest of us.
I don’t agree that it’s hard to know how sincere he is. He’s not sincere. He says whatever it suits his purposes to say, and any resemblence between what he says and reality is purely coincidental.
The trouble with Trump is that I don’t see any bottom to how awful he could be. For example, he’s promised to ethnically cleanse America of undocumented immigrants from day one of his presidency, all eleven million of them. That might just be hot air, but what if he means it? The “day one” bit is obviously bluster, it would take a while to build the concentration camps.
That isn’t hyperbole. I didn’t use that phrase to make a Godwin’s Law comparison. I used it because that is what would be required to implement his policy. There’s no other way to do it. Sure we can hope that this is hot air on his part, or that the American system of checks and balances would prevent it. I’d really prefer that we not find out.
On the Democratic side, I agree that Sanders is the least awful candidate, and that (as usual) any Democrat is better than any Republican.
Simple. A lot of people think Clinton is owed the White House because she is a woman. Not because she is the best candidate but because she is a woman. Places like that were the same way back in 2008 when she was going up against Obama.
The difference is that this time its Clinton against all white men so they can be even more blatant in their sexist bias (there’s no fear of angering black people since there isn’t a black candidate).
Would not surprise me as Clinton has shown time and again that she is the type of politician that will say whatever is needed to get a vote.
I think folks are so anxious to get a female president that they have blinded themselves from considering exactly what kind of woman ends up in the White House first. And of course these are the same people that will want to hold Clinton to a lower standard than any other president and will assume any criticism of her is based in sexism regardless of the actual content of the criticism.
Bernie Sanders is a moron. I don’t really understand why anyone supports him. Bernie style single payer health care will be a disaster for the United States. The education policy is even worse.
Lets start with health care. Health care is an idiotic way of improving health for the same reason that software testing is an idiotic way of improving code quality and firefighting is an idiotic way of preventing the damage due to fires: you deal with the problem after it occurs instead of trying to prevent he problem from occurring in the first place. If you want to avoid health problems you do things like tax sugar, stigmatize smoking, hugely encourage exercise. Health care spending is a good way to make us feel like we live in a “compassionate” society but it is poor way of improving health.
But even if health care were something you were going to try. They way we do it is not what you would do if you wanted to improve health but it is what you would do if you wanted to provide the image of being compassionate. Our health care system is not designed to make us healthy!!! For instance, there are a large number of things we do in the health care system that are not known to improve health e.g. annual checkups, but we do them anyways. It insane.
But don’t mind me…just keep believing you are smart, compassionate person because you support Bernie Sanders.
Even if you were to become a model of ideal health that doesn’t smoke, eats healthy and does plenty of exercise, that won’t prevent a broken leg, arthritis or a host of other issues like asthma, pneumonia, various other infections and diseases. And a lot of stuff that people don’t go consult for: they can’t afford the doctor visit.
I think it requires an acknowledgement that we’re going to take care of everyone beforehand so we can do as assman says and start making healthy choices for others. At the moment there’s a personal responsibility argument against the concept of controlling the health decisions of everyone else, even though really, we’re already covering for the shitty health of those too poor to pay when they end up in emergency rooms.
“Even if you were to become a model of ideal health that doesn’t smoke, eats healthy and does plenty of exercise, that won’t prevent a broken leg, arthritis or a host of other issues like asthma, pneumonia, various other infections and diseases. And a lot of stuff that people don’t go consult for: they can’t afford the doctor visit.”
Now we are getting somewhere…Fine cover only broken legs, emergency, infectious diseases and the few things where we know the health care system actually does something. And don’t cover things like psychiatrists where we know the health care system does nothing.
But even your argument bothers me. Because its typical liberal stupidity. There is a problem somewhere. WE MUST SOLVE IT. You never ask even basic questions like what is the cost of solving it, what is the benefit and does the benefit out way the cost. But even that is not enough!! The real question you should be asking is given all the possible policy interventions we could pursue given limited money, political will, national attention, media space and time what is the intervention with the biggest bang for the buck in terms of achieving the ultimate outcome you want to achieve i.e. better health. A smart person would make a list of things that impact health, order the list in order of decreasing effectiveness (benefit/cost ratio and total impact) and start at the top of the list and work your way down.
