Gender and Violence and Blame
POSTED BY: Magonsdaughter
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 20:14
VIEWED: 35151
PAGE 28 of 31
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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Hmm. In fairness, I suppose that my argument against national health care is rather like Sig's argument against the subversion of arts.
So in that case, I guess I object to both not having it as well as forcing mandatory participation.
Can you imagine, if there were laws passed that said citizens had to watch certain political speeches/conventions/debates, under the umbrella of claiming that watching is necessary for citizen action in society, but then only a few points of view get shown? So it becomes a vector for one group or another to profit immensely from it.
Now imagine there are laws passed that citizens have to get insurance, but there are only a few providers.
I concede that maybe you're right and we should try to have both art and national health care, but participation can not be mandatory in order to maintain any kind of claim about societal freedom.
Frankly, Byte, a lot of guff is talked about societal freedom, which generally means looking at things in absolutes.
No one single person on this planet is totally free. All of us have things which bind us, things we must participate in, be it certain laws, taxation, systems of governance, family obligations, cultural imperatives.
Most people in western societies live in a kind of financial servitude, locked into mortgages and jobs and insurance obligations, and in reality have bugger all freedom.
IF you move away from absolutes, from the dogma, you can start looking at solutions. I don't know enough about your health care system to argue it one way or another, and having compulsory insurance sounds pretty stupid to me, but a national health care system by its very nature will have to cover everyone. So somehow, whether by tax or a levy or insurance, everyone will have to participate.
In the end absence of decent healthcare for everyone doesn't seem more free to me. Just seems unfair.
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Quote:Our taxes fix roads, but our taxes don't fix people.
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
a national health care system by its very nature will have to cover everyone. So somehow, whether by tax or a levy or insurance, everyone will have to participate.
Kinda tells what's important here, eh?
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As I've said, I like national health care, but I'm concerned how it might be implemented here. I don't think the horror stories about death panels are remotely true, but it is clear to me that the national health care idea we came up with is to force everyone over 26 to buy mandatory insurance through their employment. If they can't afford the regular insurance programs or they are unemployed, there's a reduced cost coverage they can buy from so-called called "health care exchanges"... That cover bugger-all. And if you can't afford those, IF you qualify for medicare and medicaid, you get federal health care coverage... that doesn't even cover contraceptives and birthcontrol.
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IF you move away from absolutes, from the dogma, you can start looking at solutions.
WHAT dogma? The only one here I see speaking in absolutes is you. No one is free? And we can do nothing about this, I suppose? I tell you what doesn't help create freedom, creating more restrictions, more drain on poor families.
You think, oh yay, they've got national health care! But what we have is a lot of profits for insurance companies and still no real coverage for the at risk groups. What we have is still a major wealth gap for different groups of society, created by cost of living issues that fall the most heavily on the poor, unemployed, and self-employed. And we keep piling that cost of living expenses higher on them until they're buried.
The only good thing about the law is that they set rate caps and made it much harder for insurance companies to reject a claim... But if you think the insurance companies won't find loopholes, you're going to be disappointed.
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Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
As I've said, I like national health care, but I'm concerned how it might be implemented here. I don't think the horror stories about death panels are remotely true, but it is clear to me that the national health care idea we came up with is to force everyone over 26 to buy mandatory insurance through their employment. If they can't afford the regular insurance programs or they are unemployed, there's a reduced cost coverage they can buy from so-called called "health care exchanges"... That cover bugger-all. And if you can't afford those, IF you qualify for medicare and medicaid, you get federal health care coverage... that doesn't even cover contraceptives and birthcontrol.
I'm really not in a position to discuss the ins and outs of your proposed health care system, so I can't possibly comment. I guess how this started was that you had disputed Ikiki's proposal to look elsewhere to see what works, which you disputed claiming that you didn't like other systems. I can't see how your disappointment in the proposed health care system supports your argument. Did Americans actually look to leading systems of health care to see how they worked before coming up with some options? It doesn't appear so.
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WHAT dogma? The only one here I see speaking in absolutes is you.
That is not my intention. I don't *feel* like I speak in absolutes. I feel like i talk a lot about compromises.
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No one is free? And we can do nothing about this, I suppose? I tell you what doesn't help create freedom, creating more restrictions, more drain on poor families.
No one is totally free. And yes, I think that absoulute freedom is a myth.
