Via Think Progress:
Alaska will become the 30th state to accept Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion, after Gov. Bill Walker (I) announced on Thursday that he will use his executive power to bypass the GOP-controlled legislature and implement the policy on his own.
Walker — a former Republican who has since become an Independent — has been advocating for Medicaid expansion for over a year. Implementing this particular Obamacare provision, which was ruled optional by the Supreme Court in 2012, would extend health coverage to an estimated 40,000 low-income residents in his state.
Decent chance there will be a court fight on the expansion, but establishing facts on the ground that this is what a civilized state does (especially when someone else is paying either the entire bill or the vast majority of it), and more importantly getting the hospital groups on board and used to the revenue will start entrenching the program.
And here is the Republican response to Medicaid expansion in Alaska:
“I think in this time, in these lean years, it’s time for communities to pull together, it’s time for churches to step up, it’s time to help give a hand to each other as individuals. We can be kind as people. It’s not government’s place to be kind,” State Rep. Shelley Hughes (R) said in reference to uninsured Alaskans when the House voted down Medicaid expansion in March.
Counting on churches, private charity, bake sales and magical unicorns flying out of a yeti’s ass has been the working poor health insurance plan for years. That has not worked, but let’s try it again and clap louder. Asshole.
Kropadope
Don’t forget, we’re also supposed to use our perfect market knowledge to ferret out abuse and prevent exploitation. Vote with your dollars!!!
Tyro
“I think in this time, in these lean years, it’s time for communities to pull together, it’s time for churches to step up, it’s time to help give a hand to each other as individuals
Alaska has been a state for more than 50 years. They haven’t managed to cover everyone with private charity in that time, so we can assume they can’t/won’t wothout government intervention.
MattF
The right-wing plan for health care is that people who can’t afford it should get sick and die. Poor people are mostly Democrats, anyhow.
Kropadope
@Tyro:
Well, maybe if they asked nicely
Hunter
“It’s not government’s place to be kind,”
That’s government’s main purpose — to insure the welfare of its citizens,.
Bobby B.
Everyone’s been slagging the Republican Gov. Walker for ages, and here he actually does something right! Oh, you mean Bill Walker…
Elizabelle
What an awful person.
Healthcare is not just kind. It’s also good business.
Joy
So says the person who has health insurance coverage through the State of Alaska. How kind of her.
Keith P.
Or they could return some of their state’s meth profits to the people by sending everyone a check.
boatboy_srq
@Hunter: I was actually thinking that her statement was the GOTea mantra. It’s refreshing to see Teahadi pols being so honest: one reason I’m loving the Trump candidacy – no dogwhistle whatsoever, just straight-up brutally plain language.
@Elizabelle: Misguided, too. What part of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” does she not understand? Oh, right, Republican…
Kropadope
@boatboy_srq:
Of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations…unless it’s a hospital that wants to be paid for its services.
boatboy_srq
@Tyro: Interesting that their oilfield leases are profitable enough to cut every Alaskan a cheque each year, but healthcare is “private charity” to be left to “churches” and “communities”, no? And isn’t it convenient that this should be left to “communities”, when every time a community has tried to enact worker/LGBT/environmental protections the Teahad has run to the local state house and governor’s mansion demanding those protections be voided by state law?
boatboy_srq
@Kropadope: True. But the “we can be kind as people” bit is ridiculously disingenuous.
Kropadope
@boatboy_srq: Oh, I’m sure she treats her kith and kin wonderfully.
FlipYrWhig
The line “It’s not government’s place to be kind” is straight from the libertarian hymnal, no?
gratuitous
Yes, the times are too lean; we can’t afford that! Then when les bon temps are roulez-ing, who’s got time to think about those icky sick people; screw ’em!
There’s always an excuse for Republicans to do the wrong thing.
Amir Khalid
@boatboy_srq:
Does anyone know how much this year’s cheque is worth, what with oil prices falling and all?
Elizabelle
two things: Shelley Hughes (R) is a moron. Wish that comment would be enough to assure defeat next election. Has no business in politics.
second: I am very happy that Alaska is opening Medicaid. The sky will not fall. But some Alaskans will not die prematurely, and will enjoy more security and better health.
third, I guess: f*ck Shelley Hughes and people who think churches and charity can cover all social ills. Cruelty masked by sloppy thinking.
BillinGlendaleCA
@FlipYrWhig: Yup, it’s got a catchy tune too.
ThresherK
The “charity donation jar” delusion model holds in a place as sparsely populated as AK? Wow.
FlipYrWhig
@boatboy_srq: “Communities” means people who associate voluntarily, not municipal government, which is, after all, “government.” We’ve all heard this claptrap from libertarians and 11-year-old wannabes for 40 years: people can choose to do things but GUMMIT CANT MAKE ME
FlipYrWhig
@Elizabelle: Oh, they don’t actually think churches and charities will cover all social ills. They think that anyone suffering an ill should have anticipated it beforehand and worked harder to remain self-reliant while the ill affected them. And if you didn’t, well, sucks to be you, but don’t come crying to them! It’s like having the fable of the ant and the grasshopper as a credo — and being sure that you’ll always be the ant.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Last year it was $1884, it’s got as low as $845 once in the last 20 years.
