This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “One of the arguments against universal health coverage in America is that we are giving poor people something for nothing. So how are European countries able to avoid this while offering universal health coverage?”
They don’t avoid that, but those who argue against universal healthcare are more fixated on hating the poor than they are on understanding how “giving the poor something for nothing” results in superior healthcare at half the cost for themselves.
The cost-based mentality is surprisingly dumb when they can’t comprehend how much they can save when considering expenditures as investments rather than losses.
It is precisely this thinking that Donald Trump has been leveraging to send the nation into a recession.
Conservative thinking tends to be so very short-sighted that when they claim to be fiscally responsible, all they’re doing is showing the world they’re incapable of stimulating growth.
Conservative thinking about healthcare epitomizes their fiscal incompetence.
Fiscal issues are entirely based on a revenue versus costs model, but conservatives seem capable of understanding only one column on their balance sheet.
The capacity for creativity is why liberals excel in the revenue generation side of the balance sheet. Conservatives could learn some valuable lessons about fiscal competence from liberals if they weren’t so close-minded and filled with hateful bigotry.
Caring for the poor is how we bring out the best for everyone at the lowest cost.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What do you think of the Justice Department planning to clear homeless camps and involuntarily hospitalize the mentally ill on the streets?”
This sounds very much like a typical MAGAt CONservative brain child. It’s precisely what Pierre Poilievre suggests as a solution for Canadian tent cities.
Poilievre promises to let police break up tent cities, arrest occupants
It’s precisely the mindset of MAGAt CONservatives everywhere:
The irony in this thinking is so dense it generates a gravitational field.
“To fix a government failure, we’ll sweep it out of sight so that you don’t have to be visually confronted by government failure. You can wait until it escalates into increasing crime waves that we can use to leverage your fear and elect us to solve the problem we created.”
It is precisely this mindset that births abominations like hostile architecture.
It’s always the same heavy hand that creates problems to give them excuses to indulge in their misanthropic treatment of the vulnerable people they victimize into early graves.
No example of this kind of monstrous thinking is an attempt to solve a problem. It’s an excuse to get off on perverted Machiavellian desires.
If they could legalize fights to the death among the homeless, they would.
If they could legally implement a Squid Game television show, they would.
Within the misanthropically short-sighted mindset of reactive thinking that MAGAt CONservatives wallow in, the idea is to pretend to solve a non-problem by punishing the victims of systemic problems they create, creating the non-problem.
I am deliberately describing tent cities as a “non-problem” because they’re not the problem, but a symptom of the problem.
To solve problems, one must look to their causes and address those issues before the symptoms of those problems can ever be addressed.
It’s like affixing a bandage on an open wound while expecting to stem the internal bleeding of a patient.
Making matters even more surreal in the incompetence driving these problems is how the MAGAt CONservative mindset fixates on scapegoats that are part of a comprehensive solution, the non-problems they create with their short-sighted and misanthropic thinking.
In this case, PP blames the “lax liberal drug laws” while completely ignoring how their draconian attitudes toward drugs in society have resulted in an entire host of expensive and socially destructive problems, including punishing the victims of horrible policy while creating an underground growth network for criminal enterprises.
One would think decades of failure in an old problem created by the same thinking which made the same criminal incentivizing problems with alcohol bootlegging about 100 years ago would result in some lightbulbs going off within the dimmest of minds. Still, they seem completely inured against learning from their mistakes.
The kind of self-destructive stupidity that CONservatives perpetually indulge in is like a never-ending nightmare of a Groundhog Day repetition.
The MAGAt flavour of CONservatives wonder why their opposition thinks of them as stupid, and they never stop to look in the mirror and ask themselves why they choose reactionary and destructive approaches toward problems in society. It’s not like the information is unavailable or that educating oneself on issues is impossible. They can’t work through their biases to question their logic.
The mentally ill on the streets has been a problem created by CONservatives to begin with, when Reagan shut down institutions and forced them onto the streets. The homeless issue has grown because people who work full-time can no longer afford to house themselves. At the same time, the billionaire class buys up residential property and inflates prices as their government lackeys continue to refuse to raise minimum wage.
Then they whine that reduced birth rates are an existential threat without putting two and two together to realize they created that dynamic with their misanthropic policies.
The self-destructive stupidity is beyond mind-boggling.
MAGAt CONservatives don’t seem to care about solving problems as much as they prefer to focus on destroying the most vulnerable humans on the planet. Ironically, they often cite how much more money Conservatives donate to charities as they indulge in the same overcompensating behaviours that criminals indulge in when they create laws to ban gay marriages or abortions.
The CONservative mindset seems far more driven by hatred of one’s fellow humans than by working together to build a better society for all.
One day, we might be lucky enough to realize that the mentally ill are not those coping with life on the streets, but are those who walk among us, spreading hatred and voting to destroy lives, only to find the consequences mean destroying their lives as well.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do you deal with a family member who believes everything that Fox News says?”
I remember as a kid how futile it was to explain to my parents that wrestling on television was fake.
They would point to the blood they saw and use it to prove it was real.
It didn’t matter in the least what was said to them or what was pointed out as an obvious ploy or staged athletic move; they refused to acknowledge the truth of the fraud the rest of us kids saw in the wrestling performance.