You think that governments are the only hindrance to people's freedoms? DO you think poverty = freedom. Ill health = freedom. You don't think people are restricted by inequality, by social structures that keep them living in poverty. You don't think private corporations have ever restricted people's freedom?
Your the one that speaks in absolutes because you see, as many Americans aparantly do, that a public health system = infringement on liberty. And don't say you support public health that doesn't cover everyone, because that if you can choose to opt in or out, that makes it a private health system.
If having a public health system is such a socialist/freedom reducing construct then why don't people opt out of public education funding? Why can't you choose whether or not you want to pay for roads with your taxes? Or the military?
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You think, oh yay, they've got national health care! But what we have is a lot of profits for insurance companies and still no real coverage for the at risk groups. What we have is still a major wealth gap for different groups of society, created by cost of living issues that fall the most heavily on the poor, unemployed, and self-employed. And we keep piling that cost of living expenses higher on them until they're buried.
The only good thing about the law is that they set rate caps and made it much harder for insurance companies to reject a claim... But if you think the insurance companies won't find loopholes, you're going to be disappointed.
Yeah, well again can't comment on the effectiveness of your system.
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Quote:
Did Americans actually look to leading systems of health care to see how they worked before coming up with some options? It doesn't appear so.
We did. The problem is, THIS is the only shit that can get passed here. That's the point I'm trying to make. Until something fundamentally changes within the American system itself, any improvements we try to make to the system end up subverted and potentially making things worse.
So saying we need to look to other systems is way more problematic than you realize.
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You think that governments are the only hindrance to people's freedoms?
Okay, so now we're going to strawman me. Yeah, I think GOVERNMENT is the only hindrance when I've been saying ALL ALONG that all the big corporations are a threat as well and that there's real problems in this society created by the wealth gap. That's an INTERESTING interpretation.
You know, I've actually been trying to not attack socialism, if you guys want that, you can implement that where you live and it doesn't affect me whatsoever. I could not give less of a damn. It's not a system I personally want to live under, because I see strings attached, but this is a big damn world and I can move somewhere completely remote, where enforcement of any law would be a joke, or I could become a vagrant as I care nothing for your creature comforts. It's not even a problem for me to move - hell, it's my contingency plan ready to go anytime.
What does PISS ME OFF though is when you all decide that I'm attacking socialism and then you start making WILD claims about what I believe that aren't remotely true so you can discredit me. Like how you assumed I was against national health care, or how you think I think government is the only danger to our society. I'm against bullshit private insurance company based "national health care systems".
I actually wouldn't have a problem paying taxes for a national health care system, like I don't have a problem paying taxes so my grandmother can get her medicare and social security. I spend so little money as it is that it doesn't even matter to me, and while it chafes somewhat to know that those systems will be broken well before I can benefit, I don't intend to live that long anyway. What I have a PROBLEM with is paying money to goddamn greedy insurance middlemen, and a government that gives them FREEBIES, forcing me to PAY THOSE ASSHOLES without my having any say in the matter. Forcing poor families and the self-employed to pay insurance companies more than they would have to pay in an adjusted tax pool for a national health care system.
This is a complicated world, the arguments are complicated, the problems are complicated, the solutions are complicated, and the people are complicated. So don't tell me to look to others because they know better, can do better, or are just plain BETTER than me, and don't tell me what *I* think or feel. You clearly don't KNOW what I think or feel even after five years of familiarity.
And frankly, that's incredibly disappointing.
In retrospect, this argument has nothing to do with blaming victims of assault and violence. Are we doing anything here at this point anymore except attacking each other for various long-standing political disputes and mischaracterizing each other? If so I have no further interest.
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MAGONS RE PUBLIC HEALTH
Quote:A consistent 60-65% of the American population supported the public option. It was yanked by Obama and Congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats and replaced with.... what we have... because of strong insurance lobbying. "Americans" overall wanted something different, but the insurance companies wouldn't let it happen. This is just another example of our thoroughly corrupted government... hardly a day goes by that Congress and the President don't agree on something that the majority of Americans hate and fear.
Did Americans actually look to leading systems of health care to see how they worked before coming up with some options? It doesn't appear so.
