Props to Investors Business Daily, for this bit of wingnuttery:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
Ahem:
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (but intends to retire from this post in 2009),[1] a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and the distinguished research chair at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Is Andrew Brietbart working for IBD now?
(via)
R-Jud
Like I said in another thread: stupidity so dense, light cannot escape it.
Zam
Epic fail.
linda
can you even imagine what the bottom of stupid must look like…
every time i think they can’t possibly say/do something to top the last jaw-dropping stoopit, i’ll be damned if i’m not proved wrong again. lol.
The Moar You Know
IBD: the only choice for news and opinion on the party line, all the time.
Were I wealthy enough to be a member of the “investor” class, I sure as shit wouldn’t be looking to IBD for tips on how to
grind the little people into soylent greengrow my portfolio. Their record on facts is, well, pretty fucking weak.SpotWeld
Further fail will occur when someone tries to refute this by demanding to know why he doesn’t talk with an accent then…
Demo Woman
John, it might be time to post pictures of Tunch. The whackos are using the article to spread their lies through out the internet. A sane individual can only take so much of this crap.
schrodinger's cat
Approaching wingularity at the speed of light.
beltane
This short episode of fail is emblematic of the larger fail the is the right-wing. I’ve always assumed Stephen Hawking’s nationality was common knowledge. Now we can’t assume anything at all is common knowledge anymore. How can we have a functioning democracy when a large segment of even supposedly educated people are as dumb as dirt? How can we be expected to have dialogue and debate with people whose cognitive abilities simply do not exist?
I’m laughing at this story, but I’m not laughing all that hard.
numbskull
The response will be “Hawking only survived because he’s wealthy enough to pay for his healthcare.”
Not understanding that
a) by their argument, the NHS would have killed him before he accumulated that wealth, and
b) both the NHS and the various HC plans being formulated over here in the States do not limit you exclusively to their services.
gwangung
Yeah….any time someone quotes a report and they quite the IBD, I almost automatically think, “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”
This is getting from typical stupidity into epic ranges of Stoopid ™.
schrodinger's cat
I second Demon Woman’s request.
-Tunch fan
inkadu
Like I said in another thread: stupidity so dense, light cannot escape it.
I was just doing research on this last night. That article passed what blog physicists call, “the wingnut event horizon”.
It may also be a “wingularity”, but I still don’t understand the math behind that one.
General Winfield Stuck
Yea Yea Yea. Buttinsky. But if he’d been French he would have been sacrificed long ago to the Surrender Monkey Cheese Factory/
chuck
You cannot see a naked wingularity, only the accretion disc of shredded facts and logic at its event horizon.
SpotWeld
I wonder if a mass of sufficently dense wingularity was what created the reality bubble the surrounded Bush.
ozzy
Chuck: FTW.
gwangung
Oh, gawd….I wonder how the many Scienceblogs are gonna handle this one….
ZIRGAR
The stupidity of these people is colossal!
MattF
You believe in the actual existence of other countries? Tsk. Not real, just a figment of the librul collective treason-brain.
Max
It’s almost like they are trying to figure out the bull$hit threshhold of their base, so that they know just how much they can get away with.
Apparently, that benchmark is pretty low.
Lesley
Clearly the NHS, being a socialist government organization, is simply too incompetent to realize that Hawking is British. Now that IBD has brought this to their attention, I’m sure they will promptly euthanize him.
/wingnut
Lee from NC
@chuck:
This is win. lol
dadanarchist
@numbskull:
Or the reply will be that he was born before the NHS was implemented (he was born in 1942, the NHS wasn’t online until after WWII).
Ash Can
@The Moar You Know:
Boy howdy. If they can’t get something as simple as this right, how can they possibly be trusted on the bigger stuff?
chris
“the distinguished research chair at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.”
That would be Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Poor guy, more hellish socialised medicine.
