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[nenjin]

Your avatars are both blue on my tiny phone, is why I made the mistake.

[wierd]

In my mind, the calculus can be made fairly simple, (but with obvious and clear caveats about such simplification)--



If you have an axe to grind, you have no real business deciding about declaring war.


Seriously--

If you have one to grind about refusing to declare war at all costs, you will allow a situation to get all out of control, and you will end up with a hamstrung nation cut off from supplies and logistics, and surrounded on all sides by hostile agents that lack your scruples, and have been conducting war against your nation from the start, while you refused to take action.

The converse is also true;

If you have an axe to grind about some aspect or feature about that other nation, that just sets your teeth on edge, and you just want them gone at all costs, you will be fantastically more likely to conduct campaigns of aggression and violence, more likely to overlook atrocious behaviors from your armed forces, and all in all, you will commit your people to long and arduous campaigns abroad that quite frankly, are just plain wasteful of everything: Life, Material, Wealth, and Time-- and your people will suffer for that hubris and poor decision making.


War is never an ideal solution. It IS something that must be on the table, because humans are quite capable of being unreasonable, and you cannot placate that irrationality. (See for example, Russia Vis a vis, Ukraine)

Because it is, by its very nature, the least ideal outcome it must be treated with absolute sobriety and candor; It is not something to be approached with passion. A full accounting of the consequences must be taken, and understood, and then a rational choice to commit must be taken.  Anything less is how you throw lives away and destroy way more then you protect, for fruitless aims.

[nenjin]

I feel like, for the us, when we started making war to preemptively head off a war on our doorstep is when we started sliding down the slope of slipperiness. WW2 primed us for the idea that this is necessary, and both left and right leaders have continually broadened the conditions for us to get involved. Wars of actual defense for the US are, so far, non-existent.

[Gentlefish]

I... Don't think we've had a leader from the left. Closest would be Roosevelt and even then. Unless I'm totally misinterpreting and you mean "leaders left and right" in which case I agree. All war-hungry mongrels the lot of them.

[nenjin]

I... Don't think we've had a leader from the left. Closest would be Roosevelt and even then. Unless I'm totally misinterpreting and you mean "leaders left and right" in which case I agree. All war-hungry mongrels the lot of them.

I think I’d agree we’ve never had like, a European-style left president.

[Rolan7]

(I know this is from a bit back and Trekkin was talking more about perception than truth, but I couldn't sleep anyway so here's a rant directed at no posters, just the manipulative 1%)

Seriously? The people who are building concentration camps? The people who oppose single-payer healthcare? The people who are running headlong into war with Iran? The people who deny that global warming is even happening?

You're going to side with them because you think politics is solely binary and that an impoverished police state is somehow similar to the governments of the wealthiest, freest states in the union?

Well, he seems serious to me -- and for what it's worth, I can understand why. The alternative is presently calling his religion a front for a cabal of pedophiles, his culture inherently evil and oppressive except where it's marketably quaint, and his politics so self-destructive they could only come about by evil people duping stupid people en masse. Do you see how that might not appeal?

By "alternative" you mean Conservative Evangelicals, right?  Catholic-hating xenophobes, if not outright white-supremacists, who insist on destabilizing South-American regimes for profit?

The Pope isn't particularly popular among the Left as long as he keeps condemning homosexuality, not to mention any non-standard gender expression, but Catholics are fine.  Not the high-ranking ones involved in the pedophilia coverup, but everyday Catholics.  Our Left embraces other cultures, particularly ones which our Right-wing hates.

And policy-wise our left-leaning congresscritters are vastly behind Europe, much less any sort of *actual* socialism, so I don't see the threat.  Particularly when the alternative is literally the corporate imperialists who exploited SA economies to death.

That's how they operate, though.  Exploit people to get rich, then get those *same people* to vote for them out of desperation.  They promise everyone that vanishingly small chance of joining the upper class, while making it harder than ever to even remain middle class.  Which just makes people more desperate.

I mean, they've got an entire grassroots demographic demanding the right to die in coal mines. 

Furthermore, if someone is used to government not working, the people whose central idea is that government can fix everything for everyone can easily come off as naive. Arguing on moral grounds doesn't help dispel the impression that progressives aren't practical, either.

To the degree that that's fixable, it is, I think, down to the radical progressives to frame their proposals in ways that localize the effects until they can be considered in kitchen-table terms. For example, "single-payer healthcare" is a great slogan, but nobody has agreed on what it means at the budgetary level. Nor is it enough to just lean on class warfare and say all the money is coming out of billionaires' hides.

They're taking it out of our hides.  If this program, a basic human right almost everywhere else in the world, requires taking some portion of their ill-gotten wealth back- I'm fine with that.

