Side note on immigrants from Norway: The last person to pass through Ellis Island was Norwegian merchant seaman Arne Peterssen in 1954.
HAHAHAHAHA!! Boy, I come in here and make a couple of right-wing posts and look at the furor it kicks up! Understandable though. If I’d hosed things up like the country’s libs I’d be defensive too.
Glad to hear you survived your heart episode, wolfpup. Good thing you didn’t require a transplant or something more major. I recall a Canadian Doper from some years ago in one of the interminable heath care threads bragging about how his mother got free treatment for her cancer. Of course she had to wait three months to see a specialist and get diagnosed and another eight months for surgery. Fortunately her cancer was apparently of the slow-growing variety and she was still alive at the time of his posting. And lest anyone misunderstand, that nimrod was bragging about how great Canada’s health care system was because she didn’t have to pay anything. :rolleyes: What a schmuck! Everyone knows about the ridiculous wait times in Canada (and even worse, England), but hey, anything goes as long as someone else is paying for it and one can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, eh wot?
And speaking of wait times, some of you have asked what sort of problems I’m talking about re obtaining driver licenses. In my neck of the woods it goes like this: You call and inquire about getting a drivers license. They tell you they’re open from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. And given that there are only three DMV offices to handle roughly half the state, some drive 40, 60, 80 miles to arrive, many as early in the day as possible since they don’t know how long it’ll take. Upon arrival they see not a single employee and must navigate their way through a maze of hallways to find a room where the other would-be applicants are [del]housed[/del] waiting. You go up to a machine at the front of the room, and upon locating the correct button to push, you get a ticket with your case number on it. You take your case number and take a seat somewhere, waiting for your number to be called, whereupon you leave and try to navigate your way to where ever the worker drones are located. Then you wait. And you wait. And you wait some more. Finally, someone comes out around 3:30 after you’ve been sitting there cooling your heels for five or six hours and announces that no more driving tests will be conducted that day so everyone might as well leave. Complaints are met with angry glares and shrugged shoulders and everyone files out to come back the next day and hope they actually get through then. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. Sometimes it takes several days of this shit before they actually take their test and get their license. Other times they come back early only to have someone come out and without a word post a small sign saying no more tests today, at 9-fuckcing-a.m.! So it’s leave and come back the next day and hope you’ll strike it lucky then.
Reviews online are rife with complaints at all three offices about the way business is conducted there and the attitudes of the employees, who are rude, insulting (“Why are you here? Didn’t you see the sign we aren’t doing any more tests today? You’re gonna have to leave and come back tomorrow!”) Etc., etc., etc.
These people and their agencies couldn’t care less about how inconvenienced their applicants are, how far they’ve driven or how long they’ve waited, and they can’t even be arsed to behave politely while informing their victims that they’ve just driven from afar and wasted a whole day and will quite possibly have to do the same thing again tomorrow. This is because they don’t have to. They don’t have to rely on customer happiness or satisfaction to keep their jobs, their client is the state and they couldn’t give a fuck less what the experience is like for those who are forced to come to them to get anything done. And this is what many of us expect of government health care, if not early on then eventually.
And yes, figuratively speaking there will be death panels. No government can afford to pay for every available treatment for every illness, so by definition some are going to be denied potentially life-saving treatment due to cost, as the Doper Maastricht admitted goes on in the Netherlands.
So one way or the other people are going to be dying for lack of health care, but as long as the government is paying for it and evil rich people (i.e., anyone above poverty level) aren’t paying for treatment others can’t afford, libs are no longer so concerned about the outrage of people dying because they don’t have and can’t get health care.
One thing I’ve learned about my liberal brethren is that while they’re full of sound and fury about people’s welfare and people dying, their ire and agitating for change is intended primarily to upset whatever is the established apple cart. Ten times as many people have died due to communism (than Nazism), which, as we all know though few will admit it, is liberalism writ large. They shriek with outrage over the so-called “Nazis” who merely want to enforce immigration law while at the same defending the crappy automobiles and lifestyles people behind the Iron Curtain were forced to live, while agitating over and over for the very goals and ideas that led to Communism as a viable form of government.
It’s all so silly and based on nothing more than childish resentment that someone has more than someone else. And regrettably, this childish sentiment has been strong enough among various populations so as to enable even huge countries to adopt Communism and force its evil, murderous and repressive ideology upon its citizens (or those who survive anyway) for half a century or more.
If liberals were anywhere near as concerned with people’s health and welfare as they pretend, they’d shriek and run from the slightest hint of anything leading to communism, but no, instead it’s the evil Nazis who want to enforce immigration laws and also to keep terrorists out who are the source of such misplaced outrage and fear.
Again, and as with most things liberal, it is to laugh!
Yeah you really seem like the calm, reasonable one in this discussion.