Dr. Squid
No, Blartblart’s too stupid even for them.
dadanarchist
@chuck:
Awesome… that one is going in the rhetorical arsenal…
Mnemosyne
@numbskull:
No, no, you don’t get it — Hawking has developed a time machine and used it to go back in time to the day he was first diagnosed 40 years ago and make himself retroactively wealthy so the NHS wouldn’t kill him. Of course, he had to keep this wealth secret and pretend it all came about because of the success of his book but, really, it was there all along.
Then he lent it to Obama so the president could go plant those fake birth notices in the Honolulu newspapers in 1961.
Davis X. Machina
The “I” in IBD is for Isvestiya.
Colette
Now we know why Hawking is so effing brilliant: apparently he got all of the brainpower that should have been shared out among 30 million wingnuts. I demand socialized Big Government redistribution of intelligence now. If we gave each of them 1/30,000,000 of his neurological function, it would still double each one’s IQ.
schrodinger's cat
Apologies to Demo Woman for the typo in my earlier comment. Can we has the preview function back? Kthx.
Perry Como
IBD could visit the Large Cluon Collider, load it full of Clues, and would end up proving the existence of Crapps bogon by sheer force of will.
Calouste
@dadanarchist:
His disease didn’t show up until his early twenties, by which time the NHS had been running for a while, and I assume were the ones who did the diagnosis and the treatment that allowed Hawking to finish his PhD.
But yeah, you would expect these people to defend disregarding of inconvenient facts with further disregarding of inconvenient facts.
fantabulizer
It’s also a touch of American exceptionalism, I think. Stephen Hawking is awesome; all things awesome are American; ergo, Stephen Hawking must be American. How could someone that smart have come from… Europe?
The Grand Panjandrum AKA Americans for America
Not really all that surprising.
So let’s have a thread where we can have an actual discussion about some of the pitfalls of the this healthcare reform business. I’ll go first:
1. Smokers should pay more for healthcare. Period. $50-$100 a month seems reasonable to me.
2. People who do not take care of themselves and get morbidly obese should pay more for healthcare. Put down the donuts and get off the couch or pay for the consequences.
Get my drift? Republicans always talk about “personal responsibility” but are they all talk? So why not add amendments to these bills that require people to take more personal responsibility for their actions? And as some clever GOS diarist wrote, we promise to give up the death panels, government rationing and nationalized hospitals if they will just let us pass a healthcare bill with a public option.
Shinobi
I wonder if right wing ideologues are also convinced that Teh google is a tool of left wing fascism or something. I mean, how long does it take to find out that Stephen Hawking is from the UK, like 30 seconds with dial up?
You can give a human a brain, but you can’t make them use it.
scav
maybe this is just all a massive game of logic limbo that we weren’t invited to …
amorphous
It’s Xmas in August!
Ash
This is a nice case of America, FUCK YEAH! since those douchebags probably didn’t think someone as brilliant as Hawking could possibly have come from Europe.
Origuy
@dadanarchist: His symptoms didn’t start to appear until he was at Cambridge, in 1963. He was thought to have only a few years to live. An American insurance company would probably have denied a claim for a wheelchair, as he was considered to be terminal.
Ash
@fantabulizer: Dammit, you beat me to it.
Adrienne
This guy is a fucking idiot. The fact that Breitbart couldn’t even be bothered to, you know, do a minimal google search of Hawking shows just how lazy and unserious these guys are. I mean, damn, you name drop a famous scientist but don’t even take 30 seconds to find out ANYTHING about the man? Really? Obviously, 30 seconds was too much time to spare to avoid looking like a colossal dumbass in a widely circulated publication.
Furthermore, does any publication employ copy editors anymore? Any copy editor worth a penny should have caught this glaring wrong-osity. Damn. Epic fail all around.
R-Jud
@Perry Como:
Reposting this for the laffs.
ellie
Well if you point out that Hawking was born in Britain, the wingnuts will demand to see his birth certificate.
Perry Como
Which is obviously fake, because Hawking was born in Kenya, and being born in Kenya matters because Shut Up, That’s Why.