Single-payer healthcare is a very simple idea that's not hard to explain, because it's the worldwide default.  Canada's the most common example due to proximity, which works.  Having to buy your own insurance is vastly more complicated, which is why that's why the Republicans pushed it.  Initially Romney's plan, later the "Obamacare" we got.  The manipulative bastards got to fight their *own healthcare plan* while painting Obama and Democrats as crazy socialists for it.  The Insurance companies won, the half-measure is struggling hard, and Republicans get to wield it as a *win*.

It's kind of like how there's a lot more of a pipeline for young Republicans to get involved in politics in college and so forth because they actually get paid. If you're asking people to choose between "you get to save the world eventually" and "you get to eat lunch today", expect hungry people to disagree with you.

I know there's that canned compass-vs-navigation metaphor that gets parroted to excuse progressives from having to plan anything, but ultimately, budgets are persuasive. It'd be nice if the far left had some.

Republicans don't give people lunch, though.  They exploit their lower-class base while scapegoating academics, foreigners, and anybody else who's "different" enough to be a bogeyman.  The Democrats have real plans to give everyone lunch (UBI, single-payer health care, clean air and water) but Republicans just abuse legislative procedure when anything comes *close* to getting through.  Like shutting down government services, holding the American people hostage, to fund an ineffectual megaproject against an imaginary threat.  That's not even bread and circuses - well, not bread anyway

[Frumple]

[Again with the "deport illegals == genocide." It's not clever, it's just an appeal to emotion that doesn't have any relation to what's actually happening. It doesn't suddenly become wrong to get rid of them once they reach some nebulous critical mass. If the system is that saturated with illegals it's cause to increase the efforts to getting rid of them, because it clearly isn't enough to meet the demands placed upon it as-is.

What are you even babbling about? The genocide I was referring to is what our ancestors did to the natives. Modern immigrants can skip that step, since we've already pretty done most of the work on that front and what we're still trying to do is largely outside the sphere of what first gen immigrants are likely to have much influence over.

Seriously, how the hell did you even get that out of what I wrote? Our ancestors didn't exactly do much in the way of deportation, more actual invasion and murder/displacement of natives. These modern immigrants are a hell of a lot nicer than the ones that birthed this nation, which makes turning around and dumping on them for doing what our people did with not even half as much murder and pillaging that much more bullshit.

[Trekkin]

Republicans don't give people lunch, though.  They exploit their lower-class base while scapegoating academics, foreigners, and anybody else who's "different" enough to be a bogeyman.  The Democrats have real plans to give everyone lunch (UBI, single-payer health care, clean air and water) but Republicans just abuse legislative procedure when anything comes *close* to getting through.  Like shutting down government services, holding the American people hostage, to fund an ineffectual megaproject against an imaginary threat.  That's not even bread and circuses - well, not bread anyway

I think you may have misunderstood my point here. I wasn't talking about policy. I was referring to the many mechanisms in place for building rosters of conservative candidates for every position from city council on up and getting people involved in politics. Everyone's aware of the Federalist Society, of course, but College Republicans and YRCs do a surprising amount to facilitate that process -- and, as I said, the Republicans pay a higher proportion of their staff.

We talk about it in terms of candidates more frequently, but I think there's another political dimension to it that we miss sometimes: local government is generally more agile, so it helps get people engaged and drive up turnout by being able to more quickly show that elections matter.

That was my point regarding the political appeal of Democratic means as opposed to policy goals: it's a lot easier to get skeptical people to go knock on doors and stuff envelopes to convince a few thousand people to vote for local stuff than to try to sway the whole nation toward big-picture federal policies, but once they've done the local bit, the federal bit looks a lot more achievable.

[McTraveller]

Uhh... single payer healthcare doesn't really work.  It just hides the problems in a different way compared to the US system.  Both systems are kind of terrible.

If I was going to reform health care, I'd do maybe three things:
1. Overhaul pharma patent law and/or enforce antitrust.  The recent trend of companies monopolizing old drugs and increasing prices thousand-fold is terrible.

1a. Open public research institutions that develop treatments on the taxpayer dime, but also then have the results in the public domain, so companies compete to manufacture drugs at the most affordable price, rather than just simply get monopoly rent.  Something like NASA for medicine.

2. Reform requirements for certification for basic levels of health care.  This is to make it easier for people to become primary care doctors, so we can have more of them available for basic physicals, basic illness care, etc.  Greater supply will naturally drop prices.

3. Break up health insurance into two types - a basic type that covers the public health issues, like basic physicals, immunizations, basic illness control.  Everything else would be private.  Maybe the "basic" insurance would cover ER type events, like accidents, etc.  If you split insurance this way, basic insurance would cost 1/10 what we pay now - 90% of health care spending is on chronic conditions and end-of-life care.

