I would add selfish. There are probably plenty of people who fall into the "I gots mine, fuck the rest of you" camp who aren't stupid, brainwashed or rich.
I would even go so far as to say that they are probably more numerous than any of the other three categories.
Which, in my observation, depends upon the state the veteran lives in and how local politicians allocate funding. Your problem is you can't see beyond "Gubmint Health Care Bad" to "single-payer care could work if it were administrated fairly." It ain't the system that sucks, it's the people running it.
To be sure, there's plenty of overlap with selfish and rich, stupid and brainwashed, selfish and stupid, all four, etc. The selfish, but neither rich, stupid or brainwashed sliver is more than just a few people, but at a guess no bigger than any one of the other categories looking at it exclusively.
Oh, how I love this attitude. More misery has been caused on this world by people thinking "yeah, this obvious bullshit will work if only the right people are put in charge of it." That's why communism doesn't die the death it deserves, it's why welfare in the US has been a trap instead of a safety net, the whole drug war is based on this idea . . . bleagh. That there are NO "right people" never seems to enter the calculation.
No system will ever be administered by perfect people, be it government-run healthcare or corporate-run healthcare (what we have now in the States). To try to reason on the basis of "this will be good if only the right people are running it" will always fall short. The truth is that I have lived with the American health-care system and the French health-care system. Neither is perfect, or even close. Neither is adminstered by perfect people. But for all the faults of both systems, I vastly prefer the French system. Not only is it fairer to the masses, but it is much cheaper overall. I'm not sure just how so many Americans have come to believe that "government-run healthcare" (which is a thorough misnomer; the government doesn't run it, it merely administers the insurance system that pays for it) is necessarily bad, but I suspect that most of those who are so dead-set against it have little or no direct experience with national health-care systems.
Ditto capitalism. A blended approach DOES work and Europe proves it. Why you still have this "socialism never works" idea is beyond reason.
This right wing talking point that is just accepted as gospel (ask yourself how you would measure it and then what actual evidence you have seen to back it up) by many ‘moderates’ is not actually true. There is only a 5-11% (depending on the study) correlation of intergenerational welfare use. However that is just correlation. No study has yet to prove causation. Unless you’ve got something I haven’t seen.
True socialism doesn't work. But what Europe has, even in Scandanavia, is not true socialism. It is moderately limited capitalism (and not even all that limited; Europe is a pretty capitalist society, when it comes right down to it, where rich people can get very rich) with a strong social safety net. And that's why it works. It isn't the "state runs everything" failure of socialism, but it isn't the "strong people win and the rest get left behind" of unbridled capitalism. The problem in trying to discuss it is ultimately what is called a "fallacy of ambiguity" in logic: you change the definition of the terms in the course of the argument. At one point in the argument, "socialism" means pure, unlimited marxism. It is fairly easy to demonstrate that that has never worked, will never work, and can never work. Then, with the concept of failure firmly attached to the term "socialism", you change the definition of socialism to refer to the social safety net of European countries, and say you are against it, even though Europe is more prosperous than the USA. A fallacy of ambiguity does not prove its conclusion, but not very many people actually care about that. It has long been obvious that the standard for accepting an argument is radically different, depending on whether it "proves" what you want to believe, or not. I have seen intelligent people, including some on this very board, accept totally ridiculous arguments that any objective first-year student of basic logic could take apart in a few minutes, just because they think they uphold what they want to believe. Then those same people will grasp as the flimsiest straws to try to get around an argument that seeks to demonstrate something they don't want to believe. That's how the "socialism never works" idea is constructed and maintained: a major fallacy of ambiguity, that is "convincing" only to those who think that social systems are always bad. And it is pretty much impossible to change any of that, because very few people ever change their minds about anything on the basis of a rational argument.
I was proceeding from a point where Lanz has had those points explained to him, and then mildly chastised with them, and finally beaten and sodomized with them time and time again.
From FB, courtesy of author David Mack: There's a chance that sometime next week, the SCOTUS will order some states to prematurely stop counting votes on Nov. 3, in spite of laws requiring all legally cast ballots to be counted. I hope enough Democratic governors (esp. in PA, WI & MI) have the courage to say, "The Court has issued its ruling; now let them enforce it." And then order the counting to continue. The important thing to remember here is that the Court's rulings only matter if we let them. If the GOP has shown us anything these past four years, it's that the rules cease to matter if the players no longer acknowledge them. If Democratic governors ignore a SCOTUS order to halt the counting of votes, you know what SCOTUS can do about it? Answer: Not much. We're going to get through this, folks. But buckle up—looks like rough road ahead.