Mike G
IBD – from the “Shut up, that’s why” school of argument.
Why would anyone make their investment decisions on the advice of an ideological rag that is so egregiously sloppy with facts and deliberately ignorant? I’d rather listen to whatever Jim Kramer is screaming about this week.
The next-to-last samurai
Oh, come on. Everyone knows Hawking was actually born in Kenya.
Polish the Guillotines
Stephen Hawking doesn’t need health coverage. He’s indestructable.
dmsilev
@Perry Como:
Back when these intertron thingies were still being called the “information superhighway”, I knew some people who firmly believed that “information supercollider” was a better name, colliding endless streams of information and antiinformation, and examining the explosions.
Now all we need to do is find the guy in charge of the antiinformation stream and tell him that the knob doesn’t always have to be at 11.
-dms
geg6
Gawd. Just gawd. Just when I think I’ve seen or heard or read all the stupid there is, the take it to a whole other level. Who doesn’t know or couldn’t find out in about 3 seconds that Hawking is a Brit? Does anyone actually rely on that rag for investment advice or financial analysis? And could this be why Wall Street and the financial markets are so fucked up?
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
But being wealthy doesn’t mean you’re smart. The kind of people who are smart enough to earn their way into the investor set are after basic information from the news, not investment tips. The people who are after tips are either people trying to earn their way up or trust fund babies who are scratching to hold on to what they have. Neither one is necessarily smart enough to tell good information from bad.
wilfred
@fantabulizer:
“Inside every gook there’s an American trying to get out.” Neo-concon applied globally.
Nick
You must think your readers are fucking retarded.
Why else include a blurb explaining what any sentient being knows–that Steven Hawking is British?
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@fantabulizer:
I was thinking the same thing.
Davis X. Machina
Why would anyone make their investment decisions on the advice of an ideological rag that is so egregiously sloppy with facts and deliberately ignorant?
Someone on my faculty had a subscription to the IBD for years and I used to read it rather than grade papers — that’s about the only thing I can say for it.
It’s the bible of the angry small investor, who spends his life looking at the tail lights of the big guys far, far up ahead, and wondering why he’s falling behind. He’s thinking “It can’t be me — I’m smart, I can do things. And the game can’t be rigged, this is America. So there must be some other explanation’ and in the IBD it usually involves The Left™ (The Left is a registered trademark of Norbizness.) This is not the FT crowd.
There’s money in telling people what they already believe is in fact correct. If you tell them what they believe is wrong they just get cranky. Cf. most of NewsCorp. They’d rather be right than make money.
freelancer
Richard Dawkins was born in Kenya. It’s all a Godless conspiracy.
Perry Como
@Nick: Brick Oven Bill hangs around, so, yeah. Also.
Comrade Tudor
Ahh, but you know, if we now apply Hawking’s new concepts of the absence of an event horizon, then we can now see that there is no clear line where the wingnuttery goes infinite. It’s not a proven concept yet, but give Hawking a few more years to work on it, and we’ll have a clearer understanding of the Wingnut Event Horizon.
Joshua Norton
Bad example. When Hawking gets a little run down, all they usually have to do is reboot.
General Winfield Stuck
@The Grand Panjandrum AKA Americans for America:
Mountain West states where I live have the lowest obesity rates. These are the top ten other than W.mountain states with highest Obesity.
Note all Red States/
And Senor Cole, note the runner-up spot.
And further, these are some of the leading welfare states, and generally suck up most federal aid dollars per capita relative to tax dollars paid.
Sockalism, Sockalism, Sockalism!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fucking Fat Sockalists to boot..
robertdsc
I used to work for a sister company of IBD. The management then was just as bright as the IBD article.
Leelee for Obama
@Adrienne: The copy editor, proof reading career path seems to have gone the way of the DODO! Plus, how much fun do you guys have trying to translate what passes for English in Closed- Captioning? I use it a lot cause the TV is too loud for my Mom, and I swear, sometimes I cannot figure out what the hell has been said! Computer captioning…what a crock. Sometimes it actually changes the meaning of what’s been said!