MomSense
If community members coming together to pay for health care is fine then why isn’t the community of United States taxpayers coming together to pay for health care just as fine?
Face
The first….not enough to matter. The second….not for much longer. The third…..wow.
Kropadope
@MomSense: Voluntary association and all…
pluege
leave it to republicans to be dedicated, faithful, and unchanging in their vile indecency.
Punchy
So says the piece of shit from the ONLY state which pays back their cititzens with some oil slush fund. Unfuckinreal.
peach flavored shampoo
My question is this: in most GOP states, you can tie the reluctance to Medicaid expansion to their revulsion that lazy, shiftless Darkies may actually get something good out of it. But I’m guessing there’s all of 9 AAs in AK, so who’s the boogeyman in Barrow? Do they hate Eskimoes too?
Randy P
It’s not government’s job to provide me roads. My neighbors and I can do that.
It’s not government’s job to provide an army or police force. If I’m worried about attackers, I’ll just go down to my local Second Amendment Beer Wine M16 Deli and pick up a sammich and a couple of assault rifles.
It’s not government’s job to invent the internet (Arpanet), if people wanted to communicate they knew how to do it with tin cans and string.
etc., etc.
The puzzler is why the dumbasses can convince so many smart people of this crap. And don’t lie to yourself, among your Republican relatives at least one should be smart enough to know better if their beliefs were based on reality and logic.
BillinGlendaleCA
@peach flavored shampoo:
Yes.
Randy P
Question for Richard: As more states join the Medicaid pool and/or set up their own exchanges, does that help drive the prices down on healthcare.gov? I’m 100% ignorant on the flow of dollars or the forces that contribute to pricing on the state exchanges vs federal exchange.
MattF
@Randy P:
And, also, refinance your mortgage.
Punchy
Must be one hell of a bake sale to pay for a heart transplant or brain surgery. On the bright side, this mode of charity keeps all the dentists and diabetes doctors well-employed.
FlipYrWhig
@MomSense:
Because it’s coercive. It makes you pay in even if you don’ wanna. Libertarians have a choice fetish. (Hey, that makes sense whether “choice” is a noun or an adjective!)
Jeffro
@Punchy: Perhaps a simple bar graph showing how many $.50-net-profit cupcakes it takes to pay for each particular procedure? I mean, it would take 50-80 just to cover the co-pay on a regular ol’ checkup…
Jeffro
@FlipYrWhig: What if we choose…to come together? (libertarian head explodes)
Kropadope
@Jeffro:
Isn’t that what was done when they wrote the Constitution and what we continue to do when we hold elections?
Face
@Punchy: And you libtards ripped Sharon Angle when she dared to propose a chicken-for-colonoscopy system. At least grilled chicken is good for you. Now we’re stuck with hocking $1 brownies and $0.50 nutty bars just to get some ampicillin. Blood sugar to the moon, Alice!
boatboy_srq
@FlipYrWhig: … so, are HOAs going to assess health premiums for the residents, then? Wonder how many gated-community homeowners will go for that…
Matt McIrvin
@Keith P.: Alaska actually DOES send everyone a check. It’s remarkable how socialist a state with oil money can be when it feels like it.
Richard Mayhew
@Randy P:
Setting up a state run exchange instead of using Healthcare.gov should have next to no impact on prices. It is just a different front end for the sales and membership management function. It might be a $1 or $2 difference in admin fees per policy per month MAX. Fundamentally irrelevant.
Now the bigger and far more interesting question (and one I have no good data, and therefore no good answer on, although I hvae a gut feel) — are the Exchange risk pools in Medicaid Expansion states better/healthier/cheaper, all else being equal, than the risk pools in non-Medicaid expansion states. The Non-expansion states have a significant portion of their risk pool made up of people making between 100% and 138% FPL. Are these people statistically sicker/more expensive to cover than people making above 138% FPL?
I’m not sure…..
Richard Mayhew
@Jeffro: Well, it takes more than just choice, a little bit of skill and lots of communication with your partner(s) is usually needed to make sure that everyone comes together….
boatboy_srq
@Face: Colonoscopies are good for you; the chicken would have been good for the attending physician. Not being able to keep the chicken isn’t good for you since the chicken isn’t yours to eat (nor are the eggs the chicken won’t be laying for you anymore). So the brownies aren’t healthy but handing over your foodstuffs isn’t exactly healthy either.
Frankensteinbeck
They don’t want to be a civilized state. Conservative values are not the same as ours. They want to go back to tiny communities with minimal direct contact with the rest of the world, so they can enforce their prejudices, publicly beat or kill anyone who doesn’t measure up, and be sure their children will grow up with their same prejudices. Education and the government helping people are antithetical to this goal.
