Comments for Hildegarde

Comment on Ad Hominem by jem

jem — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:39:59 +0000

Most of us, however, especially where I live and there’s no mass transit do have cars and have to buy insurance, tag, license. Also, most of us earning money, pay taxes. It’s required, a government mandate. There are also property taxes you have to pay if you are a homeowner and if not, they are paid through your rent cost. The government requires quite a bit of its citizens. I understand the principle behind the argument against being required to purchase health insurance but if one is ill somebody’s going to pay for it. Medicaid or charity, one or the other. I, too, would rather see a public health option but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Too much partisanship in Congress. Government sponsored insurance is hardly free, it, too, comes from taxes. I would rather that happen than Blue Cross and company adding more billions to their coffers.

Comment on Ad Hominem by Cheryl

Cheryl — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:38:34 +0000

You aren’t required to own a car, and if you don’t, you aren’t required to have car insurance. I haven’t paid car insurance in years, although I maintain my license and would have to take some out if I wanted to rent or buy a car.

Theoretically you don’t need homeowner’s insurance either, if you rent, or have enough money to buy a house for cash and pay for any liabilities you may incur.

Comment on Ad Hominem by robert_piepenbrink

robert_piepenbrink — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:57:00 +0000

Jem, the last I heard, I could still move to a high-density urban area and take public transportation, or live as the Amish. No state requires me to buy liability insurance from a private corporation as a condition or legal residence.
And I’ll second the motion on bureaucracies, if we restrict it to those with monopoly or near-monopoly power. I’ve fought my own battles with Comcast and Blue Cross, and I’m currently struggling with Verizon. But Amazon is a model of responsiveness, and none of the surviving private car companies is too bad. It’s not the size that makes an organization unresponsive. It’s the knowledge that your customer has nowhere else to go.
Obamacare cuts both ways on that one: both the House and Senate versions open up sales across state lines, but both require me to purchase insurance for a wide variety of conditions we can’t diagnose consistently, and don’t know how to treat. No policies just for catastrophic or chronic conditions will be allowed. It’s as though we’ll have 10 car companies, but they’ll only be permitted to make of sell limousines–no econoboxes allowed.
On the ad hominem argument, I’d like to add one distinction–between the fact and the expert. If a tax protester poins out the size of the Federal debt and deficit, noting that he is whit and middle class has not refuted a word he said. If a climatologist says that sea levels are rising six inches a century, pointing out that he receives government funding will not lower the water level. BUT, if the same climatologist says “surface temperatures are rising based on data I have not shared, based on a complex algorithm I also have not released to the public” then his professional competence and honesty are certainly issues–and it is of some importance to know on which side his bread is buttered.
Much of the “health care reform” debate has been carried on with sections of the bill not yet written, or with inadequate time for careful reading. ALL the talk about “bending the cost curve” is based on assumptions concerning the actions of future congresses. At that point, character, competence and previous behavior are not side issues, but critical data.

And when the debate shifts from “what does the bill say? to “what is it GOING TO say? And what are the intentions of those who will implement it?” the fight gets really vicious as a result. “Trust me” is not a program.

Comment on Ad Hominem by jem

jem — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:02:34 +0000

All states except Wisconsin and New Hampshire require drivers to have automobile insurance. As of June 1 Wisconsin will require it. “New Hampshire law does not require you to have automobile insurance. However, you must satisfy the NH Financial Responsibility requirements to operate a vehicle in New Hampshire. This is a mandate from state governments that drivers: have a driver license, automobilie tag and have at least liability insurance on the cars they drive. How, exactly, does this differ from requiring US citizens without health insurance to purchase it?

Comment on Ad Hominem by Cheryl

Cheryl — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:27:32 +0000

The more I read about the Bulger case, the more I’m becoming convinced that now and in the past the extreme violence expressed against the murderers by the media and political reactions to that pressure were disgusting. And I’m not reading much in the way of rational arguments for or against protection of the killers’ identity, now that they’ve presumably paid the price exacted by their society from murderers.

As for US health reform – I haven’t been following it closely, but I did come across that bit about requiring everyone to buy insurance from private insurance companies some time ago. To be honest, it made me wonder about the rationality of the politicians who proposed the idea, but I suppose in the US political context, with the distrust in government and naive trust in big business, it was inevitable that some bizarre-sounding compromise would be proposed.