JenJen
@schrodinger’s cat: The Wingularity grows ever-near!
wasabi gasp
IBD was off by one (uno for you terrorists) single character. Friggin hippie nitpickers…sheesh.
General Winfield Stuck
And for the new site format, I want to recommend fixing the exclamation point rationing. It is thwarting my Emo/
Set My exclaim points Free!
Makewi
@The Grand Panjandrum AKA Americans for America:
Right on. But let’s not stop there, when there are so many more risky behaviors that someone needs to use the force of government to control. Drug use, unmarried and/or unprotected sex (especially of teh ghey variety), failure to brush/floss, contact sports, too little sleep, etc. all are potentially dangerous activities which will COST MORE IN HEALTH CARE.
Damn straight we needs someone to tell us what to do.
steve s
speaking of fail i just heard they’re making a remake of Red Dawn
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32362308/ns/entertainment-access_hollywood/
I wonder if Wingnuttia is large enough to support a big movie. You could make a movie where skinny african american president Mark Cyst has overthrown capitalism and instituted forced communes, and is opposed by a plucky band of white christians from Heartland Bible College. They have to evade machine gun patrols of Radical Dykes, in the middle they get betrayed by their friend who is a closet atheist LieBrul, and then in the thrilling conclusion they break into the white house basement, find the usurper’s real long-form birth certificate and the secret service arrests him and deports him to kenya.
General Winfield Stuck
@General Winfield Stuck:
Christ, I’m starting to sound like LauraW.
joes527
@Makewi: So when HMOs first came out, the idea was that they would encourage healthy living and cheap preventative care.
But the quickly discovered that rationing care was so much easier than making healthcare more efficient by improving the health of their members.
Laura W
@General Winfield Stuck: Fuck you.
joes527
@General Winfield Stuck: I seem to have missed something! Have exclamation points been rationed???!!! (!)
That would be awful!!!!!!!!
WHAT NEXT? WILL THEY COME AFTER TEH CAPS?
General Winfield Stuck
@Laura W:
Drat, I thought you were Galt. But touche!
YellowJournalism
@Leelee for Obama: Try watching the subtitles on a few Bollywood movies sometime. You can tell who hired the lazy subtitle people by the all-too literal translations of Hindi or Punjabi to English instead of trying to create dialogue that makes sense in English and fits the scene. It’s hilarious, especially when they translate English into English.
General Winfield Stuck
@joes527:
How did you do that? I only get one — give me teh secret, now.
Please.
anonevent
@steve s:
The answer is no: I give you An American Carol which cost $20million to make and made $7million.
lawnorder
Copy editors at a wingnut astroturf factory ? What’s next, quality control people in China’s dairy farms ?
RedKitten
@Laura W: And now LauraW’s starting to sound like John! Cats and dogs are living together! It’s all madness!
Svensker
@General Winfield Stuck:
Christ, I’m starting to sound like LauraW.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Makewi
@joes527:
The government will be even more efficient at that than the HMO’s! So win for everyone. Just make sure that your vice gets on the approved list.
General Winfield Stuck
@Svensker:
Not really. It’s called teasing. the good natured kind.
srv
Perhaps the good Professor could extend Hawking Radiation theory to determine how much rational thought escapes from the Wingularity, and how long it will take the Republican party to evaporate.
Wile E. Quixote
@General Winfield Stuck:
Hey General Winfield Stuck, how’s that hot steamy BJ discount?
joes527
@General Winfield Stuck: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I started with 4 and ended up with 2. So if I understand it correctly, you should see 7 !’s above if it divides by 2, 2 !’s above if it truncates at 2, and any other # if !’s above means I have no idea what I did.
Svensker
@General Winfield Stuck:
Not really. It’s called teasing. the good natured kind.