Feature, not bug. Giving a job to someone you know won’t do it is a major passive-aggressive tactic to escape responsibility. Bonus points: It makes them feel warm and fuzzy and self-righteous to imagine that their institutions are the cause of charity, while at the same time relying on those institutions to not do that. It’s ‘being an asshole’ 101.
Note that both of these ideals sound kind of nice to shallow people at the level of ‘I just do what everyone else does and don’t think about what people not like me might need’ callousness.
@peach flavored shampoo:
Yes, but that revulsion is not tied to actual probabilities that Darkies will benefit. Bigotry flourishes where bigots never have to deal with the Other. Let’s face it, conservatives don’t give a rat’s ass about facts.
boatboy_srq
@FlipYrWhig: Libertarians exercise their choice at least twice every two years (or in places like VA twice every year). It’s not like it doesn’t exist – just that it isn’t an immediate thing. And not voting is still a choice whether they recognize that or not.
Jeffro
@Kropadope:
Yup, exactly what I ask them. Also, “How is taxation ‘theft’ if we’re all expecting each other to pay taxes (and we’re all voting for the reps who make/pass budgets)?” Being a Libertarian is actually dumber and less defensible than being a Republican.
shell
Because in Repub world, government must always, always, always be the problem.
Jeffro
@Richard Mayhew: That almost needed a NSFW
Frankensteinbeck
@shell:
Government kindness was the motivation for all civil rights laws. That left conservatives with a nasty taste in their mouth for anything the federal government does.
Richard Mayhew
@Jeffro: I just assume that Balloon Juice is NSFW, and by the time the comment thread gets to comment # 30, it is definately not work place showable, no matter what the original topic was.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Jeffro: As the kid said when I mentioned libertarians, “Well, they’re idiots.”
Kropadope
@Jeffro:
My libertarian bestie prefers defining taxation as slavery, but I digress. I think part of the problem is that they aren’t voting for the people who institute taxes to pay for services and their own candidates aren’t electorally viable.
Elizabelle
Here’s Shelley Hughes’ campaign website. You will notice her experience is very thin.
Vote Smart.
She used to teach in a Christian school, then she turned her attention to government.
Kropadope
@Elizabelle: A BA in English rhetoric, hmm, I would’ve guess some form of BS.
FlipYrWhig
@boatboy_srq: I don’t think there would even be elections in Libertarian Utopia. That would mean consenting to the idea of the government as institution. Ideally everyone would be autonomous and all relationships voluntary and contingent. How this would work in a world that still offers modern conveniences and relative security is an exercise best left to the reader. Also, that’s why they want to have guns.
Kropadope
@FlipYrWhig: It’ll work because it will, that’s why. People will want all the same things and they’ll still go to work and produce all these wonderful things, except now they’ll do so PEACEFULLY!!!! We know it will be peaceful because everyone will be heavily armed.
Belafon
@Kropadope: That would involve Science.
Kropadope
@Belafon: Not the BS I had in mind.
Belafon
@Kropadope: I know, but I’m pretty sure the Science scared her off.
RSA
@Kropadope:
In my past brushes with libertarians, taxation eventually came down to force. I think to be a libertarian, you need to be comfortable defining things in the simplest possible terms and then accepting the implications, no matter how stupid they turn out to be.
Jeffro
@Kropadope:
I’ve heard that one too from a couple of my L friends…to which I usually ask them, “aren’t we all slaves to each other then, since we all pay taxes and all expect each other to pay as well? How is that oppressing you in particular?”
And once they agree/admit they’re citizens and can vote and/or run for office, it’s a pretty short trip to where they admit they just don’t like paying taxes period.
FlipYrWhig
@Kropadope: Civilization be damned! Everyone his own warlord! No obvious flaws with this plan, right, Mr. Hobbes?
aimai
@MomSense: Silly!
Kropadope
@FlipYrWhig:
I often argue that the end result of libertarian ideology is aristocracy. They deny it, say that’s just replacing one bad system with another. However, I just don’t think they understand the nature of aristocracy. Person has resources and industry, person hires people to protect his interests, competing interests come to blows and one bests another, one stands above all; a king.
FlipYrWhig
@Jeffro: They don’t like being forced to pay for someone else’s failures and wastefulness. They don’t typically comprehend that other people have paid for _their_ failures and wastefulness. Mostly because every libertarian I’ve ever known is utterly confident in his own brilliance and innate superiority.
FlipYrWhig
@Kropadope: Sounds about right to me…
rikyrah
then her muthaphuckin’ azz should turn in her government-paid for healthcare.
I have no more patience with these evil-azz mofos.
Kropadope
@FlipYrWhig:
No…that was the Republicans, don’t blame us for their failures even though we believe in most of the same things or when we disagree it’s just different logic for the same conclusion.
Quack, quack
Waddles away
SenyorDave
@Jeffro: Great idea, they can use that as a unit of currency. Of course it would only apply to things that might help ordinary people, you know the little people. When it comes to the 1%’ers and doing things for them, we don’t even have to track money because obviously any money spent on them will more than pay for itself.
boatboy_srq
@FlipYrWhig: One more reason I say libertarianism is a brilliant political position for a preindustrial society without an established currency.