[Lord Shonus]

No, single payer really does work. It is possible it wouldn't work so well in the US due to our complex governmental structure and pre-existing setup, but the concept works very well in most countries. Indeed, it working so well Over There is quite possibly a big part of why the US system is so fucked up - the companies that make pharmecuticals and equipment are gouging the US because they can't gouge Europeans.


Granted, we hear a lot about the problems with Britain's NHS, and some of the things we hear are even true. This is because the NHS (instituted in the 1950s) was the first such program outside of the communist states with all the fumbles that implies, not because of fundamental problems with the idea.

[McTraveller]

Maybe we have different definitions of "work"...  which is fair.  Different metrics paint different pictures.  But so much of single-payer is cultural: I don't see a single-payer in the US actually having a reasonable balance between outcomes and price.  Part of the US mess is that our culture is "maximim personal benefit" rather than any kind of maximum collective benefit. I mean, look at the immunization nonsense...

I do stand at least by one of my assertions - the US doesn't have very many physicians.  Even worldbank agrees: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS

Germany has 4.2 physicians per 1000 people. UK has 2.8, and US only has 2.6.

Also - did you suggest that part of the reason why single-payer works is because they can externalize the cost of medicine?

[wierd]

No.

He said the pharmecutical companies gouge americans, because they can, and he is right.

(The statement that 'because they cannot gouge europeans', I take to mean "Shameless profit seeking to bolster shareholder value in markets where they can, because the Eurozone countries do not permit high margins that make the investors jizz themselves like the US does." This does not mean that there is no profit made there; it just means that they cannot inflate the price of a drug by umpteen bazillion percent, just because it makes investors ejaculate rainbows.  The investors have gotten used to obscene returns on investment that make them *squirt pretty colors* at their *Parties*. Having to accept slower returns will make them *squeeze the juice* and they don't like that, and threaten to pull their investments out into other areas where they can get such obscene growth. The drug companies will do anything, including financially murdering people who depend on these medicines, to prevent that.  So, they do.)

See for example, when HIV/AIDs medicine went up 5,000% in price, because a CEO made it so.
https://money.cnn.com/2016/08/25/news/economy/daraprim-aids-drug-high-price/index.html


Other noteworthy example is EpiPen.
https://www.businessinsider.com/epipen-cost-increase-healthcare-insurance-2016-8

A generic injector of a different design, with THE SAME DRUG INSIDE, costs a vanishingly small amount in comparison.
https://www.goodrx.com/epinephrine-adrenaclick


It is ***NOT*** that the drug companies are subsidized by US markets!!  It is that they can extract a higher price, due to market stagnation and government collusion.  They can extract a higher market price-- SO THEY DO.

As for the "Fewer doctors"--

That is an artificially (and purposefully!!) induced situation.  The AMA puts a stranglehold on the number of new doctors that can practice every year, through the necessity of residency program completion to practice as a doctor within the US.  The AMA controls the residency programs, and artificially controls the supply in this fashion.

There is a huge glut of trained, and otherwise perfectly capable physicians in the US, THAT CANNOT PRACTICE, because they cannot enter a residency program, because the AMA actively PREVENTS them from doing so.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/doctors-with-borders-how-the-us-shuts-out-foreign-physicians/382723/

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/12/702500408/are-doctors-overpaid

[Zangi]

Insert people who will actively sabotage implementation of the program and then say 'we tried our best, it does not work'.

[Lord Shonus]

The statement that 'because they cannot gouge europeans', I take to mean "Shameless profit seeking to bolster shareholder value in markets where they can, because the Eurozone countries do not permit high margins that make the investors jizz themselves like the US does."

This is precisely the intended meaning. I'm not quite socialist enough to think that the profit incentive is not necessary or useful to incentivize developments, but the level of profit drug companies expect from Americans is obscene. However, your two examples aren't quite perfect examples of the phenomenon.

The price hike for Daraprim was primarily because the patent was expiring, which meant that a flood of generic equivalents would soon be flooding the market. It was a blatant "get as much money out of this as we can before the competition shows up. Likewise, the EpiPen price hike came right after the company had a new executive - who had just finished a term in politics where she mandated a huge school district to stockpile EpiPens -by name- for student safety. In other words, it was a garden-variety corruption case where she was paid with a job for securing a guaranteed "at any price" contract for the company.

[Trekkin]

Apparently Trump tweeted he's pushing the mass ICE raids back two weeks in the hope of reaching a consensus solution on immigration with Congress.

In other words, it's the shutdown all over again. "Give me what I want or I keep hurting poor people."