Lanzman is frozen in 2003. Microsoft tried to send upgrade packs to his personality and worldview, but he kept hitting "later". They tried forcing the upgrade, but he started stepping on the power strip button. They tried forcing it on the next bootup, but he bypassed their bootup with a 3.5 bootup floppy he wrote. He's a stubborn codger, I'll give him that.
Exactly. Modern economies aren't a inevitable result of our biological nature, they are designed systems. Machines intended to facilitate trade and the effective functioning of society. Like any machine that means sometimes parts have to be speed limited, lubrication has to be added. When it stops working it might need a jump start. The obsession from some that only tax breaks can help it, and that they always will is like someone trying to fix their busted car by adding more oil. Sure you need some, but you can quickly reach diminishing returns or even cause more damage. (The rest of your post was very good as well)
Similar system here (at least for doctors, some hospitals are government run). Doctors have private practices or are part of larger health care companies (private capitalist entities in a "socialist hell hole"? It's more common than you think!) All Australian citizens are eligible for a Medicare card. It acts a little like private insurance, in that the government has a list of fees they will pay. Doctors who accept Medicare are referred to as bulk bill, because they bulk bill the costs of their services to the government, saving a lot of administrative overheads.
Okay, I could swear we've had this exact same discussion before, but what's one more time? It's called Medicare for All, not VA for All. The care you're talking about is provided at VA Hospitals; there is no such thing as a Medicare Hospital. As far as I know, nobody is advocating that all hospitals be government-run. Medicare for All is about how the bills get paid, not how the care gets provided. In general, public goods are at their best when provided by multiple private entities engaging in well-regulated competition. A for-profit monopoly will almost always be the worst scenario. And government-run entities will be somewhere in the middle. Multiple private entities engaging in well-regulated competition is what Medicare for All calls for. There's also another critical difference between veterans' services and services provided to the entire population. Due to the "I got mine, fuck you" attitude that is so prevalent in this country, the more people use a service, the greater the public pressure will be to make sure it runs well. Veterans make up about 5% of the population, but just about everyone has a family member on Medicare and expects to be using it themselves at some point. That alone creates a very different atmosphere when it comes to the amount of pressure that will be applied to making sure the program runs well. But if you're talking about hospitals, that doesn't matter because Nobody. Is. Calling. For. Abolition. And. Replacement. Of. Private. Hospitals. In. Competition. With. Each. Other.
Our welfare system is really only good for keeping people alive. It's not designed to help people better their situations. However, as soon as you try implementing programs that would help people better their situations and have an intergenerational impact, Republicans start shrieking their heads off.
My first thought on reading this was OBAMAPHONES!!1! which is doubly sad because it was actually a Bush Admin program. At one point they actually tried to govern for the people. Might not have succeeded, but at least they tried.
This is a "feature" not a bug. The folks running FB have drunk so deeply of their own Kool-Aid that they think their AI systems can do everything a human can that they're incapable (or unwilling) to admit when their systems go wrong. I once posted a link to a Wikipedia article on FB in response to a bullshit post that someone I was "friends" with had made. Literally, as soon as I hit "submit" I got a pop-up notifying me that my link was spam. That had to be FB's systems flagging the post and not anyone else. I later figured out that said "friend" was most likely a bot account and unfriended them but not before FB told me that the post that account had made was not antisemetic, even though it clearly stated that JFK was killed by Jews.
Wow! This one oddball anecdote totally outweighs Facebook's well-documented, systematic effort to choke off traffic to progressive sites so that Republicans wouldn't yell at them!