FlipYrWhig
@boatboy_srq: We can’t deny that nasty, brutish, and short is a KIND of life…
Another Holocene Human
@Richard Mayhew: BJ is very mobile friendly, so I just use the mobile version at work.
charluckles
Alaska…filled to the brim with right wing anti-government ideologues all desperately dependent on government.
Mike in NC
@charluckles: Where else could the likes of Sarah Palin get elected governor?
elmo
@FlipYrWhig: That doesn’t even work as a Monty Python concept.
Tommy
@rikyrah: You know Shelley Hughes I don’t mind paying a little more so the citizens of your state get health care. Maybe why my state pays .32 cents more each year in taxes than we get back from the federal government. I long ago got cool with that. I’ve not looked but pretty sure Alaska is on the list of what I call “donor” states. States that need me and other Americans to pay their bills.
boatboy_srq
@FlipYrWhig: IOW, Libertarian Utopia is anarchy. I won’t disagree, but I’ll make sure I’m at a safe distance when you try persuading a Libertarian that s/he’s really just an Anarchist in love with polysyllaby.
Randy P
@Another Holocene Human:
Except for the part where you can’t edit your posts, and the part where it randomly switches you to Desktop view and you have to expend precious energy using up one of your lifetime supply of clicks to get it back.
(Insert either Louis CK rant or SNL skit on people whining about imperfections in amazing 21st-century technology)
But yeah, I use the mobile version at work too.
Kropadope
@boatboy_srq: No, Libertarians allow for a court system. How the court is staffed or enforces decisions…I don’t know.
J R in WV
@charluckles:
So True!
There is no other state in which state government is so important to the lower economic set of citizens. People even get annual income support checks from the oil field bonus program.
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: Actually, Alaska is fairly self-sufficient – but that’s in large part due to the lease payments and fees assessed on Big Oil. Of course state spending is maintained so that a chunk of that is refunded direct to the residents, so there’s no way to repurpose those funds to do anything actually useful like healthcare… /snark
boatboy_srq
@Kropadope: Automagically created and maintained public constructs aren’t defensible. Courts imply authority, which is granted by _____, which means government is a requirement for the courts to exist. Either they give up on the courts, or they admit a need for the other two branches.
Brachiator
@Kropadope:
But corporations are people, too. So, by the principle of substitution, Benghazi!
@FlipYrWhig
Very true. Libertarians are comically predictable in this way, even when they are totally irrational. So, libertarians would be against the FDA and the CDC because they believe that they magically could detect tainted eggs or meat and ward off any illness or death with libertarian mojo (the power of Ayn Rand compels you!).
Kropadope
@boatboy_srq:
I have one L friend who’s big idea of healthcare is “people should just receive healthcare.”
I say: “sounds like socialism.”
Him: “No, what are you talking about.”
Me: “Well, who’s gonna pay administer or pay for it? The healthcare fairy?”
Him: “Why does anyone need to administer or pay for it?”
::Facepalm::
Thinking about it now, I think the implied solution is to enslave doctors.
Another Holocene Human
@boatboy_srq: Except actual anarchists, not teenagers spraypainting anarchist symbols on buildings, aren’t as lulu as libertarians.
Tommy
@boatboy_srq: I got a little Libertarian running through me. But then I think for a few seconds and it makes no sense.
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator: I think our schools are part of the problem. We teach kids that competition is how we evaluate virtue. Good scores, good grades, the best time on the one mile, and so on. It’s this twisted moral logic where the best humans will outcompete the worserer ones, and any interference with God’s Own Plan will bring about the mediocratization of the human race.
It’s moon logic, but I think some young people believe this as an underlying value.
Remember the vegans who told Penn Jilette that if non-raw-vegan food could support more souls than a raw-vegan-only diet, “What kind of people would they be?”
gelfling545
Given as she’s Republican, I suppose this …person belongs to a church. How long could her church stay afloat if even 5 of their members needed help with large medical bills? Not coming up with the cash for a prescription of a doctor’s visit but for by-pass surgery or chemotherapy? She should really ask her pastor about how financially able the church would be to help in such a situation. I spent the first 40 some years of my life very involved with churches and while some (most, actually) are willing to help out about all the can do is take care of small or non-cash needs and the most realistic thing they can do for a member is to try to help them get social services assistance!
Another Holocene Human
@Randy P: I’m able to do editing using my phone now. Maybe I have a better phone and that’s why? I had to replace the old one, it was tripping out and wouldn’t place or receive calls.
gelfling545
@Elizabelle: and about that “promote the general welfare” bit in the Constitution, Ms. Hughes?
Randy P
@Another Holocene Human: I have an iPhone 5s which is pretty new and up to date on the OS. Let’s see.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@FlipYrWhig:
I’d say it’s more of a You’re not the boss of me! fetish. Libertarians have never gotten over the fact that their mom was allowed to tell them what to do, and they want to make sure that no one, anywhere can ever tell them what to do ever again.