For instance the number of iatrogenic deaths in the US is estimated at 230000. You could, I don’t know, try to reduce that number. When was the last time Obama used the word “iatrogenic”. Imagine 230000 people died every year in school shootings. I guarantee you we would be doing something about it!!! These are fucking obvious things and the solution for reducing iatrogenic deaths (checklists, handwashing programs) are so freaking basic a 10 year old could run the program.
The health care system whose ostensible goal is to improve health is one of the leading causes of death. It doesn’t make even basic sense if you think health care is about health. But it makes total sense if you think health care is about “showing compassion”.
Americans are so hyper-focussed on health care coverage as the solution to some problem that you have failed to ask really basic questions. And when a person like me does I know that I am viewed as some weird person bringing up irrelevant issues that are not germane to the serious business of improving our health care system. But I am asking the questions that we should have been asked before we constructed a trillion dollar system.
Gotta say, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that anywhere before now. From what I’m seeing (read: quick google), it’s the top cause of death after heart problems and cancer, and there are fuckups for 1 in 5 patients. Wow. This explains a lot about how ‘alternative medicine’ is so popular.
“This explains a lot about how ‘alternative medicine’ is so popular.”
I feeling like screaming. Then crying. Then screaming. Alternative medicine is so popular for the same reason chinese medicine is popular, for the same reason socialized medicine is popular, for the same reason medicine men are popular, and african witch doctors. Its because humans have a mental disease which is cross cultural where they some how believe in the idea of medical care regardless of its effect. You are fucked up. Except it. We know based on current Western science that previous Western medicine could not have worked e.g using mercury based solutions to cure disease.
You know I became an atheist when I was a teenager. The thing that did it for me was when I found out about the cargo cult. It was very clear with the cargo cult that humans were predisposed to believe in God even where it was clear that no God was present. As soon as I knew that I transferred the logic to my own beliefs and I realized that the same thing that was true for the cargo cult could be true for Christians.
Looking at Chinese alternative bullshit medicine or better still old Western mercury based cures. And then looking at the modern era and all the research done by John P.A. Ioannidis, I find it surprising there aren’t more health care atheists.
See here where Ioannidis talks about how evidenced-based care has been hijacked.
John http://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(16)00147-5/pdf
The other thing that did it for me was when I found out that when it was shown that routine mammograms were useless and studies where published showing this there was tremendous political pressure not to publish the studies and in addition US lawmakers pushed all kinds of amendments to keep routine screening in place. THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS. If you are really concerned about human health you should be outraged that we do things in the healthcare system that have no health benefit. But you aren’t outraged. Nope not in the slightest.
And that is because you are a true believer in health care. Its not rational. Its not smart. Its just another religion.
A country where people think they’ll go bankrupt at the smallest health hitch they have no control over is one where more people are willing to screw the rules and go criminal to get that money.
And that costs more than the healthcare costs.
Assman:
Single payer health care isn’t about improving health. It’s about improving the economics of providing care.
I believe the medical community does put significant effort into reducing such deaths. If you were to stop medical care wholesale then the number of iatrogenic deaths might go down, however deaths from other causes would go up a lot faster.
“I believe the medical community does put significant effort into reducing such deaths.”
Then you are wronger than wrong. Doctors don’t wash their hands.
http://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/early/2015/07/09/bmjqs-2015-004319
The reason doctors don’t wash their hands is there is literally no incentive for them to. Nobody in the health care system gets paid if more hands get washed. The same goes for everything of this nature. Almost all the activities involving better delivery and quality of healthcare have no incentives associated with them.
“Single payer health care isn’t about improving health. It’s about improving the economics of providing care.”
The simplest way of improving the economics of healthcare is to ban health care insurance. Or baring that at least have large deductibles. Single payer does not do this. Singapore does not have a single payer health care system and they have better health care economics then any country in the world. Singapore’s system is based on a very simple principle: everyone pays.
“A country where people think they’ll go bankrupt at the smallest health hitch they have no control over is one where more people are willing to screw the rules and go criminal to get that money.”
Your argument is ill-considered. Very few criminals will commit crimes due to needing money for health reasons. Said criminal would both have to be in good enough shape to commit the crime and simultaneously sick enough to urgently need the care. Also most criminals are young and most sick people are old.
But it would make for a good movie.
Welp. I think this site is finally dead. Last post being April and all…
Its a shame, there are too few voices from the MRA left.