Started last night. A sampling of good analysis of what a shitshow it was, even without ACB getting involved: https://slate.com/news-and-politics...s-trump-fraud.html?via=rss_socialflow_twitter FTA: As the Senate was voting to elevate Amy Coney Barrett to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court on Monday night, the immediate stakes for the entire country were made suddenly clear by a critical election ruling from the court she now joins. On Monday night, Justice Brett Kavanaugh released a radical and brazenly partisan opinion that dashed any hopes he, as the Supreme Court’s new median justice, might slow-walk the court’s impending conservative revolution, while also threatening the integrity of next week’s election. In an 18-page lecture, the justice cast doubt on the legitimacy of many mail ballots and endorsed the most sinister component of Bush v. Gore. America’s new median justice is not a friend to democracy, and we may pay the price for Barrett’s confirmation in just eight days. Monday’s order from the Supreme Court blocked a federal judge’s order that had tweaked Wisconsin’s voting laws in light of the pandemic. The judge directed election officials to count ballots that were postmarked by Election Day but received by Nov. 9, finding that the unprecedented demand for mail ballots combined with Postal Service delays could disenfranchise up to 100,000 voters. An appeals court blocked his decision on Oct. 8, and on Monday, SCOTUS kept it on hold by a 5–3 vote. The court offered no majority opinion, but Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh all wrote concurrences. Justice Elena Kagan penned a trenchant dissent joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Kavanaugh’s opinion is the most notable of the bunch because he is the new median justice and the opinion is frankly terrifying. In one passage, Kavanaugh attempted to defend the Wisconsin law disqualifying ballots received after Election Day. He pointed out that “most States” share this policy, explaining: Those States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election. And those States also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter. Kavanaugh then quoted New York University law professor Richard Pildes stating that the “longer after Election Day any significant changes in vote totals take place, the greater the risk that the losing side will cry that the election has been stolen.” (Kavanaugh was quoting an article in which Pildes encouraged states to extend their ballot deadlines, directly contradicting Kavanaugh’s argument.) It is genuinely alarming that the justice cast these aspersions on late-arriving ballots. In at least 18 states (actually 22 including a multitude of Republican states like MS, KY, and TX) and the District of Columbia, election officials do count ballots that arrive after Election Day. And, in these states, there is no result to “flip” because there is no result to overturn until all valid ballots are counted. Further, George W. Bush’s 2000 election legal team—which included Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Roberts—argued during that contested election that ballots arriving late and without postmarks, which were thought to benefit Bush, must be counted in Florida. Finally, and most importantly, late-arriving ballots have handed the election to a candidate who was behind on election night on many occasions in the United States—most recently, in multiple California congressional races in 2018. Two years ago, California anticipated this possibility after extending the deadline for mail ballots, a move that signaled no chicanery. Yet Republicans seized upon it to delegitimize multiple Democratic victories. Even putative moderate Republican Young Kim raised the notion when she lost her lead after Election Day. Now the country’s highest court is ready to give any such challenges the ammunition they need heading into one of the most fraught election days this country has ever seen due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a would-be strongman in the White House. President Donald Trump has taken the pastime of false voter fraud allegations to a dangerous new extreme, repeatedly rejecting the validity of mail ballots that arrive after Nov. 3. Indeed, roughly 15 minutes after Kavanaugh’s opinion came down, Trump tweeted: “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd.” Twitter concealed his tweet with a warning its content is “disputed and might be misleading about how to participate in an election.” But there is nothing Twitter, or anybody else, can do to warn Americans about Kavanaugh’s lies about “chaos and suspicions of impropriety” when states try to count every ballot next month. And there was another, even more startling assertion in Kavanaugh’s concurrence. While referencing an earlier case, Kavanaugh dropped a bombshell in a footnote: He endorsed an argument that was too extreme for even the Bush v. Gore majority that decided the 2000 election, one that would give the Supreme Court the wholly new right to overrule state courts on their own election laws. In Bush v. Gore, three justices—William Rehnquist, joined by Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—tried to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s interpretation of the state’s own election law. As a rule, state Supreme Courts get final say over the meaning of their own state laws. But Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas argued that SCOTUS must review their decisions to ensure they comply with the “intent of the legislature.” In other words, the Supreme Court gets to be a Supreme Board of Elections that substitutes state courts’ interpretation of state law with its own subjective view of a legislature’s “intent.” Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor balked at this theory, refusing to sign onto it. Yet Kavanaugh cited Rehnquist’s concurrence as if it were precedent. As Rehnquist “persuasively explained in Bush v. Gore,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the text of the Constitution requires federal courts to ensure that state courts do not rewrite state election laws.” It is surreal to read these words. Rehnquist’s concurrence garnered just three votes, so it is not precedent at all. Neither, for that matter, is the majority decision in Bush v. Gore, which warned future courts never to rely on it as precedent. To set a good example, SCOTUS itself has never cited any part of Bush v. Gore as precedent. Its opinions are ghosts that haunt modern constitutional law. Yet Kavanaugh just declared in a footnote that he not only agrees with Rehnquist but actually views his opinion as bona fide precedent. Monday’s opinion was especially bizarre because the justice has previously gone out of his way to distance himself from the more strident conservatives. In cases involving LGBTQ rights and Dreamers, for instance, he has declined to sign onto Thomas’ and Alito’s partisan rants, presenting himself as a reasonable guy who tries really hard to do the right thing. The most generous explanation of Monday’s frightening opinion is that Kavanaugh started to defend his vote in these election cases and got carried away, digging a deeper hole for himself as he tried to respond to the unanswerable rejoinders in Kagan’s dissent. The most pessimistic view is that Kavanaugh knows exactly what he’s doing: laying the groundwork to reject enough ballots to hand Trump an unearned second term while daringDemocrats to do something about it, or to potentially decide critical congressional races at least. Perhaps Kavanaugh is planting his flag now, proclaiming that he won’t strike compromises for the sake of the court’s legitimacy; to the contrary, he’ll toss fuel on the fire, confident Democrats are too cowardly to retaliate. ------ More from a separate article: Let’s Count All the Errors and Lies in Brett Kavanaugh’s Defense of Voter Suppression Mistake No. 1: Vermont hasn’t changed its election laws in response to the pandemic. Monday’s order required Wisconsin to disqualify ballots that are mailed by Election Day but arrive shortly thereafter. A federal judge had ordered the state to count these ballots, but SCOTUS shot him down by a 5–3 vote. Kavanaugh defended his vote by writing that some states modified their voting rules in light of the pandemic while some did not. This divided response, Kavanaugh suggested, demonstrates that it’s perfectly reasonable for states to ignore the pandemic’s impact on elections and refuse to make voting easier and safer. Kavanaugh cited Vermont as an example of a state that has “decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules.” As the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office pointed out on Tuesday, Kavanaugh’s claim is “simply not true.” Because of COVID-19, Vermont chose to mail every registered voter a ballot on Oct. 1 this year. This action limits the risk that voters will receive their ballots when it is too late to mail them back on time. Vermont also authorized ballot processing 30 days out from the election to speed up vote-counting. “Those are our VT specific solutions,” the office wrote. It also provided the relevant state guidance to a commenter who considered sending a correction to Kavanaugh. Clearly, Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos is not happy that a sitting Supreme Court justice spread misinformation about his state’s election procedures. Mistake No. 2: States declare the winner of an election on election night. In one shocking passage, Kavanaugh baselessly cast doubt on the validity of mail ballots that arrive after Election Day in language echoing Trump’s. Noting that some states throw out these ballots, he wrote: These States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election. And those States also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter. There are really two errors here. The first is that late-arriving ballots can “flip” an election, which is obviously false; as Justice Elena Kagan retorted in dissent, “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted. And nothing could be more ‘suspicio[us]’ or ‘improp[er]’ than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night. To suggest otherwise, especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process.” The second error lies in Kavanaugh’s claim that states “definitively announce the results of the election on election night.” That is untrue: The media may call an election on election night; a candidate may call on election on election night; but the states do not “definitively announce the results” on election night. To the contrary, every state formally certifies results in the days or weeks following an election; zero certify results on election night. There is a good reason why: It takes a while to count every ballot, including those from members of the military, which frequently arrive late. A state’s duty is not to satisfy anxious candidates and voters but to get the count right. It is only cynical politicians who insist that a state must announce the results immediately. Mistake No. 3: The Supreme Court unanimously endorsed a radical theory during the 2000 election litigation. The most eye-popping part of Kavanaugh’s opinion was tucked away in a lengthy footnote that sought to retcon a theory too radical for the Bush v. Gore majority into the law of the land. To recap briefly: In Bush v. Gore, George W. Bush’s legal team—which included Kavanaugh, Barrett, and John Roberts—claimed that SCOTUS must police state courts’ interpretation of their own state’s election laws. These lawyers asserted that state courts unconstitutionally usurp power from state legislatures when they construe election laws in a way that SCOTUS doesn’t like. Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy ultimately balked at this theory, favoring a different rationale to hand Bush the election. On Monday, however, Kavanaugh claimed that a “unanimous” Supreme Court endorsed the very theory that O’Connor and Kennedy rejected in Bush v. Gore. This position never drew support from a majority of the justices, let alone all of them. So how did Kavanaugh pass off this lie? He cited Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, the decision that preceded Bush v. Gore. But Palm Beach County did not say that federal courts must police state courts’ interpretation of election law. In fact, it barely said anything at all. Palm Beach County merely asked the Florida Supreme Court to clarify an earlier decision. It even included a disclaimer that the decision declined to review “the federal questions asserted to be present.” In other words, Palm Beach County did not enshrine Kavanaugh’s theory into law. It did not make any law, or even accept Bush’s contention that he had raised a genuine constitutional claim. Mistake No. 4: There is a rule against federal courts changing voting rules before an election. Kavanaugh alleged that the Supreme Court “has repeatedly emphasized that federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election laws in the period close to an election.” That’s false. The Supreme Court has neverstated this rule in a majority opinion. It has enforced it in a series of unsigned orders released without oral arguments, full briefing, or an opinion of the court—the so-called shadow docket cases. Kavanaugh is pretending that these shadow docket orders qualify as bona fide precedent. They do not. Mistake No. 5: No one thinks they can return their ballot by Election Day if they request it by Oct. 29. Kavanaugh wrote: “No one thinks that voters who request absentee ballots as late as October 29 can both receive the ballots and mail them back in time to be received by election day.” He cites no support for this assumption, probably because it’s wrong. Many states explicitly allow voters to request absentee ballots even closer to Election Day and instruct them to mail their ballots back. A large number of voters do wait until the last minute to ask for a ballot, which is why a strict deadline disenfranchises so many people. In August, the Postal Service encouraged 46 states to change their deadlines, warning them that ballots requested and returned in accordance with state law might not make it back in time. The Postal Service would not have sent out this warning if “no one” thought the states’ existing deadlines were unrealistic. There are several other confusing and dishonest aspects of Kavanaugh’s opinion, many of them spotted by Talking Points Memo’s eagle-eyed Tierney Sneed. Here’s a sampling: ● Kavanaugh quoted New York University law professor Richard Pildes warning about the destabilizing effects of late-arriving ballots. But this quote came from an article in which Pildes supported extending the deadline for mail ballots—exactly what Kavanaugh sought to condemn. By plucking the quote out of context, the justice falsely implied that Pildes shared his hostility to counting every ballot. ● Again, one of Kavanaugh’s chief arguments is that only state legislatures have power to alter election laws. He wrote that the Supreme Court has blocked multiple lower court orders “that second-guessed state legislative judgments” about voting rules. The first example he cited was Merrill v. People First, in which the court halted an order that would’ve allowed Alabama counties to offer curbside voting. But the Alabama Legislaturenever banned curbside voting. Its Republican secretary of state simply concocted this ban out of whole cloth. By preserving a ban the Legislature never approved, Kavanaugh violated his own rule that legislatures, not governors or courts, have constitutional authority to make election laws. ● A key premise of Kavanaugh’s opinion is that the Wisconsin Legislature is eager to count ballots as quickly as possible so a winner emerges on election night. But the Legislature has preserved an antiquated law that forbids officials from processing ballots until Election Day. Many other states, including Florida, start processing ballots much earlier so they can get out results quickly. Wisconsin Republicans rejected this reform. There are thus good reasons to question the sincerity of the Legislature’s alleged desire to count ballots fast. Kavanaugh did not even engage with this issue. By deploying so many falsehoods in his 18-page opinion, Kavanaugh sent a signal to lower court judges: Uphold voter suppression at all costs, even if you have to ignore or contort the factual record to do it. Trump’s dozens of hackish judicial nominees will hear this message loud and clear.
@AdamParkhomenko tweets: If you’re shocked that Kavanaugh would have so many errors in his lunatic writings, it helps to remember he’s not actually a judge. He’s a GOP operative who became a judge to help his party.
Here's a rundown on the last day states will count a ballot postmarked by election day https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...yNyBxUsI2ZtN3hqClvdeWqFQw1aD_SDxITmjfsmhPcrcU