Out of curiosity, Starving Artist, how many countries have you lived and worked in besides the United States? I’ve lived in four, on four continents, and worked in three {I was too young to work in Canada}, and I’m counting that as a reasonable base for first-hand comparison. Yourself?
Communism-with-a-capital-C and small-L-liberal ideas such as “Universal Health Care” and “Unemployment Benefits” are not even remotely the same thing.
There’s a lot of things I agree with you on, Starving Artist, but trying to defend the appalling US healthcare system situation with “Well, people in other countries have small houses and cars (Narrator: They don’t) and life sucked in the Soviet Union!” is not helping your cause here.
The reality is the US system is completely indefensible from any perspective besides “Making lots of money for someone”.
Economic inequality is meaningless in terms of a person’s earning capacity. No matter how wealthy a certain number of people are, everyone else earns the same amount whether they’re flipping burgers, selling cars or whatever. No one has lost a cent because Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have become billionaires, and no one would profit a cent if they lost it all. There are only two ways the poor can become better off: they can seek to better educate themselves and/or seek to find more profitable ways to work (assuming they’re working at all, that is), or the government can simply take money away from those who’ve earned it and give it to those without.
Liberals obviously opt for option number two, as number one requires effort, discipline and time, and liberals, as we all know, have no heart for trying to make people improve their lot nor the patience to make it happen. In fact their policies and influence in the fields of education and family life over the last fifty years have exploded the number of people who can’t hack it in life, and it’s a question up for debate as to whether this has been deliberate or not, since as we all know, the more people who can’t hack it in life, the more Democrat votes there are.
And yes, large parts of California have become a hellhole. The L.A. Times just ran an Op-Ed asking “Why is California the poverty capital of the United States?” The answer is easy: liberalism! But California isn’t alone. In 1960 Baltimore wasn’t a hellhole. In 1960 Detroit wasn’t a hellhole. In 1960 Chicago wasn’t teetering on the brink of becoming a hellhole. And New York City had become a hellhole until conservative Rudy Giuliani cleaned it up. So what’s changed since 1960? The fact that in each case the city or state in question is being run by impassioned liberals.
With respect, there are a couple of areas where I think you err here. So far as I know I’ve never sought to equate government health care with communism. The reason for this is that I’ve never equated them in my own mind. As I’ve explained, I think there is a lot to fear from government health care, but communism isn’t one of them.
Nor have I tried to equate Scandinavian houses and automobiles with healthcare. I bring them up to show the advantages (and to me, vastly superior lifestyles) of capitalism vs the socialistic practices that prevail in those countries. Many issues are under discussion here and I can see how it might be easy to get them mixed up. As for me, if some sort of health care program were to be put into place that gives everyone the sort of healthcare they previously enjoyed under pre-Obamacare system, and the government’s only role was to foot the bill, I would get on board. But those who hold the purse strings call the shots and I’m far from eager for the government to be the one to determine what sort of health care people are allowed to have.
And again with respect, but the widely held view that sickening insurance companies are getting rich off the backs of their victims is utterly incorrect. Most insurance companies realize a profit of around 3% on the money they take in vs. pay out in benefits. Cite. So for every one hundred dollars paid into health care in America, only three of it gets kept by the insurance companies, and $97 of it is paid out in service of patient healthcare. So the idea that everyone would be so much better off if only these greedy health insurance companies weren’t profiting on everyone’s illness is a fallacy and nothing much would be gained at all by taking that profit away.
I don’t think we’re on the same page about inequality or economics, Starving Artist.
My job in Australia pays pretty much exactly middle of the road, but it still allows for a comfortable standard of living with food, clothing, shelter, internet, entertainment, transport etc. I’m not (totally) broke but I’m not making it rain either.
When I buy lunch from (say) McDonalds, I know the staff working there are earning a decent wage and like me, they will go home to their family or flatmates or friends and have a roof over their heads, an internets in their house and clothes on their back. If they or their family get sick, they can get free treatment. Their lives, as a general rule, will be OK (not counting any of the personal things that can affect any of us throughout our lives).
When I buy lunch from somewhere in Los Angeles, there’s a very good chance the person serving me makes something like $5 an hour on a good day, probably has two or more jobs to make ends meet, and is praying they don’t get a really bad cold or something, and that their kids don’t outgrow their school shoes this term.
Australia has its fair share of problems and is far from perfect, but what we don’t have is this weird thing I’ve seen in LA and San Francisco of super modern and affluent existing right next to abject poverty of the sort I’ve seen in places like Indonesia.
It’s got nothing to do with how much money Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Elon Musk has, and everything to do with how much money Jesus the Gardener and Bob The Burger Chef and Susan The Check-Out Chick don’t have - not because it’s in some billionaire’s money bin somewhere, but because the entire social system there is geared up towards saying “We’re not going to give you a fair go and make sure everyone’s life is OK.”