BYTE has every right to be wary, and Chris every right to be cynical, because if there is one thing our current government has perfected 100%, it's the ability to take the crisis du jour and turn it into another torture for the American people. I cite NAFTA, the DOMA, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the Patriot Act, Obamacare, the financial system collapse (rewarded with $17 trillion dollars, mostly off the books).... every time we face a crisis of some sort, the American people go thru the wringer and come out looking like hamburger.
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BYTE
Quote:You seem to be responding to this as "cable tv and iphone or nothing?" In other words, your imagination seems to be following the pattern of choosing among what's presented on TV, versus... nothing. Can't you imagine better? This is what I meant by Americans being saturated in propaganda. The first thing that you are made to believe is that the only choices that you have are the only choices presented to you.
Sometimes something that sounds good and easy has a lot of strings attached that makes it look less attractive.- BYTE
Like cable TV and iPhones? As my hubby likes to say " Unexamined convenience is the road to extinction." -SIGNY
Sig: Kinda? Both have their problems, true, and are instrumental in dividing people, isolating people. I'd actually argue the pros for them outweigh the cons though.-BYTEMITE
HKC, TONY, BYTE- Little story here on centralized media... before the election there was a groups of older reporters tackling the question of "why is the American political landscape so polarized?". They went mistily back to the old days, when everyone watched broadcast TV and everyone learned the same news at the same time from David Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. The national narrative, all from the same source and all at the same time. And then they went on to contrast cable news, and the internet and being some horrible divisive force, and I kept thinking.... But... but that's a GOOD thing!. It struck me that centralized broadcasting is a very successful medium of social control. That is the basis for eliminating one-way communication... ie. when the listener is unable to respond to the broadcast.
HKC You think the inet is free? It is hostage to a series of interlocking corporate and government controls. The NSA already has spliced into every backbone internet server operated by the main telecoms. A 30-year veteran of the NSA-turned whistleblower just came out several months ago to tell us all that the NSA ALREADY collects every email every written by everyone on the USA.
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'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistleblower
http://rt.com/usa/news/surveillance-spying-e-mail-citizens-178/
Everything you post on LinkedIn, on Instagram, FB, on ANY of these websites becomes their property. Your prize photos? Theirs. Your thoughts on building a better fusion-powered reactor? Theirs. All of your google searches, your FB entries, your Amazon purchases, your bank transactions? Bagged and tagged, to go to that great database in the cloud which anyone with any money or a warrant can and will mine for THEIR interests, not yours.
Use Apple products??? Well, aside from the fact that you must absolutely run ONLY Apple products, they have all of those nifty little apps that keep track of where your phone is ever second of the day. Apple, MSoft, AT&T, Verizon... my god, they can't wait to hand over your data to the FBI and "fusion centers" to see if you're planning to demonstrate or are illegally downloading copyrighted material.
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The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission... to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens [who were protesting banks].
The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banksNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Magons
Yeah, that's the rub, I see "Self-Defense" as a huge range of options rather than holding to a ridiculously narrow viewpoint and interpretation, words are a hell of a lot cheaper than bullets, although in some cases they can be damn near as harmful.
(See Also: Abuse victims)
This bit stood out though, cause I wanna refine the point here.
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but I don't know if I see your conspiracy to respress...
As I am fond of pointing out to PN and others, there's never any great grand single conspiracy, what you get is a bunch of little ones all mixed in with personal agendas, office politics, incompetence, fingerpointing, blamestorming and fearmongering, which is generally not even half as effective as the folks involved wish it was - however sometimes they get that push anyway by sheer weight of collective effort regardless of how incompetent their execution, the social version of a brute force attack.
Example - you see a bunch of crabs walking in lockstep on a beach, you could take that for evidence of a hivemind, but it's not, it is that their limited worldview, primitive cognitive, and reflex response causes them to all react in much the same fashion to the same stimulus.
This is actually a weakpoint of the powers that be, and the foundation of follow-the-money, strike-the-money tactics, given that avarice and greed for power breed extremely predictable responses.
And while not so much a great, grand overwhelming one, there's ALWAYS been some level of conspiracy in american media, here's some cases in point for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority
The latter is why american comics are generally considered garbage even today, having been used as a propaganda engine ever since their inception (which hasn't at all stopped, See Also: Civil War) and plagued by generally awful writing as within the CCA there wasn't room to tell decent stories.
Sadly that ain't improved much...
