An exchange with a blogger who is apparently a philosophy student at the University of Virginia leads me to believe that many people are still misunderstanding my point about the morality of single payer healthcare. Many people responded to my first post by saying, “But we have a duty to care for the sick!” Trying to make myself very clear, I wrote 2,000 words explaining that even assuming, arguendo, that we have a duty to make sure people don’t die from lack of health care, this is not a good moral argument for single payer. At which point I got more posts, including from said philosophy student, saying “But we have a duty to care for the sick!” Length having failed, let me try brevity:
1) Single payer transfers money from anyone who is young and healthy to anyone who is old and sick, regardless of their need for the money.
Basically, yes.
And as someone who is young and healthy (Really! I go on three-mile runs thrice a week and lift weights twice a week!), I have no problem with this. The reason? Well, because I have no problem paying taxes to help old sick people now, because I’m going to be old and sick in the future. That’s the basic principle involved here. But for peeps like Meghan, whose only thought is “MEEEEEEEEEEE-me-me-me-me-MEEEEEEEEEE!”, this line of thought is deeply immoral.
I can’t wait until one day, years from now, when some American tourists crash their hot air balloon into an Iraqi hillside and a kindly old man greets them with a glass of brandy. Until then, stay classy, America.
We should have given up on Nouri al-Maliki long ago and begun to work with other parties in the Iraqi parliament to bring down the government, yielding either a new coalition of less sectarian parties or, as Pollack has suggested, new elections.
The choice is difficult because replacing the Maliki government will take time and because there is no guarantee of ultimate political success. Nonetheless, continuing the surge while finally trying to change the central government is the most rational choice because the only available alternative is defeat — a defeat that is not at all inevitable and that would be both catastrophic and self-inflicted.
So basically, we’re going to either:
a.) Topple the Iraqi government through “other parties” in the country (*COUGH!* Military coup! Go Chalabi! *COUGH!*)
-OR-
b.) Force the Iraqis to vote until they elect a government we approve of.
All of which makes me go…
“Bloob-blubba-bloob-blubba-bloob-blubba.”
This sort of “planning” is so stupid, that I’ve decided to concoct one of my own. Let me know what you think:
So after our release-wild-bears-and-pumas-into-the-streets gambit inevitably fails, I think we should work on a plan that will literally put the fear of God into the Iraqis until they all hold hands and sing Dan Fogelberg’s mellow brand of vagina rock throughout the hills of Basra (if Basra has hills, that is… since I’m a product of the American education system, I still don’t know how to read a map).
The first step will require the slaughter of every household’s first-born child. Moses used this technique to good effect against the ancient Egyptians, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t work this time. But if this fails to pacify the ungrateful Iraqis, I suggest a bold new strategy: we begin bribing insurgents not to kill people. For every week an insurgent goes without setting up a roadside bomb or opening fire in a crowded marketplace, that insurgent will receive $15,000 and a box of ho-hos. Given that there are roughly 70,000 or so insurgents in Iraq right now, I calculate that this plan will cost us $1,050,000,000 per week, or roughly half of what we’re paying to occupy Iraq right now.
Now that we’ve defeated the insurgency through a combination of wanton child slaughter and bribes, we’ll have to topple the current Iraqi government via a military coup. And what will we replace it with, you ask? Well that’s the best part! We’re going to take all the illegal immigrants currently working in America and deport them to Iraq, where they’ll become the de facto leaders of the country! This works out wonderfully, since those sneaky Meskins have been trying to reconquista the southwestern part of America for years. This is our way of saying to them, “Hey! Chicanos! If you have a hankerin’ for reconquista-in’, you can reconquista this li’l desert country over here! Hope ya like falafel! Ta-hilk-hilk-hilk!”
So what do you think, guys? Does this plan of mine make any less sense than what Krauthammer advocates?
UPDATE: Pere’s right, I need to fit giant robots in here somewhere. Maybe we can use them to “deal with” the illegal immigrants if they fail to gain legitimacy as a shadow government.
Gavin adds: How about a robo-Hussein? He’d be just like Saddam Hussein, except (and here’s the best part). . .a robot.
It’s grossly negligent (at best) that American kids are dying for strategic incoherence on such an epic scale. If I were a diplomat at the State Department, I’d probably resign in protest rather than continue to serve an Administration bleeding American lives so irresponsibly. Arming Sunni militias (sorry, Concerned Citizens Programmes) rather than the National Army, as nascent and pitable as this last is, will almost certainly lead to more intensified Sunni–Shi’a fighting. Meantime, these bolstered Sunni forces (some of them simply ex-Baathists we supposedly went in to topple) will eventually be fighting for primacy against the very Government we’ve been trying to prop up in Baghdad. I find this mind-boggling in its short-sightedness and lack of overarching strategic direction (unless we’ve truly become Machiavellian, and are plotting to return the Sunnis to power to contain Iran!)