You don’t have to take money from the money bin for that, you don’t have to “punish” high-earners or motivated people, you don’t have to reward “laziness” or whatever you want to call it - you just have to accept that there’s a baseline level of egalitarianism which people can agree society needs and work to make that happen.
The problem here in the U.S. is unique in that it’s a mixture of a screwy way of dealing with racism combined with a degraded educational system and virtually non-existent family values, all of which are the result of liberal policies and which in combination have resulted in a huge underclass of people who lack the education, attitudes, work ethic and commitment necessary to support themselves, and there isn’t even a hint that these problems will become anything but worse in the foreseeable future. So to the country’s conservative mind, liberals have caused all these problems despite our trying to point out over and over again that what they’re doing is making things worse. Indeed their reaction has been either to ignore us, claim that no such things will result, or insult us and call us names. So now that the result of their power and influence has come to fruition, they now want us to cough up our hard-earned money to fund the harmful results of their folly, with the added expectation that even more will be required in the future.
So we tend to see the nation’s poor as the result of liberal policies that we’ve objected to all along, and as an endless money pit that will only grow larger.
I, myself, have little problem with the idea of a $15 minimum wage, though I have my doubts that even that amount would provide a livable wage for most people. That’s only $2300 a month before taxes based on a 40 hour work week, and 40 hour workweeks for jobs and people like the ones you’re talking about have become increasingly rare in the wake of Obamacare, since workweeks of over 35 hours inflict onerous health care obligations upon employers. But at least the benefits of the larger minimum wage would go to people who at least have jobs and are trying to make their way in the world, and they are provided by customers who’ve voluntarily decided to patronize the businesses that are paying such a wage. So while the cost is spread among the populace at large, at least it’s coming from those who choose to support it through their patronage, and it’s going to people who deserve it more than those who aren’t working and won’t as long as everyone else is paying their way. Roughly ten years ago I was privy to a conversation between a middle-aged guy from Paris and a gorgeous young woman who was working as a stripper. In the course of the conversation it turned out she was 21 years old and had three kids. He suggested to her that she move to France, because with that many kids the government would pay her $2,800 a month and she could stay home and not have to work. This is the kind of situation we foresee as the end game that liberals in the U.S. want, where everyone gets a living wage no matter what, and we both think it’s wrong morally and resent the idea that we should subsidize it. Especially, like I said, that once such policies become the norm they’ll just grow and grow, because if there’s one thing the last fifty years have taught us, it’s that the country’s liberal faction is never satisfied.
I should probably add that I’m now out for the night, Martini Enfield. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to have a civil conversation with you about these issues and don’t want to seem to be ignoring you should you post something in reply.
Hey, anomalous1, sorry to be so late acknowledging this post. I was gone when you posted it and only spotted it now. Congratulations for having recognized and escaped the brainwashing you were encountering in school. It would be great if more did.
Damn - before you go - (for next time, then)
In what I hope will be my final feeding to the “Anomalous1/Starving Artist defensively contorting all things repulsively republican” derail, before we can maybe refocus back to what this tread’s actually about…um…oh yeah - How has President Trump pissed you off today? - yeah, that’s right…
Just simply scratching my head as to what the specific name or phrase is to describe gigantic shit avalanche posts like 2743, 2747, 2748, and 2750, whereby to rebut would require half a long page of parsings, and I don’t have to be here since the early aughts to know that all that fucking horsehit has been already rebutted, squashed, and stomped on, oh, ninety kajillon times, since you have been here, Starving Artist.
So, before I nod off and then check out your tedious response tomorrow (really? do always weaslely post late at night, when there’s less traffic so you can do whatever the word or phrase is I’m looking for?) - how about taking your verging-on-the-t-word pulpit to a separate thread so this one can go back to what it’s about, perhaps?
Yeah, it’s the pit, but even you’ll admit this derail is getting stupid now.
Thanks.
The US is definitely different in many respects.
One of the key elements of Australian and New Zealand culture is the idea of a “Fair Go” - ie, the idea that everyone should be able to make a go of things and part of that is having access to healthcare, unemployment benefits, and not living in a rolled up newspaper at the bottom of a septic tank.
I’m not going to pretend we’re perfect - we aren’t. But there’s an enormous difference between deciding that everyone should have somewhere to live, something to eat, clothes to wear and medical treatment, and going full-on Soviet Russia.
I’m not going to disagree that racism issues and education system problems are hurting the US, nor am I going to pretend that Australia is a land without racism (Trolololololol!) or an education system that only produces Nobel Prize candidates, but there’s a certain… myopia about the world beyond the US borders that seems symptomatic of wider issues.