:)
Laura W
@General Winfield Stuck: The ironing in your comment and your timing is that I was literally seconds away from turning off the first MSNBC I’ve watched all day, putting on Joni’s “Blue”, taking my glass of crappy Yellow Tail Pinot Grigio and rocking myself back and forth in the corner, at long last savoring the sobs I’ve been suppressing all day. (The day started at 7:30am with a screaming geriatric cat having yet another bladder infection, so it’s been crappy, overall.)
But just as I was about to go lick my gaping Emo wounds, I check BJ to find you, talking shit behind my back!! (I’d use 87 !s if I could, AND ALL CAPS.)
You made me laugh really loudly and long, so again I say: Fuck you!
Way to thwart a really good Emo cry, Stuck.
Indylib
Sam Stein and his headlines are concern trolling the White House.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/10/white-house-frustrated-co_n_255927.html
The headline reads “White House frustrated and confused by Palin, Limbaugh and Hannity”
Comrade Darkness
@Ash: since those douchebags probably didn’t think someone as brilliant as Hawking could possibly have come from Europe
And he didn’t. Ehem. He came from England. Very important distinction.
General Winfield Stuck
@Laura W:
Sorry to disturb your misery :–)
DonkeyKong
When you’re too fucking lazy to beat your head against a wall………………………..Andrew Brietbart.com
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@joes527:
The use of ALL CAPS is an indicator of stress, high blood pressure and the likelihood of escalating health care costs due to hypertension, heart disease and cheeto poisoning. Keep typing, we will track your ip address and an Obama Death Panel counseling team will be in contact with you shortly to discuss your “Living Will” arrangements. Also, pay no attention to the barcode placed on your front door by our census takers. It it purely decorative. Have a nice day!
Comrade Darkness
Every time I’ve had surgery I’ve been urged to fill out a living will. Given that car accidents are the most likely thing to kill me (barring counterdemonstrating the wingnuttery) they should make you fill one out when you renew your driver’s license.
_testing underscore_ just for grins and giggles bitches!11!11!
asdf
Davis X. Machina
Why would anyone make their investment decisions on the advice of an ideological rag that is so egregiously sloppy with facts and deliberately ignorant?
Someone on my faculty had a subscription to the IBD for years and I used to read it rather than grade papers—that’s about the only thing I can say for it.
It’s the bible of the angry small investor, who spends his life looking at the tail lights of the big guys far, far up ahead, and wondering why he’s falling behind. He’s thinking “It can’t be me—I’m smart, I can do things. And the game can’t be rigged, this is America. So there must be some other explanation’ and in the IBD it usually involves The Left™ (The Left is a registered trademark of Norbizness.) This is not the FT crowd.
There’s money in telling people what they already believe is in fact correct. If you tell them what they believe is wrong they just get cranky. Cf. most of NewsCorp. They’d rather be right than make money.
————-
Davis X. Machina, that was excellent. Thanks.
Comrade Darkness
Hm, it’s the old usenet standard at work here. I remember because I thought (underscore)word(underscore) should be underline, not italic.
steve s
@anonevent: “Both ‘Wayne Knight (I)’ and Frank Caliendo turned down the role of Michael Malone”
good lord that must be a terrible movie.
Oh well, no good money in wingnut movies. Another idea down. Friend of mine’s who’s also from Redneckistan Florida has really been trying to come up with ways to rip them off. “There so dumb. And they have some money. How come I haven’t figured out how to take it yet?”
I’ve suggested that he start an advocacy group and hire telemarketing firms to solicit donations. Go county-by-county through election results and find the area codes for the counties that voted 70+ percent for McCain. “Nancy Pelosi wants a big government program to develop a Gay Laser. It’ll shoot your son from outer space and make him kiss dudes. Send us $100 right now!” And of course set the whole thing up through 15 different offshore shell companies so that you don’t answer the door one day and see Mike Wallace. If you ever see Mike Wallace coming at you with a camera crew, flee for your life.
freelancer
@steve s:
Sounds like Mike Wallace likes to concern troll the shit out of hard-working American Entrepreneurs.
asiangrrlMN
Oh, good lord. Is that really all they have?