Yes, they’re pouty five-year-olds in adult bodies.
Randy P
@Randy P: Nope. Hitting the “Edit” button on the phone throws me to the BJ main menu. Just as it always has. And just as my previous phone, a Droid, always did.
Kropadope
@Mnemosyne (tablet): OMG, it all makes so much sense now…
Well, as much sense as it possibly could make.
The Other Chuck
@Richard Mayhew: Yep, this is still the #1 Google hit for “skull fuck a kitten” after all…
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human: Well I can’t agree. I think winning is kind of a good thing. Now if winning is important for math and not baseball, well that is a debate. Oh and math is far more important than baseball, and that is said as a dude far better at sports than math.
But I went to my niece’s soccer game this year. She is 6. I openly asked way are they not keeping score? A parent said to me they don’t keep score, it doesn’t matter who wins. I felt like I should be listening to Rush when I said yeah the score matters.
Kropadope
@The Other Chuck: Top three relate to BJ in some way, in fact. Thanks for helping to keep it there.
Belafon
@Tommy: That’s not a new thing. I personally wouldn’t worry about it too much, they’ll learn the score matters in a couple of years. (Says the dad who stopped letting his kids win games when they turned five.)
the Conster
Another logical response from Wingnuttistan. Wingnuts are all actually 12 yr olds.
Petorado
“It’s time for churches to step up.” So Shelley Hughes is putting the blame for the uninsured squarely where it belongs — on religion. Good to know.
“I think in this time, in these lean years, it’s time for communities to pull together … it’s time to help give a hand to each other as individuals. We can be kind as people.”
Communities pulling together and giving a hand to each other is exactly why we pay our taxes and govern ourselves. But plain selfishness and disliking other members of the community to which we all belong are the reasons Shelley and her conservative ilk refuse to pull together and give each other a hand. It’s amazing how they can claim to love America but hate they fellow Americans so much.
Kropadope
@the Conster: I hope they give those low-level AIPAC employees bonuses in addition to making good on the vacation later. Actually, no, I don’t.
Tommy
@Belafon: I was playing Uno with my niece. Dad saw I let her win and he was kind of mad at me. Now I am 45, not some spring chicken, but said let her know what it is like to lose.
Another Holocene Human
@Randy P: Weird. I get a special edit page.
Brachiator
@Another Holocene Human:
I don’t think that I can agree with this, especially with respect to libertarians. Most libertarians I’ve known have been auto-didacts who didn’t particularly like school and the idea of intellectual authority, but too often compiled the shittiest reading lists to educate themselves.
And because they often have a twisted understanding of science and especially evolution, they come up with a vision of competition and excellence that doesn’t have squat to do with much of anything.
I also don’t have a problem with competition or good grades, etc., I just don’t make a fetish of it.
No, I didn’t know about this, but it sounds ridiculous.
Another Holocene Human
@Tommy: I’m not arguing for that kind of nonsense. (Like they would pull that at a boy’s game.)
But I mean the whole academic system pits you against your peers–your friends, even. I still struggle with jealousy and insecurity, like if someone is smarter than me I think they’re only hanging out with me out of pity.
boatboy_srq
@Kropadope:
The implied solution for any product or service – besides the one you yourself provide – seems to be “enslave producer segment so product/service is ‘free'”. One reason why followers of Rand tend to be white and male.
@Tommy: That sounds painful. I hope you catch him and have him extracted soon.
Another Holocene Human
@Belafon: And kids do need to learn how to lose. Don’t be like my one brother who would toss board games in the air when he lost. Hello, nobody will ever agree to play with you again….
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator: It was ridiculous. One of the actually good episodes of Bullshit.
Then they tried to do an episode claiming 2nd hand smoke was a hoax. Not only were viewers outraged, they had to publicly walk it all back. And now it’s come out that Jilette had ties to either the tobacco companies or their PR lawyers or whatever, maybe via Cato or whoever Jilette leaned on for talking points in that episode, no surprise there.
MuckJagger
“These lean years.”
Asshole, indeed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human:
Actually they do.
Another Holocene Human
Need a new thread, but here’s Ben Shapiro being extra disgusting, attempting to kick down at a transwoman, getting told off, and then running on twitter to say he needed security to go home because he is at heart a whiny little baby.
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/17/ben_shapiro_tries_and_spectacularly_fails_to_humiliate_trans_woman_zoey_tur_what_are_your_genetics_sir/
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: I stand corrected.
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human: The cool thing for me in the soccer game, unisex. That was very cool. And the boys better pick up their game because the little ladies were far superior to them!
As for the academic system not sure what to say. I got a MA and hoped to get a PhD. I left because, well I got sick of all the BS. Wasn’t worth my time.
Another Holocene Human
I like what Tur said about Jenner, I mean sure, rich, white, whatever, but going through an OUT transition is EXTREMELY difficult.
