Mooo!
You want to find out what people really are? See what they do in a natural disaster. Welcome to reality, Naomi Klein. Most people aren’t very selfless or nice.
I forgave the “Thetan” one, but now you’re really pushing your luck…
Concussions can have that effect on people. I wouldn’t draw conclusions about her over-all ability to reason based on her actions immediatly after receiving a blow to the head. The “nasty, dirty refugees” part is, as near as I can tell, purely your own invention, as the point she’s clearly making is that she figured that any medical institution in the city would be swamped by patients, and she wouldn’t be able to get any medical attention because of the crowd. Luckily for her, there are still plenty of doctors who are in it just for the money, and don’t give a damn about actually helping people.
And then it’s long pig pie for everybody!!!
(<licking my lips smiley)
(< is there any stuck in my teeth smiley)
“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”
H. L. Mencken
CMC +fnord!
Did I just advocate cannibalism? Why yes, I did. Eat the rich!
Yes, waiting for care clearly is for the “little people”.
Yeah, they should just have spit on her and headed downtown to help the deserving.
Most likely she was triaged to a less busy facility precisely because her injuries didn’t look too serious. Her reaction to actually getting attention is to sneer at the people who helped her. Bizarre, but not as bizarre as assuming that physicians shouldn’t be on duty at a suburban hospital, because of course no one in the area could possiibly have been injured in the storm or had other acute or chronic medical problems needing attention, being suburbanites and all.
I can’t tell if the docs she allegedly saw playing cards were on ER duty, but from experience I can tell you that demands in the ER vary widely. One minute things are slack, and the next all hell has broken loose.
Maybe she has valid wider points to be made, but everything posted so far about her revelatory hospital experience sounds like anecdotal bullshit.
Let me add to your list of outrages - I’m just about finished reading a book called"Crash Proof: How To Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse" by Peter D. Schiff. Aside from the point of his book (how to profit from the economic wasteland that the U.S. is about to become), it’s a frightening read about how the United States got into the position it’s in today - an incredibly diverse, wealthy nation that’s damned near bankrupt. There are many, many reasons to hate the rich and the governments that cater to them off the backs of the masses.
Actually, let me add to that - the wealthy have a lot to answer for, but so do governments that make getting re-elected their first and foremost priority, instead of actually running the country for the benefit of everyone in it.
Heck, I’m reading Galbraith’s The Culture of Ocntentment, and he laid it out pretty well in 1992. Ditto for David Halberstam’s The Next Century, written in 1991.
In both instances, these intelligent-seeming individuals present cases that are pretty convincing to me, that a very major (if not the overriding) intent and result of US policy over the end of the 20th century was to increase the concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest. And if you accept even a fraction of what they say as true, it is clear that the trends they identify has not slowed a bit in the most recent 2 decades.
It is hard to refute that the rich are continually getting richer and richer, while not all that many other public objectives seem to be improving anywhere near apace. If further increasing the richest’s share of the wealth has not been the intent, it has certainly been the result.
It has a Corot-sive effect on society.
Naomi Klein makes a lot of ignorant assumptions.
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So, if the physicians she saw could be “out there”, then who’s going to cover service in this hospital?
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How does she know what the hospital census was? Is she seriously trying to claim there were only “three or four” patients in the entire hospital?
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It probably hadn’t occurred to the medical intern to go volunteer at a shelter because when interns are off duty, they tend to want to do things like, you know, actually get some sleep. And maybe eat something. Does she have any fucking clue what a medical internship actually is?
What’s wrong with this? Here are a bunch of folks who will get out of town on a private jet instead of taking up space in the commercial jets or further clogging up the roads.
I used to work in the disaster recovery business, and one of the key points is that having a business in this market means you gather assets and personnel who are prepared to act, well in advance of the event. When the event happens, those assets and personnel are brought to bear, and that can very well free up the public services that would have been used for those folks.
Let’s say that HelpJet takes off. You have available airport space being used for evacuation that wouldn’t have been used before, and couldn’t be used before because nobody had contracts with these plane owners. Then you spin off HelpBus, a service that contracts with bus companies to arrange for pre-disaster evacuation. Buses that would normally have been hundreds of miles away get driven in to evacuate customers.
But surely the government can take care of that, what with all the school buses they have available…
It seems to me that the OP is trying to make two points. I’m going to stay away from the Naomi Klein argument, because I’m not sure what point he is making.
This was also Johnston’s point in the Fresh Air interview. His contention is that government policies and economics from post-WWII to 1980 were geared toward the advancement of the middle class, and that those policies have skewed since the Reagan years (trickle down economy, anyone?) toward the upper income class, irrespective of the party of the administration. Based upon my own observations, this certainly seems to be true. The cost of education, even at a State University, is staggering compared to when I went to school. The division between the have-too-muches and the don’t-have-enoughs widens every day. Our infrastructure is crumbling while the wealthy move into gated communities and bitch about taxes.
If I were to hazard a guess, it would be to put the blame at the feet of our electoral system. Candidates (whether for the House, the Senate or the White House) need television to get their messages out, and that requires money. Lots and lots of money. And when those who funded a campaign demand a little quid pro quo, it is easy to see why tax cuts and loopholes top the list.
In a way, doesn’t that make them the real heroes?
When the going gets touch, the rich are already gone.
Well all right then, no wonder he’s so angry. He’s tired of people calling him Naomi.
Is he, like, Finnish or something?
You know, thinking about this a little more, this is how things have always been in human society - the most powerful make the rules (and the rules ALWAYS benefit them), and the rest of us suck hind tit. It was this way when Og smashed his first sabre toothed tiger’s head in and started wearing the pelt, and it will be this way until us Homo sapiens manage to wipe ourselves out.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Nately died a wealthy man, Yossarian. He had over sixty shares in the syndicate.
Yossarian: What difference does that make? He’s dead.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his family will get it.
Yossarian: He didn’t have time to have a family.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his parents will get it.
**Yossarian: ** They don’t need it, they’re rich.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then they’ll understand.