@The Grand Panjandrum AKA Americans for America:
I disagree. I smoke once a month, four cigarettes at a time. I have one drink at the same time. Now, while the latter is scoffed at because it makes me such a lightweight, the former is decried as teh evil. My doctor told me that smoking one cigarette a day is not a big deal. Therefore, where do you draw the line?
As for weight, it’s better to be ten pounds overweight than ten pounds underweight. It is also best to gain ten pounds per decade as one grows older. So, again, where do you draw the line?
In addition, people with heavy muscle density are considered obese by BMI standards.
So, by your rationale, people who drink excessively (whatever that is) should pay more. People who skydive should pay more. People who don’t wear their seat belts should pay more. People who don’t wear helmets while riding a bike should pay more. People who don’t eat organic food should pay more. People who have more children should have to pay increasingly more for insurance for each kid.
Where would it end? Who would decide? Why should the two behaviors/situations you outline be taxed any more heavily than the ones I outlined?
Xenos
@freelancer: Th Queen of England was notified that her father died, and she had assumed the right to be monarch, whilst she was on vacation in… KENYA!!!
It is all coming together now!
freelancer
@Xenos:
Hemingway took two safari’s to Africa, specifically Kenya, where he wrote two of his best Short Stories.
He then spend a large portion of his life in Cuba, before returning to Idaho, where he died of a “Self-inflicted” gunshot wound to the head on July 2nd, 1961. (Three months after the Bay of Pigs incident.)
Barack Obama was “born” 32 days later. Coincidence?!
ruemara
I had to post them a little snarky congratulations on being so damned clueless. I feel strongly that such blatant stupid should be celebrated. Regularly, Plenty & Offer.
General Winfield Stuck
@Wile E. Quixote:
WTF are you jabbering about wiledood?
steve s
@freelancer: Indeed. He Concern Trolls you in the FACE!
jenniebee
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist.
Not according to his Kenyan birth certificate and the testimony of his step-grandmother’s third cousin once removed who swears she was there at the delivery, room 326 at Mombasa General Hospital, she remembers it all like she just made it up yesterday! And why would his step-grandmother’s third cousin (once removed) lie? Why would she lie?
inkadu
@asiangrrlMN: Nicotine is way more addictive than alcohol; and alcohol, as far as I know, does not cause cancer.
And cigarettes are already taxed, just like alcohol, so if you want to be judgemental, you can always direct the money to health insurance.
If we’re so concerned about obesity, we can stop funding the over-production of corn and have mixed use zoning to encourage more foot traffic.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
What we need to experiment with is a Superconducting Wingnut Super Collider. I would pay good cash to see wingnuts fired at each other at near the speed of light to see what the results are.
bellatrys
preserved for ignominious posterity – I HAZ A SCREENSHOT & SO CAN U.
jcricket
I think Steven Hawking is actually Barack Obama’s dad.
Augustine
@joes527:
You can’t take three from two,
Two is less than three,
So you look at the four in the tens place.
Now thats really four tens,
So you make it three tens,
Regroup, and you change a ten to ten ones,
And you add them to the two and get twelve,
And you take away three, thats nine.
Is that clear?
Wile E. Quixote
@General Winfield Stuck
D’oh! Wrong Thread! It’s the stupid that did it; reading that IBD editorial stunned my thought processes. The IBD editorial emitted hazardous levels of intermediate vector bozons (not to be confused with intermediate vector bosons which are something completely and totally different). These IVBs emitted by the IBD caused destructive interference with my brain waves, thus completely shutting down all thought in my head and turning me into brain-dead husk of a man with the will, volition and intellect of a bowl of over-cooked broccoli, or Harry Reid, I’m not sure.
Fortunately I began to drool copiously on my keyboard while I stared blankly at the IBD editorial. The drool shorted out my keyboard giving me a powerful electrical shock and causing the computer to reboot, thus freeing me from the inexorable stupidity of the IBDs IVBs, but not before I had posted this in the wrong thread and bought three copies of that book on how to pick up on Thai women.