Trans people used to cut off all ties and flee somewhere else with a completely different name. You cannot oversell the FEAR factor here. Jenner was spreading the truth about the homicide rate. If anything, she tread too lightly on that topic. (Stopping suicides is a cause that makes everyone feel good about themselves, but addressing the homicides is tougher for cis people to take.)
the Conster
OT, but #IfIDieInPoliceCustody has me in tears. Literally. Unfuckingbelievable the shit white people don’t have to think about.
Randy P
@the Conster: The Sandra Bland case has hit me personally (i.e., I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut) for reasons I can’t identify. Maybe because I’ve known so many promising young AA women like her just at her stage of life when it looked like everything was about to open up. And the fact that she is my daughter’s age.
For the record, I am more-or-less white. Or non-black anyway. Mixture of a few things, but none of them African. In American society, so far as I know, I get treated as white (except in Southern Cal where I’m often taken as Mexican, which is part of the mix)
The Other Chuck
@the Conster: It’s almost like Netanyahu shouldn’t have publicly slagged off Obama the way he repeatedly did, because just maybe Obama doesn’t give a fuck what Bibi and AIPAC have to say anymore as a consequence. Hoonoo, gofigya.
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human: It was 1989. I was running the suicide hotline at Western Illinois University. I was interviewing people. Keep in mind this is 1989. At the time I didn’t know an openly gay person. This person walked in, about 5’9 and 245. In a flowered dress. Said his named was Denise. I will admit I was confused. Denise was
amazing. Wish I was half the person she was.
the Conster
@The Other Chuck:
The Obama with no fucks left to give about anyone is fun to watch.
Jeffro
@the Conster: And I hope he keeps it up, accelerating as he goes, right through the finish line (and beyond, why not?)
raven
@Randy P: I just found out she went to my high school.
Another Holocene Human
@the Conster: It’s the most rage-inducing news all week, bar none.
Another Holocene Human
@Jeffro: It’s Barack Obama, we know there will be a beyond.
Ruckus
@Jeffro:
Had a discussion with one about society. He said he didn’t live in society. I asked him how he got to the party we were at, how he was able to shop for food, find a doc to try to keep him healthy. His denial was so deep he still refused to admit he lived in a society, even one he disliked. I pegged him for about 7 yrs old, even though we graduated HS close to 50 yrs ago.
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
So you’re talking what, 1000 BC?
tazj
@gelfling545: Yes, from my experience that’s exactly how most churches operate. My dad was a member of the St. Vincent DePaul (Catholic organization) for years before he died. He’d explain to people that the church would get them what they needed in an emergency like food, money or shelter and they would be referred to social services for more help.
the Conster
@Another Holocene Human:
CBS This Morning featured it at the top this morning – I have to say I was pleasantly surprised, and showed an interview with her family. Her family was just so…. lovely, and concerned, and it got me sobbing with frustration. They cut away to the announcement by some TX authority that the Rangers would be investigating, and showed the racist cracker who arrested her who looks like something out of a cartoon of Texas racist crackers. I’M so tired of this shit, and nothing about it seriously affects me.
Face
@the Conster: Investigation, Shimestigation. Find me a Texas jury that convict a white cop over a black female and I’ll show you the keys to my house, car, wife, and kid*
* — unless there’s video, then there’s perhaps a ten percen……nope, nevermind. Still would never, ever, ever happen.
Calouste
@Ruckus: See mnemosyne above. Libertarians are people whose emotional development came to a screeching halt when their mom told them to eat their broccoli.
Omnes Omnibus
@Face: DoJ and FBI have been brought in already.
Another Holocene Human
@the Conster: Rawstory says the investigator and the prosecutor have troubling histories of racial bias. Not. Surprised.
Patrick
What a fricking bubble Shelley Hughes lives in. Drugs for a person with MS without insurance costs $3000 per month. Can she please list which churches that are willing to cough up that money each month? If they had done it before, there wouldn’t have been a need for ACA in the first place.
Face
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, OK then. That changes things. Considerably.
Belafon
@Patrick: I’m pretty sure her solution involves laying of hands.
NonyNony
@Tommy:
The thing to keep in mind is that when you’re doing sports for 6 year olds, the important thing is to get them to love the game. Get them ALL to love the game. If they love the game, they’ll keep playing it. If their memories of the game are rage and disappointment because they lost 36 to 0 (because they have no skills because they’re SIX and the other team has that one kid who has been pushed by soccer parents to be a soccer machine since he was three years old), they’re not going to stick with it.
The kids all keep score and know what the result is (trust me on this – when they’re old enough to care, they always know what the score is). They don’t need adults rubbing it in when they lose. Once they have enough love for the sport to want to keep playing on their own, that’s when adding score keeping to the game stops hurting retention.
My son loves sports a hell of a lot more than I did at his age, and I mostly attribute it to the fact that when he was still learning the game in the glorified practice/scrimmage sessions they played when he was six and younger, they didn’t bother with keeping score. (And also that I’m not an asshole sports parent. I love my Dad, but man he killed my love of sports at a young age by the way he managed to “give advice” in a way that would just crush my interest in playing the game.)