Then there was the PMRC, one of the reasons I would not have voted for Al Gore, cause the notion of him and especially his wife having the position and power to try to force their moral standards on us gave me the wiggies - although Ashcroft under Bush did about the same bullshit, it just mostly went unnoticed under worse abuses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
If you can find it, the video of Dee Snyder from Twisted Sister handing Al Gore his ass on the Senate Floor is downright epic, cause they made the *dire* mistake of taking him for an idiot.
He's not.
But what really shows some of the sad underbelly of this, and how deliberate it was, is some stuff from Mark Evanier.
Link 1: http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2008_12_11.html#016337
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TV networks, because they reach so many people, are always being sued and/or protested, often over things you could never imagine would create problems. Most of the time, the network position is defensible and the outrage falls into the "nuisance" category...but even nuisance suits and protests can be a nuisance. And expensive to defend against. In kids' television, the stakes seem higher. A protester yelling, "This show is poisoning our children" will usually get more traction than someone bitching about a show for general audiences. The sponsors of kidvid are especially frail and known to atomize over very little negative feedback.
Censorship of broadcast television has declined greatly in the era of HBO, Showtime and DVDs...but in the early eighties, if you were creating a show for CBS, NBC or ABC you usually found yourself in the following dilemma. You had to please the Programming People who bought the show and prayed for ratings. They wanted your program to be edgy and sexy and full of action and excitement. And then you had to please the Standards and Practices People. They wanted your show to be nice and quiet and non-controversial. The two divisions rarely spoke with one aNOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
You seem to be responding to this as "cable tv and iphone or nothing ?" In other words, your imagination seems to be following the pattern of choosing among what's presented on TV, versus... nothing. Can't you imagine better? This is what I meant by Americans being saturated in propaganda. The first thing that you are made to believe is that the only choices that you have are the only choices presented to you.
Actually no, that's still in line with my "if we have lots of media sources it'll spread them too thin to control everything" argument.
It's like how all hackers target internet explorer for the most part because it's the most ubiquitous program. But while they're distracted with that, people using more obscure programs can avoid a lot of the damage and fallout.
I don't want cable tv or nothing, I want cable tv and everything.
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FINAL THOUGHT FOR A WHILE... I've been on vacation, it's the first proper vacation that I've taken in over 20 years, and part of my enjoyment was coming here and yakking with you guys. (Also, I dug the bermuda grass out of my garden.... again.... and am going to invest in a durable root barrier. But that's another story.
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I mentioned that I thought society was like an organism, and I would like to expand on that idea and see if it leads to any further thoughts at your end.
When societies begin with very few members, those members are necessarily rather unspecialized. Everyone does everything. The units are more-or-less undifferentiated, except that some are younger and less capable, and some are capable of budding and others are not. (This puts a little kink into the relationships between these units.) As these units grow numerically and form a larger organism, the individual units themselves cannot absorb water and nutrients directly, they must be brought, so certain units form food-and-water-gathering/transportation structures, while certain other units form waste-excreting structures. Movement thru the environment improves the chances of finding food, so some units propel or extend the organism along. Remembering where one has been and what has been encountered (whether good or bad) also improves the chances for survival, so sensory, memory and response units become feature of the whole. Defense against internal invaders is useful... defensive units develop. There are also defensive units which fight internal renegades.
This could describe an embryo, a beehive, or a society. To analogize societies even further, what could cause a society to collapse?
Well, like all living creatures it could collapse due to environmental catastrophe... the 500-year drought, the cataclysmic volcano. It could use up all of its local resources and die. It could collapse due to all kinds of internal failures... memory failure, internal signalling failure. It could develop a cancer... a portion of the organism which grows beyond the bounds of utility and into the realm of fatal parasitism.
But unlike the organism on which society is modeled, society does not have to remain in its mature form. A lion can become a cow, or a hydra. As far as death is concerned, many societies have atomized so completely that little is known of them today... necrotic failure. But others broke down into smaller semi-independent and still-surviving units... apoptosis.
The ability of society to survive either internal changes or environmental challenges is the ability of the fundamental algorithms to adapt to new circumstances... to change themselves.
I'm going to go back to that paper I mentioned before: The Algorithmic Origins of Life . I think the concept can be applied not only to cellular life, but also electronic life and organizational life.
The Algorithmic Origins of Life
http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.4803
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