Not everyone lives in a house you know. What if your smoking neighbor started this fire. Tough shit to the several hundred people also living in the building?
I happen to live in Chicago and that crazy Mrs. O’Leary and her fucking cow burned down the whole city!
Maybe the government should do that for health care too!
Now bear with me here 'cause this is just something I thought of off the top of my head, but what if the government provided a safety net for people who can’t afford decent health care too? Like food stamps, but it would be “health stamps”!
No, no scratch that… how about just offering affordable health insurance that was available to anyone–regardless of their health? I mean, everyone will probably need some significant health care procedure at some point–just like everyone needs to eat-- but there are many millions that can’t afford health insurance. We can’t just let those people get sick and die preventable deaths, can we? That would be like kinda like standing by and watching people starve.
I haven’t worked out the details yet but it’s a pretty humane and civilized idea, don’t you think? Who’s with me?
I’m just surprised no one has thought of this before! (Although maybe this is already happening in some compassionate, civil-minded, and forward-thinking country and I just haven’t heard of it).
The original premise of blalron, the OP, was to make it look ridiculous that government does not pay for health care by equating health care to a basic community service such as fire fighting.
I don’t buy into it. It does not follow. And if needed, communities and individuals can take care of fire fighting needs without the help of the federal government.
If calling me a dumbass helps you feel better, go ahead. The argument that health care is a vital public service is not made.
I don’t even know how to respond to the ignorance displayed here. I supposed I could post pictures of tenements right here in Ottawa with holes in the floors and walls and ceilings, broken windows, and with no running water and “toilets” consisting of a bucket. I could post links to government reports on the conditions of native reservations described outright as “Third World.” I could even describe my own personal experiences in rooming houses where, for example, the toilet fell right through the floor one day into someone’s room, and then was just left like that, or the place where the pressure valve on the boiler in the basement was rusted shut so we had to check it every few hours to make sure it didn’t explode like a cast iron shrapnel bomb.
But what would be the point?
I’ve become quite accustomed to the routine around here. Any time I make a claim – often something which is common knowledge to anyone with any actual life experience – a dozen of the Usual Suspects chirp “CITE CITE CITE” like deranged budgies. If I go out and find citations, people either start running around in circles with the goalposts, claiming for eighty different reasons that these particular citations are worthless… or, more often, they just drop into the void as the local dipshits have been distracted by something shiny and are now busy discussing boobies or toilet habits or something.
I don’t think I have ever encountered a group of people so incredibly white anywhere else before. Even Wikipedia isn’t this bad – although I suspect there’s a good degree of overlap, because both places are overrun with the same overprivileged and undersocialized nerds who have mistaken their arrogance for experience, their opinions for expertise, and their rectum for a hat.
We have those same tenement conditions in New York, where I grew up. Rat hole tenements so bad even the rats and roaches wouldn’t live there, complete with exposed (or no) wiring, broken plumbing, no heat, etc. It didn’t make the entire country a “third world nation”.
What is “actual” life experience to which you are privy and the rest of us are not? Why is your experience superior to someone else’s? How do you have the first fucking clue what other member’s life experiences are?
Doubtless your experience is different than other people but I suspect no more real than anyone else’s.
I swear you sound like those Palindrone fuckers who live in the “real” America. :rolleyes:
This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen you post. (In fact, it may be the only ridiculous thing I’ve seen you post, despite the fact that we rarely agree.)
I’d like to see any court in the nation convict RR of theft based on your definition.
He gets lawfully paid for finding ways for people to lawfully avoid paying taxes by taking advantage of lawful loopholes established by the nation’s lawmakers.
And arriving at the conclusion he’s a thief because he indulges in luxuries and sneers at people who provide them is even more ridiculous than the accusation that he’s a thief by virtue of his profession.
The more I’m exposed to the way people think around here the more I’m amazed that we manage to have any sort of civilized society at all.
I guess you missed all the guffawing and snickering at the very idea that anyone in North America might live in Third World conditions. As if it’s some kind of ridiculous conspiracy theory that some people live in shithole tenements with holes everywhere, often even without heat or running water. Or that there are people who fucking freeze to death in the streets for lack of shelter and proper clothing. And the fucking Lancet and JAMA are just crackpot conspiracy zines for reporting that chronic malnutrition stalks poor neighbourhoods, with a corresponding rise of rickets. My annoyance is with the obnoxious fucking snide assumption that because something falls outside their white suburban reality, it couldn’t possibly exist.
This sounds like South Africa. Excellent trauma surgeons come from South Africa, great experience, real depth of knowledge. They like Kanada a lot, and are grateful for the nonviolent society here, and generally like working in our socialist healthcare system, Komrade.
I snicker at my pleasure. Your 1 or 2% in third world conditions can kiss the asses of the 25% living in 8th world conditions in my country. You deal with the, almost ineviatble, margins of a society, where we all and forever fail. I talk about structural unendable poverty. So you can take your buckets full of shit and be thankful you have a bucket.
But even supposing you are right (which I absolutely do not accept but will go with for the sake of argument) why are you arguing against these effete white people who want to make life better for these people?
Rat nibble your baby’s toes off in the shit hole you live in? Now you have access to medical insurance to take your baby to the hospital if the white silver spoon crowd has their way.
What jerks. :rolleyes:
And yeah, would be good to see those people not live in shit holes where rats chew on babies but that is a different problem. The argument at hand is giving those people access to medical care which they currently do not have.
ETA: Guess Ají de Gallina is guffawing but not for the reasons you suppose.
With due respect to the unfortuanate souls you are referring to, they lie outside a great deal more than white suburban life. I’d wager that less than one out of a hundred of Kanada’s overall population live on the streets or in the “third world” squalor that you describe.
And guess what? Every country in the world has people like them. They exist in Sweden, they exist in France, they exist in China and they existed in the Soviet Union.
It is impossible to have a society in which they do not exist, unless you want to provide food, housing, automobiles medical care, and, most likely, drugs, alcohol and sundry forms of entertainment, to anyone who says they want them or they’ll live in tenements or on the street. And even then you’ll have some who’ll tell you to shove it up your well-meaning revolutionary ass.
But then I guess there is also always a tiny subset of the population given to tilting at windmills and sneering at everyone else for carrying on with their lives.