Wile E. Quixote
No, wait, this was the right thread!
Hah! If you’re starting to sound like LauraW. then you should know all about the the steamy BJ discount and why I bought it up. Hah!
Hah! I say. Hah! Hah! For some reason today I feel like saying “Hah!” and “This is obviously good news for John McCain”. It started right after I read that IBD editorial. Man, that IBD is some bad shit. I mean I thought that PHP fucked you up bad (or is that “PCP”? I know that one is a powerful animal tranquilizer and dangerous street drug and the other is a hypertext pre-processor and scripting language but I’m always forgetting which is which.) but that IBD gives you a serious case of the stupids.
Llelldorin
@chuck:
Can’t you integrate around it on the complex plane, and measure the residue of imaginary facts that way?
Brachiator
@beltane:
In Sarah Palin’s Real America 1.0 (TM), being dumb as dirt is a feature, not a bug.
Chris Baldwin
The NHS is better than the American “healthcare” system and that’s just an objectively verifiable fact.
valdemar
I’m a below-average income working stiff and have been all my life – except, obviously, when I was a. still a kid or b. unemployed for several years. I’ve had UK National Health Service care worth many tens of thousands and all I’ve paid are the same taxes as everyone else, plus some flat rate prescription charges.
Of course it’s an imperfect system. But many of its problems (i.e. huge costs) come down to ‘free enterprise’ screwing the taxpayer big time. Our newspapers are regularly blitzed with so-called ‘research’ that proves some drug or other can extend terminal cancer patients’ lives. Check out Dr Ben Goldacre’s site Bad Science for how this manipulation by Big Pharma works (bearing in mind that advertising drugs or any medical treatment is illegal in the UK, so they have to try and cheat their way past this ban.)
As for the Hawking thing, Christ on a bike. I thought everyone knew the NHS did most of the heavy lifting. Over here private medicine is for nip-and-tuck, ‘alternative’ crap for the middle classes, and jumping the (admittedly long)queues for some fairly basic surgery. Why don’t Americans learn about other countries? In the long run, it does you good.
bob h
I spent 1971 at Cambridge University in Applied Math and Theoretical Physics. Hawking was in a wheelchair even then, speaking with a seal-like bark that I could not understand.
That the UK health service has kept him for these 40 years is testimonial to the quality of care they offer.
RememberNovember
IBD is the “Screw” magazine for Wall St. If it doesn’t jingle in their pockets, it won’t make them tingle.
Marshall
The Grand Panjandrum AKA Americans for America @35
No, no, no. Smokers should, in any rational scheme, pay less for health care.
The flaw in most of these arguments is the assumption that, if you don’t do X, you just might live forever. Well, you won’t, and dying younger is cheaper to the health system, on average, than dying older. You will think that this is snark, but it isn’t.
Wolfdaughter
Visit Political Animal for another discussion on IBD’s serious brain fart. A winger posted repeatedly. Seems to me that he initially didn’t believe that Hawking is a Brit. Guess he must have Googled him or something, because his subsequent arguments agreed that Hawking is British, but he kept trying to say that Hawking is alive INSPITE of the NHS, that Hawking is wealth enough to have afforded the top level care which he obviously gets, and that none of it was through NHS, and besides everyone still knows that Obama’s death panels are ABSOLUTELY TRUE so shut up, that’s why. (OK, I’m putting words into the poor schmuck’s mouth.) But his arguments kept getting more and more fantastic. Or maybe I should go all Poe and say phantasmagorical.
Hop on over if you want a laugh or two.
mey
The best part is how they’ve corrected it. Editor’s Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.
Yes, not that their entire argument was based on how Hawking wouldn’t have had a chance with the NHS handling health care, but that he didn’t live in the UK. How about they say something about how even the the NHS is Le Suck, it still works for people who are disabled, like Hawking? Nah, guess that wouldn’t make sense.