Jeffro
@Ruckus: He doesn’t live in a society? Wowzers. 7 billion rugged individuals on this planet, none of them interacting in any way. I never noticed that before.
definition #2 at Dictionary.com: “a body of individuals living as members of a community” – even that doesn’t work for him?
Ruckus
@Calouste:
Agreed. I think the only discussion is at what age did they stop any maturity. The answers vary from 5 to 12. I go with 7. And of course it probably varies depending on the individual. But 12 seems awfully high to me.
Ruckus
@Belafon:
Does that laying of hands include in the wallet?
Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus: I watched a documentary, I think it was Seven Up? and some of the kids had really matured by 11/12. The way they talked and carried themselves was even more striking than the inches they’d put on.
Mike J
@FlipYrWhig:
Coercion is perfectly acceptable to make you pick up the tab for a war.
the Conster
@Another Holocene Human:
It’s just all so tiresomely maddeningly fucking predictable.
Twitter tells me there’s a march from the jail to the courthouse. Thank FSM for twitter, because that’s what got the Texas cracker pool cop fired.
Another Holocene Human
@NonyNony: So my first year playing soccer we were the “Surfs” with blue shirts but the adults snidely called us “Smurfs” and our practice sessions consisted of basic ball handling skills rather than how to play the fucking game so after a whole season I wasn’t even clear on the rules and threw a ball away that I had in play. We lost every fucking game that fall until the last where we faced the second worst team and we tied. I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT! We played our hearts out. It’s the adults who throw the tantrums when they lose, and how ugly that is.
Ruckus
@Jeffro:
It was an interesting discussion. But nothing was getting into that thick head. His mind was firmly made up that you can’t make him, no sir you can’t make him, no way. Usually by the time you hit 65 you are bitter, resigned or happy with life. But if you never leave childhood you never have to reach one of those stages. Of course you are bitter about all those people who are still trying to make you grow up.
Another Holocene Human
@the Conster: Thank goodness for Twitter. Game changer.
Belafon
@Ruckus: “Reach deep into your heart and your pocketbook, and take His hand.” – Queensryche
Another Holocene Human
@Patrick: When she needs help, she’ll be on GoFundMe or championing a bill for the State of Alaska to pay for treatments for SpecialSnowflakeDiseasitis, right after she votes to sweep terminal cancer care funds into the general fund and votes to move the Agency for the Blind under the DMV and removes their dedicated funding … well, if Alaska lege is anything like Florida lege, that is.
xenos
@Ruckus:anthropologists and archaeologists know all about lots of pre-industrial societies without established currencies.
The successful ones were not run on libertarian principals.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: More like 700 AD. Currency was for the landed gentry, used to pay taxes; most other transactions were some form of barter. All the pesky complex molecules modern industry creates that cause poisonings and AGCC and such weren’t identified let alone mass-produced. But ethnic tension was far higher and more granular; women were property; “human rights” didn’t exist; and the only people sufficiently educated to explain it all were all in the Church.
The moment you add industry and a state-sanctioned currency into an environment, Libertarianism begins to fall short of that environment’s needs – until you reach a point like today where libertarian principles can’t properly address product safety, pollution, energy policy or any other modern ill and can’t recognize a practical way to fund the governmental forms that can touch those because it won’t recognize fiat currency as having measurable value.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: Depends on the grade of patent medicine being hawked. The good stuff usually lists “contents of one wallet” among its ingredients.
FlipYrWhig
@xenos: Ah, but what about the _un_successful ones, huh? :P
boatboy_srq
@Richard Mayhew: ROFLMAO. Well played, sir.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: FWIW that’s more feudalism than aristocracy.
catclub
OT: This is so sweet to read on the Iran deal and Netanyahu.
catclub
Another OT:
This seems like a huge deal. All those statements about you can be fired for being gay; Do they now go away?
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
Been a long time since studying history but I seem to recall that while a currency as we now look at it, something that has little intrinsic value, was rather late, many societies had some understanding about the various values of barter items. 2 chickens=X. I call that a currency, known agreed upon values for something. Now if you are still arguing about the value of 2 chickens every time you go to see the medicine man, then yes that is barter. And in some societies arguing about the value is still done even with a paper currency. Maybe it’s because it’s a paper currency. We have gold bugs that think that someone will want gold when the apocalypse strikes. Because it is shinny and heavy and therefore has more substance than paper I think. Chickens have more substance than paper and you can eat them.
Ruckus
@catclub:
This seems like a huge deal. All those statements about you can be fired for being gay; Do they now go away?
It is a big deal. And no assholes will still be assholes. It may be easier for them to lose now though.