Your guess is as good as mine.
Next week, I expect to read that we’ve started releasing packs of hungry bears and pumas loose in Baghdad to ensure that neither the Sadrists nor the ex-Baathists get too much of an upper hand.
It’s a very, very sad commentary on the state of our government that I actually believe they’d try something like this:
A rumor is circulating among well-connected and formerly high-level Iraqi bureaucrats in exile in places like Damascus that a military coup is being prepared for Iraq. I received the following from a reliable, knowledgeable contact. There is no certitude that this plan can or will be implemented. That it is being discussed at high levels seems highly likely.
“There is serious talk of a military commission (majlis `askari) to take over the government. The parties would be banned from holding positions, and all the ministers would be technocrats, so to speak. . . [The writer indicates that attempts have been made to recruit cabinet members from the ranks of expatriate technocrats.]
The six-member board or commission would be composed on non-political former military personnel who are presently not part of the government OR the military establishment, such as it is in Iraq at the moment. It is said that the Americans are supporting this behind the scenes.
The plan includes a two-year period during which political parties would not be permitted to be part of the government, but instead would prepare and strengthen the parties for an election which would not have lists, but real people running for real seats. The two year period would be designed to take control of security and restore infrastructure.
. . .[I]t is another [desperate plan], but one which many many Iraqis will support, since they are sick of their country being pulled apart by the “imports” – Maliki, Allawi, Jaafari et al. The military group is composed of internals, people who have the goal of securing the country even at the risk of no democracy, so they say. “
I just don’t know what to say anymore. Maybe I’ll just put my index finger on my lips and start going “Bloob-blubba-bloob-blubba-bloob-blubba.”
It’s Thursday, and that means it’s time to pick on Megan McArdle again see what’s happening with Warner Todd Huston, the formerly walrus-visaged seer of RenewAmerica and NewsBusters.
Another example? As if this video of the YearlyKos Nutroots Panel weren’t enough!
Above: Markos Moulitsas (with glasses), Matt Stoller, Jerome Armstrong
It’s sad that the Nutrooters can’t even demagogue a story right!
Oh, well, that’s a different thing, there. Most of us aren’t even aware that ‘demagogue’ is a verb. Warner Todd is going to show us how it’s done:
I mean, about all the extreme left in this country has left is demagogy,
Uh, hi. Me again. Excuse me for busting in here again already. So, this must be a result of the tidal wave of defeats and scandals that the left has suffered lately, whilst conservatives ride high?
Seriously though: you can’t tell who the wingnuts are talking about half the time, since they insist on referring to liberals interchangeably as ‘the left,’ ‘the extreme left-wing,’ ‘the hard, extreme Stalinist left,’ ‘the hard, berserk Nazi-Stalinist left wing OF DOOM,’ and ‘the Democrats.’ I think he means that Ward Churchill lost his job, ergo Chuck Shumer must be on 24-hour suicide watch, or something.
Honestly, we’re only one line in, and I’m already baffled.
Also, I hate pedantry, but the word is ‘demagoguery,’ not ‘demagogy.’ [*]
and they can’t even get THAT right anymore. Here is one from the fringe, nutters on a site called BSAlert.com. It is hilarious in that their August 8th story so badly missed its target as well as instructive for its display of an utter inability to discern reality from their favored fiction. Couple that with a wild-eyed effort at assumption and the extrapolation of one person’s comment into an assumption of ubiquitous representation and you have a fine example of what the nutroots is famous for: BS. Yes, it’s amusing that the site called BSAlert gives us a perfect example of what it purports to reveal… unfortunately it uncovers its own BS instead of other’s.
We’d never heard of this site before, but being curious fellows, we poked around a bit and found this post at Free Republic, which explains how Warner Todd found it. It’s nothing but a quoted news story from the Waco Tribune.
(I’ll wait while the nutrooters who stumbled upon this post look up the words “demagogue” and “ubiquitous.” OK. Learned what the definitions are, guys? Great. Now we can continue…)
Oh certainly. And in that case, sir, I hope you will not object if we also offer our most enthusiastic… contrafibularities.
Also, since ‘others’ now has an apostrophe in it, we pledge to follow suit for all possessive pronoun’s.