It’s a well-known fact that as a general rule, Americans are not great at international geography. Most people in Western countries know all 50 US states and where the major cities are, but it’s patently clear to me your average American has no idea where Brisbane (population: 2 million) is and would probably be astonished to discover Australia has states too. This lack of awareness of the wider world has bigger consequences than “Lol who cares where the fuck Luxembourg is, amirite?” because it helps contribute to the idea that no-one else has anything to contribute unless it involves buying American consumer goods or entertainment.
Literally every other country in the world (not you, Burma or Liberia), for example, as adopted the Metric System. This has huge benefits, even in everyday life when I can talk to friends and business colleagues all over the world and we’re on the same page when it comes to temperature, distance, weight, and so on. If I tell a friend in France it’s 47 degrees celsius in Sydney, they will immediately understand that “Holy balls that is insanely hot”, just as when they are lamenting the -10 degree temperatures they are facing I will know that it’s time to rug up and avoid the snow. When I see a
There’s no downside to the US saying “Fuck it, we need to get with the programme and commit to going totally metric by 2025” (for example), but it’s a “liberal” idea so there’s a lot of resistance to it from conservative quarters, as I understand it.
Moving on, there’s always going to be poor people - the only place I’ve ever been where I didn’t see anyone who might be called “poor” was Singapore, and even then I’m sure they exist there too - but I’m not sure blaming everyone politically to the left of you for that is the way forward, or fair, or reasonable.
A work ethic is important too, but being unemployed isn’t a moral failing for most people - the overwhelming majority of people want to work and do productive things with their lives. Sure, the Beavis & Butthead stereotype works better as part of a “Let’s hate on those people who aren’t us!” thing, but it’s not what being unemployed for most people is like. It’s soul-destroying and the hoops you have to jump through to claim unemployment benefits while trying to find a job only make it worse.
Also, there’s the unfortunate reality that robots are eventually going to take most of our jobs, and not everyone will be able to retrain into a robot repairer or programmer - so looking at the idea of a “Universal Basic Income” now is not stupid, or Communist, but sensible.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying “The problems America faces come from both sides of politics - not just the left, not just the right - and there aren’t any easy solutions”. 
So Norway is a great example of a successful country and economy, but the US’ failures are because the US is too liberal.
Do you know anything about Norway? How are you squaring this nonsense in your mind?
I don’t even have to go in to the office to renew my license; I can do it online.
Just to apparently hijack the hijack, but a Trump hotel had someone superimpose the word “shithole” and poop emojis all over its outside.
I want to apologize to anyone I may have offended or hurt during my tirade. I never really visit The Pit and was using it as a way to vent my anger and it had gotten out of line. Been having sort of a rough few days, still not an excuse. My political inclinations are what they are and will continue to be what they are, but opinions are opinions and we may not all have the same. I do want to gp on record that I am genuinely not a bigot or hateful person, and I want to apologize using the “land whale” term as a thinly veiled insult, and any other utterances that may have struck an off chord with any one.** I love the sharing of ideas** here on this board, and while we may not all share the same opinions, it is important that we share them with each other in the name of progress in general. We are all in this world together, and we just have differences of opinion in how to assess and continue on with it.
Take care, everyone.
Based on his last post it is clear that he has noticed the point I made in post #2702.
Indeed, you are willfully ignoring that Trump is not defended by Republicans or conservatives that do realize that Trump is damaged goods indeed. And it is apparent that you erroneusly continue to tell others that “we republicans” or “we conservatives” as if all agree with you when that is not the case regarding Trump bigoted acts and tirades.
So indeed, who is “we”? Kimosabe?
And even though my National Insurance contributions cover all those lazy scroungers who don’t put anything into the system, I’m still paying considerably less than I would in the US and don’t have to worry about deductibles, pre-existing conditions or any of that nonsense. Everything is covered.
I also continue to be amused by those who trot out this sort of argument:
…in defense of a system with higher costs, worse outcomes, and a large group of people with a personal financial incentive to deny you coverage. So the argument “Your way will only cover 99% of the population, therefore we should keep the system that covers 60% of the population and less successfully” remains unconvincing.
This is even more true when one considers that two-tier systems do exist - for those tiny, tiny percentage of cases not covered by government healthcare, you can still go private). And because emergency treatment is covered by the NHS and thus doesn’t need to be included in private plans, even private health insurance is drastically cheaper than it is in the US.
Or to sum up - compared to the US system, the UK system:
- Covers everyone;
- Costs less per person and in aggregate;
- Has better outcomes overall;
- Involves considerably less bureaucracy for patients (and, yes, even for practitioners);
- Is highly well-thought-of by the vast majority of the population; and
- Offers the option to pursue private care if desired.
So - SA is wrong again on every front.
But hey - how about that Trump guy? What a jerk.
But what happened to the snacks? I assume the quisling operatives of the socialistic health centre, starving because of the collapse of your economy, stole them?