Someone had a good idea that insurance should cover the cost of end of life counseling with your private doctor. That of course became associated with government death panels and dropped like a hot potato (in the United States).
Most nights, my parents sleep under a quilt made by my great grandmother. It was probably made in the 20s or earlier, and it is festooned with swastikas. To my knowledge, my great grandmother had no Native American ancestry. She just wanted to make a quilt with Native American symbols. The arms of the swastikas on the quilt do at least turn the opposite direction from the Nazi swastika.
I think I am going to be stretching the rules a bit -
I find that in the US, we flat out reject some very sound, straightforward ideas because…well…they’re European! (And if it’s European, it must be just awful, yucky poo.)
[ul]
[li]The Metric System - They kinda tried half-heartedly back in the '70s, but it all died on the vine.[/li][li]Universal Healthcare - Nope (crosses arms) not gonna happen![/li][/ul]
I mean really, join the rest of the world.
My grandmother, an American Jew, made a lovely needlepoint tablecloth as a teen. It is covered with hundreds of little swastikas, each carefully sewn by her. I sometimes use it to cover my bridge table, but always feel I need to explain its origin.
The proliferation of health-related woo has made it harder to discern good ideas from bad ideas. About ten years ago, my mother was seeing one of the holistic/naturalist practitioners to treat some health issues. Suddenly every other food was a “trigger” food for her asthma. She was a firm believer in her special alkaline water and magical magnetic bracelets. Crazy stuff.
But not all of it. She had identified sugar/refined carbohydrate as a “trigger” for her asthma and arthritis. Of course this made us all roll our eyes, because it just sounds made up. But turns out she was onto something.
Elaborate
Do you mean marijuana legalization?
100 years ago, San Francisco had a Socialist government. It:
Built Golden Gate Park. The structure near the carousel was called "The Woman’s Building. It has an original ramp and the floor is several feet above ground.
The ramp was for baby carriages and the elevated floor provided privacy for nursing.
Bought the Hetch Hetchy Valley (next door to Yosemite), dammed it and built an aqueduct to the city. It operates on gravity the entire distance - no pumps.
They also bought the Crystal Springs in San Mateo County - the only source of water on the peninsula. SF sells the water to San Mateo.
Among other things.
But now “Socialism” really means “Stalinist Communist” and is rightly denounced by all right-thinking Americans.
le sigh…
Various food sensitivities to things like gluten or lactose or MSG. I realize there are some people who have legitimately serious physical problems with these substances. But there are also people who just claim these conditions to excuse their general fussiness or to call attention to themselves.
Well, you nailed it with the last: for too many who might otherwise be open to socialist ideas, the notion is tainted by association with the rather overbearing French/Spanish contingent. My focus includes a related concept developed mostly by French Socialists!™ and I have to work to dissociate the valid notions from the gallic table-pounding.
Men who like babies and small children.
I haven’t held a baby in many years; with no grandchildren on the horizon it will probably be a while yet. I’ve been in a number of situations where a wee one was passed around by the women, but without someone making an assertive offer to me it’s just no longer comfortable to even show any interest, much less ask.
(And yes, I have had a few encounters where a mother all but shoved her infant into my arms, maybe from knowing it had to be that way. I appreciated it.)
The guillotine. Here’s a form of capital punishment that (unlike hanging) is really, really hard to screw up; that quickly and reliably kills its victims, and is (I assume) quite a bit cheaper to operate than most other forms of execution (it certainly would be nowadays). Completely killed (in the court of non-French public opinion, anyway) by the crazed excesses of the Reign of Terror.
Interestingly, technology can address one of the few real downsides, the concern over pain: there’s no real reason we have to rely on gravity to accelerate the blade; we could use pneumatic acceleration. Still not enough? Magnetic acceleration! Prepare the Gaussotine!
Well, tying a few kilos of C-4 around an executant would work even more efficiently and in the blink of an eye.
But if there’s to be any public support for capital punishment, the methods need to be gore-free, and I think decapitation gives all but the hardest of us the squicks. So I wouldn’t put the blame entirely on the RoTters.
::Sigh:: C4, C4, C4- don’t you people know of any other explosives? Poison with cyanide, blow up with C4. In my day, we showed creativity with our murders, darn it!
Yes, killing people with explosives is more time-efficient, but not more financially efficient- and that’s always part of the problem. And yes, the other big problem with the guillotine is that it makes a terrible mess, but in my above post, I’m working from the assumption that you’re going ahead with the whole ‘capital punishment’ thing.
Huh, I guess my husband is luckier. He loves babies, and tiny children. But luckily, we have friends who trust him with them. He was bouncing a baby for nearly half an hour on Sunday at the neighborhood Christmas party. Then, when the baby needed Mommy, he entertained two small girls with a marble rolling toy and some shape sorters.
If you have the right plumbing to handle the blood, I don’t see why it should make too much of a mess. Explosives – yes, that would be horribly messy, and kind of a nightmare for whoever had clean-up duty. Granted, I’ve never decapitated anything larger than a rat, but other than needing to collect the blood, it was actually quite tidy. A dead-bolt gun, like they use to kill horses and other large livestock would be another cheap, reliable, simple method.
As for avoiding undue pain – some morphine or sedatives should do the trick. and if the doctor was just prescribing it for the pain, and someone else/some other method did the actual kililng, it probably wouldn’t be too hard to get both drugs and doctors for the purpose.
I have often wondered why those states that do executions use such convoluted methods.
Welll… WE know who’s on the payroll of the Semtex Consortium…
This is why most states that have capital punishment use lethal injection. No blood. The convict just goes to sleep and never wakes up.
The one I wonder about is the electric chair. I get that Thomas Edison basically conned the state governments into using it in an (unsuccessful) effort to discredit AC electricity. What I don’t get is why anyone kept using it. After maybe three executions, max, I’d think the guys in charge would look at each other and say “You know, this is pretty demented. Let’s go back to hanging, OK?”
Yeah, I’m really curious why in the light of the drug shortages, death penalty states haven’t just quietly moved to inert gas asphyxiation. More humane overall, and no gore or anything like that. Plus, it’s absurdly simple to get hold of nitrogen gas, since it’s used for welding, in medicine, etc…
Please, that’s chigro.
In parts of the Southwest where swastikas as Native American symbols have a strong heritage, you still see them, sometimes in brickwork or in tiles.
But this has certainly declined over time. The New Mexico State University yearbook was the swastika until 1983, when I gather the university just got tired of explaining why their yearbook had that name.