This nutrooter post breathlessly proclaims in its title that “Bill Nye Boo’d In Texas For Saying The Moon Reflects The Sun”
It’s not clear how that’s ‘breathless.’ ‘Breathless’ would be Warner Todd Huston after five minutes on a Stairmaster.
OK, so according to the BSers at BSAlert, we are to believe that all of Waco, Texas, are anti-science whack jobs that would be so gauche…
Yes, I’ll wait while you look up “gauche,” too….
OK. Back? Great
En fait, nous étions dans la salle de bains. Excusez-nous tandis que nous coupons la belette.
…so gauche as to attack that poor, innocuous Bill Nye the Science Guy. (No I will not wait for you to look up “innocuous.” I have to move on here. If I had to wait every time you didn’t get a word, I’d never get through this Fisking.)
Um, mon aéroglisseur est plein des anguilles.
zzzzzzz oh wait fell asleep with all those prosampiquitous words.
This is not as exciting as I’d hoped. Let’s pick it up from the end.
I guess to the nutters of BSAlert.com, one woman apparently equals all of Waco, Texas. I would like to point out to the BSers that it is highly doubtful that even half of Waco had attended the Nye lecture, so it’s a tad disingenuous for them to assume that the attitudes of the few people Nye upset equates to that of the entire town. In fact, I’d bet that there isn’t a single venue in the town where the estimated Waco population of 121,496 could have gathered to take the chance to be offended by Bill Nye’s elocutionary skills and religious allusions. (I told you I’m not waiting while you thumb your dictionary!)
That’s not my dictionary, sweetie. Ok, seriously, let’s get this straight: According to an obscure website, a Waco, Texas newspaper published a story about a woman walking out of a Bill Nye lecture. Since all the people in Waco didn’t walk out of the lecture, we can see that this obscure website is howling mad and represents the entire left in America. Also, in a subsequent mini-rollercoaster of paragraphs, Huston asserts that the Bible is true.
Well, there you have it. A perfect example of the nutroots’ inability to understand real Americans and their total failure to interpret an incident for its truth as well as a fine example of their ability to turn just anything into a chance to demagogue for their favorite cause célèbre.
Queen Hillary surveys our little desert colony’s political leadership and declares, “We are not amused”:
Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday the Iraqi Parliament should replace embattled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with a “less divisive and more unifying figure” to reconcile political and religious factions.
And who, exactly, is that gonna be, Hill? We’ve gone through Allawi, Jaafari and Maliki. None of them have worked. None of them have any legitimacy, mostly because they’re seen as our puppets. And I got news for ya: urging the ouster of Maliki in favor of someone that we prefer won’t help the situation.
I know I’ve said this before, but imperialism is really, really bad. The best thing we can do for the people in Iraq is to just leave them alone and stop treating them as our colonial pets. That’s not to say things will magically get better when we leave- indeed, there’s a good possibility that things will get a whole lot worse. But our ability to have a positive influence on Iraq’s politics is precisely zilch. We have no credibility with the people of Iraq. They do not trust us. Hell, I don’t trust us. So let’s just leave them alone. It’s their country, not ours.
We need to face facts. The problem of Iraq has very little to do with “the terrorists” whom Bush vaguely refers to in speech after speech. The problem of Iraq is that four years of a botched bloody occupation have created a failed state defined by fear, sectarian slaughter and the flight of Iraq’s educated class. Iraq is being held together by just one thing now: American glue, the glue of U.S. troops on the ground. The noises you hear now about the ineffectiveness of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are merely the sound of an approaching collapse long in the making. The only really appropriate analogy to Vietnam is that Bush’s policy of Iraqification—handing over things to the Iraqis—is far too similar to Vietnamization. Like the South Vietnamese government, the Iraqi politicians hunkered down in the Green Zone have little legitimacy any longer. Whatever authority they gained in the January 2005 elections has long since been frittered away and overtaken by the sectarian power struggle that is the governing reality on the ground. This power struggle is the reason why the Parliament is hopelessly paralyzed and why Maliki has almost no freedom of action. As a loyal Shiite of the Dawa Party, he is and will remain incapable of defying the new consensus among his sect for Shiite dominance. So powerful are these centrifugal forces pulling Iraq apart that the Iraqi Army seems to be disintegrating faster than it can be trained up.
It’s amazing to read someone in a major news magazine write about real history and not simply quote neocon revisionism about how we so so so so SO woulda won in Vietnam if only we’d stayed another 20 years.