Comment on Ad Hominem by Mique

Mique — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:50:04 +0000

John Oliver is a guest of our soon-to-implode public health system. He won the lottery this morning (Australian Eastern Summer Time) when he was actually operated on for the removal of his gall bladder. Luckily, the op went ahead as scheduled, which is extremely unusual in the NSW public health system where many people have had a large number of cancellations some right at the very door of the operating theatre.

His friend from the Land of the Long White Cloud (NZ) emailed Cheryl, me and his other friends this evening to report that she had called the hospital,and that according to the status chart everything went well. She’ll call again tomorrow and see how he’s doing (and see if she can talk to someone who is directly caring for him).

Here’s hoping there are no complications.

Back to your usual program.

Comment on Children’s Stories by Cheryl

Cheryl — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:25:48 +0000

I would be more impressed by claims that ‘irate responses’ from citizens were driven by suspected government incompetence if the irate citizens appeared to actually know anything much about the situation they are protesting. Knowledge of their own legal traditions would help too – so many of them don’t bother to wait for a trial before howling for blood, and are unwilling to accept any possibility that convicted criminals might have completed the punishment required by their own government and belong back in society. They’re missing that entire improvement in the legal system brought about by removing punishment for wrongdoing from the family and mob and handing it over to the state, and find movies, however gory, a poor substitute to the direct action based on emotion and self-righteousness.

Comment on Children’s Stories by Mique

Mique — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:51:34 +0000

And here’s a different view, this time from the left:

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8290/

I agree with the last paragraph in particular.

Comment on Children’s Stories by robert_piepenbrink

robert_piepenbrink — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:54:24 +0000

I checked. Leopold and Loeb, Charlie Starkweather and Ed Gein all had better childhoods by the usual social definitions than many people I knew in the military and some family members–or almost any of Jane’s students. To contend that they were the victims of their environments is to go down to the level at which each environment is unique, and to argue that theirs must have been horrendous because they did terrible things. The arument from heredity seems eqully circular thus far.

Which is not to say how we raise out children or treat our neighbors has no consequences. It’s to say that barring real insanity–a brain no longer capable of functioning–either we are all responsible for our conduct or none of us is.

As for the howling mobs of the UK and the committees of vigilance, how would you keep order and keep honest citizens safe in a 10,000 man mining camp? Answer: the same way as anywhere else–by holding individuals responsible for their conduct. When a government is suspected of not doing this–when, as in this case, it withholds the vital information which will permit citizens to see whether justice is being done–an irate response from the citizens seems normal and healthy.

Save the Roman stadium parallels for the people renting movies according to how much gore is shown..

Comment on Children’s Stories by Cheryl

Cheryl — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:24:21 +0000

There are several narratives which could be taken as a ‘broken and in need of repair’ response to human evil, and they aren’t all based on Rousseau. The basic Christian view is that we are all broken and in need of repair – and that those who offend can and must be taken back into society, under certain conditions. The post-enlightenment version assumes we aren’t all broken – either we start out as a blank state, or in a perfect state – but can be fixed taken back. Only the agency changes, from Christ acting alone and through humans to humans acting alone. And the source of the problem changes – from something innate to human nature to something innate to human society – making the common current approach far more susceptible to focusing on causes than the practicalities of what we do now with the wrong done to the dead, the grieving survivors, the vengeful neighbours, and the provedly dangerous human who was the immediate cause of it all. I don’t want to say that causes aren’t important, that we shouldn’t be trying to ensure that children shouldn’t’ be neglected or abused, or that a certain percentage of those children will become dangerously criminal; just that sometimes that the focus is too tightly on that.

But I don’t entirely think that reactions the the rage and obsession demonstrated in the Venables case is an example of people protesting, however inarticulately, against either of these narratives of failure and redemption/cure. I think it’s the same thing that led the Romans to cheer at criminals being eaten by lions and vigilantes in the American west to chase down and hang them, and people everywhere to riot and burn and destroy whoever they see as the enemy. Humans like excitement and violence and being part of a group, and if they can indulge in all this while attacking an evil, they get excitement and the satisfaction of demonstrating their own virtue (surely it’s a virtue to attack evil any way you can?) at the same time.