FlipYrWhig
@Face: the chicken for checkups woman was the one Angle beat for the nomination: Lowden, I think. Angle was the second amendment remedies one.
boatboy_srq
@catclub: No, they don’t, but the likelihood of someone suing a former employer under Title VII is significantly higher since winning appears a reasonably likely outcome. It’ll take time for change because a Title VII case is expensive and the attorneys’ fees will be obscene, so the first litigants are going to be relatively wealthy and the tangible harm will be in hundreds of thousands. Count on Reichwhingeing at earsplitting levels, though, as soon as this gets absorbed by the Religulous Liberteee shouters.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: Barter turns each commodity into its own currency; hence the “barter” since in your equation seasonal variance could mean 2 chickens = X/3 or 1 chicken = X depending on how good or bad a given year was. It’s more equivalent to buying and selling on the currency markets than it is buying products/services within a single currency market because the value is approximate but not fixed and variable according to supply. Not having a single, state-sanctioned medium of exchange that is readily available to all citizens is the key: the moment you have an abstract value assessed to what’s essentially a publicly-recognized promissory note, you get people complaining that it isn’t “money”. Europe hadn’t even seen the concept until the 13th century and banks didn’t begin issuing/accepting them for another hundred years. Libertarianism accepts the bank note (the bank backs the paper) or the promissory note (the individual backs it) because it serves as a contract. Government, especially a government bank (Federal Reserve, Bank of England, etc) is suspect because it’s a public-sector contract with an entity they inherently distrust – and a government bank not adhering to a standard (the gold standard is the big one but others are possible) is particularly suspect because the contract value is no longer fixed. Strangely, though, they seem to have no problem accepting huge values in that paper “fiat currency” for physical items like gold or real estate; it’s only the converse (the requirement of mountains of paper bills, or their equivalent) that they seem to have issues with – particularly when that “fiat currency” is used to fund things they don’t like (minimum wage, unemployment benefits, etc).
Richard MAyhew
@NonyNony:
Agreed completely, the point of sports at age 5/6/7/8 is three things:
1) Enjoyment
2) Lots of moving
3) Get the kids much more tired at the end of the game/practice so Mom and Dad have a better chance of winning the race to exhaustion that night.
Anything after that is a bonus, and realistically from a player development point of view in soccer at least, there can be really bad habits ingrained in reasonably atheletic kids at age 5-6-7-8 that lead to lots of goals at age 5-6-7-8 due to superior atheletic ability and piss poor play once puberty hits and the atheletic gap shrinks considerably.
As a ref who has seen way too much piss poor tactical soccer, I would be tempted to tell most recreational leagues that scores should not be kept until U-13/U14 as linear kick and run dominates bad soccer — however once a kick and run team plays a team with a reasonably speedy center back who can read play and a team that can play possession to create massive imbalances on the field, they lose 10-2.
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
Don’t disagree with you just was thinking of much smaller societies. With a reduction in size a society can agree on constant values for what would be barter items, chickens for example. Once any appreciable size of society is reached there must be a currency system (among a bunch of other systems) with a set rather than agreed upon value. Otherwise all the time is spent arguing about crap which is fixable and livable, not that we don’t still do that.
What gets me about libertarians/conservatives is not that they don’t like government, it’s that they don’t like a government in which they feel that someone other than themselves has a say. They don’t actually hate society, they just want it to be small enough, like their personal church, so that control is not relinquished. Currency falls under that as well, if they have more than enough then they feel that they have control over things and people. If the government has too much then they have lost control. If women have authority over their bodies, they have lost control. It really is about power and it’s abuse.
Chris T.
@Hunter: What?! Next thing you know, you’ll be claiming that “WE the PEOPLE [might like to] PROMOTE the GENERAL WELFARE” or something!
Chris T.
@gelfling545: Nah, that’s just in the preamble. Who cares what they intended, right?
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: Agreed. And don’t forget to add in the extreme naiveté over the behaviors of commercial enterprises: businesses exert strong influence over public policy, mislead their customers, abuse their employees, pollute, waste, and in general behave like amoral children unless regulated. The power of a single consumer’s wallet pales in comparison with the deep pockets of the corporation. Sole proprietorships tend to far less irresponsibility, and form the ideal libertarian business model – which they project onto the corporate space and refuse to reconsider.
ETA: the smaller model you had in mind is the exact size of the Libertarian Universe. Which is of course part of the problem with Libertarianism: it doesn’t stretch far, and certainly doesn’t stretch to a nation of tens of millions or a planet of billions. There’s no way to make the micro interactions that work in Libertarian models practical in the macro.
john fremont
@Petorado: My gosh, the Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventist, Baptists, Jews, and Catholics have all run hospitals throughout the US for decades. How much more do they have to step up?
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
Has to be a pretty small society so that those micro interactions don’t create some/too much friction. Of course in a situation of even more than 40-50 people there are just too many assholes to make that work. You don’t need thousands or millions to need a macro based society.
Ruckus
@john fremont:
They didn’t run those hospitals on good will and the collection plate, charity dinners or car washes. Many of them did however impose their religion on those paying for the medical services.
RaflW
Sorry, late to the party but this jem popped out to me: “it’s time for churches to step up”
Uh huh. Are these the churches that are in continuous decline in the 21st century? Have these Republicans looked at church finances lately? Not as bad as the US House, but there isn’t exactly surplus cash laying about for getting the poors on insurance.
Misterpuff
@Chris T.: Yes, but to Republicans The General Welfare is The Gross National Product.