Because okay, maybe the anti-McArdle appeal is wearing off, like with the LOLcons explosion last week, but it’s just so easy and time-saving to look to her for material — every post has something like this:
One of the most facile dismissals of torture is that it doesn’t work, so why bother? That’s tempting, but it’s too easy. Torture seems to me very likely to work provided that you can verify the information, which I assume interrogators can in at least some circumstances. Nor is it obvious to me that the quality of information is likely to be lower than that obtained by other means: yes, people will say anything to avoid torture, but they’ll also say anything to avoid imprisonment. Maybe the lies will be vivider or more voluble under torture, but it doesn’t seem necessarily so that the ratio of lies to truth will increase.
Why, maybe so! Who can say? If only there were a network of, for instance, computers all linked together, where we could search for information and have relevant documents come up on our screens.
Oh wait, that gives me an idea. Let me run a cable from my computer to the Washington Post offices.
Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
Then again, to be fair, the article doesn’t say a single thing about how it seems to McArdle, so her point stands unchallenged.
Bonus McArdle moment II: “Hey John Quiggin, hey Daniel Drezner: If you mix up different meanings of the terms ‘idealist and ‘realist,’ doesn’t it make it seem like the Netroots are enraged because, uh, they’re so clueless about international affairs? Haha. Zing!”
But then I started poking around his website. Just who was this person whose writings were so over-the-top bonkers that even a wingnut clearinghouse like Family Security Matters scrubbed them from its site? And as I poked around, I found lots more disturbing stuff from Atkinson. He idolizes the Boers. Thinks he’s finally ironed out all the kinks in ‘philosophy’ — which he defines as ‘the study of understanding’ but also ‘the study of civilization’ (infinity parenthetical ?’s).
And I came to the conclusion — a very, very rare one for me — that this is a man whose wingnutitude is so total, whose pathologies so super-numerous, that rather than deserving our mockery, Philip Atkinson deserves our pity.
(I say this with two caveats: It remains pretty interesting that a Philip Atkinson is attracted to a gathering like Family Security Matters, which in turn liked the cut of the lonely old nutter’s jib on first glance. And that if Atkinson were in any way a threat to anyone, even a threat to inspire others to be threats, the situation would be different.)
Because really, he’s just a pitiable old fool who, amateur long-distance psychoanalysis notwithstanding, appears very plainly to be deeply, probably irretrievably disturbed. Take a look at the author’s bio on his self-published website:
Philip Atkinson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, on the 7th June 1947, the result of a wartime marriage between a state registered nurse and a Captain in the Royal Army Ordinance Corps. His father had been educated at Cambridge University before working for some years for the foreign office in Africa, but was an ardent supporter of George Orwell and a socialist. So after being demobbed and winning the position as lecturer in History at Kings college, Newcastle, he decided to plant his family among the proletariat, the heroes of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This meant his middle-class wife and three children lived for the next fourteen years on a new council estate in the company of resettled slum dwellers. And this action, inspired by inverted snobbery, had a lasting impact upon his spouse and offspring, especially his middle-child.
For some reason, probably because he is sort of endearingly deluded about a historical need for a sketch of his early life, Atkinson speaks of himself in the third person in this opening paragraph. Foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds, this will not continue. Also, note the reference to Orwell. It’s not clear what a ‘supporter’ of Orwell was, but he and Galileo are for the most part the only historical figures Atkinson ever cites, indicating at the very least that he is not particularly imaginative.
Like all children I wanted to be accepted by my peers and be part of the gang of small boys who lived in the street. They were my heroes, I hung on every word they said, and I did everything I could to win their approval. Their contemptuous treatment of me I accepted as only natural because I was the youngest and weakest. They were tough and clever while I was puny and inexperienced. But one day this all changed. To my delight, a boy who was smaller and younger than me, moved into the street, and I knew that it would only be a matter of time before I could demonstrate my superiority to the newcomer. And when the gang resolved to have a boxing competition, I felt that this was my chance. Previously I would have been omitted from such a competition as being too weak to match in a fight, but now there was a possible partner, and as the gang split up into matched pairs I was pitted against the new boy. And when it was our turn to box, I gently, but firmly, displayed my clear superiority. Alas, when the judges, the oldest boys, declared the result, it was not me, but the new boy, who was deemed the winner. I was stunned.
Think about this. Atkinson is a full 60 years old, and still dwells on this incident from his childhood. And he still regards childhood cruelty to ‘the youngest and weakest’ as more than just a natural, passing stage of adolescence, but seems to see it as an inherently admirable and just way of social behavior so long as he himself gets to climb up the pecking order. More: Read the rest of this entry »