Making matters more convincing that it wasn’t an argument worth pursuing was how their agitation quickly escalated into anger if we persisted past the point of their capacity for maintaining patience with their annoying children. We learned that once we detected visible signs of anger, it wasn’t worth the effort to push them any further. By that point, the conversation had escalated into a frightening experience.
We eventually gave up and decided there was no harm in letting them believe whatever they wanted to believe.
Fox is an entirely different matter because its effect on their audience has contributed to a nightmare affecting the world.
I suggest one does not bother addressing the issue with one’s family because even if one succeeds in helping them accept reason, that victory has little impact on the severity of the problem Fox poses in society.
Addressing Fox as a threat to national stability and security is essential. There could be several approaches to addressing this problem, and one of them could be an aggregated accounting of behaviors exhibited by Fox adherents, collected by family members to construct a compelling argument for affecting legal change and influencing the media as a whole for the benefit of society.
My view on news media in society is that there is no justification for consolidated enterprises serving a profit motive. The Fourth Estate is a critically important entity within a democratic society that must be capable of earning and maintaining the public trust. That is impossible when their mandate is to serve the billionaires who are the existential threat to our democracies that we now face.
Let us take a page from the peer review process applied within the scientific community, ensuring integrity throughout the science discipline and the scientific community.
Matching the scientific community’s level of granularity in self-policing is as simple as breaking up large news media enterprises into community-based and locally-owned operations.
The more numerous the entities that represent the Fourth Estate, the more able they can become in ensuring the public is well served with a diversity of perspectives that can achieve a far more objective delivery of information than is possible through the lens of a billionaire who controls the dissemination of information with a self-serving agenda.
Funding for individual operations could be coordinated through a crown corporation that provides administrative services, such as an access point for advertising and a payment system modeled on existing systems, like Medium, where payments are distributed based on readership and engagement. Graduated access levels could be permitted, and stories can be assessed on a scale of widespread need for distribution versus content catering to niche markets. Public and subscription-based funding could support a system for disseminating critical information to broader audiences, ensuring everyone can access news crucial to their lives.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think that the editorial integrity and independence of the Washington post has been compromised by the current owner, Jeff Bezos?”
Billionaires have compromised all news media. The Fourth Estate has long been corrupted and serves its primary function of informing the public only tangentially. Their mandate has been perverted by a profit-driven mentality that prioritizes the interests of capitalist owners over ensuring the public is aware of and informed about issues that can dramatically affect their lives.
This has been a long and slippery slope of degradation begun by Ronald Reagan’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and then the installation of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network.
Meanwhile, the American public participated in the destruction of its lifeline to crucial knowledge by choosing entertainment via rage porn than any objective analysis of issues that would help them make the best decisions for themselves and the nation.
Had this corruption not become so complete as to allow Fox to continue publicly referring to itself as a news organization while declaring themselves an entertainment organization in the courts, Donald Trump would not now be wreaking havoc on the nation.
The problem has been that the changes have been subtle and incremental over time, on such a level that the public merely shrugs its shoulders while remaining blissfully unaware of the long-term implications of allowing their lifeline to knowledge to become so polluted with noise.
Here’s an example of a non-issue that should have pissed off the public enough to be radically vocal but it was just another day and another shrug of the people’s collective shoulders while a significant proportion of the population has been so condition by this degradation that they see nothing fundamentally wrong with it in the same way that a Stockholm Syndrome sufferer sees nothing wrong with their abuser’s abusive behaviour.
Along with all the other numerous acts of restoration required for the nation, what needs to happen is the breaking up of big media into community-based and locally owned enterprises that can collectively function like the scientific community’s peer review system to ensure integrity is restored to the Fourth Estate.
We have cultivated it by allowing our societies to grow into corrupt monstrosities that people have no choice but to struggle to survive within.
We have placed a physical resource like money at the top of our values and have dehumanized people every step of the way. At the same time, we convert human beings into disposable commodities.
We are dehumanizing ourselves at every level by endorsing a system that devalues the ineffable qualities of humanity because they are not viewed as profitable by industry. Instead, we have ways of further dehumanizing people by leveraging their despair against them with global institutions that dictate dogma to follow without question.
Everything has become reduced to a competition for tentative comforts that bear no intrinsic value or meaning beyond serving the immediate gratification of shallow desires.
None of this contributes toward the growth of those qualities of humanity that we value. None of this brings us together as people in common cause for the betterment of all. Everything is catered toward the propulsion of individuals we stratify with blind worship.
When we replace human qualities we cherish with an avatar, like money as a metric for determining their value, we become divorced from our humanity.
While living in a world that views wealth as an indicator of all positive human qualities, people inevitably start to develop disparaging views toward their neighbours because everyone has been left fighting over the same scarce resources that are left behind by the plutocrats dehumanizing all of us with a system they parasitically siphon of wealth at our expense.
We can only live so long with oppressive conditions before the effects grow out of control and well into making our environments breeding grounds for chaos.
Misanthropy is just an early stage of widespread systemic collapse.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Should we conclude that the only way America can be first is by making everyone else weaker and second including American citizens?”
If that’s considered a valid conclusion, it is derived from a mindset that fails to comprehend how strength arises from unity, not division. Such a conclusion is a recipe for weakening all parties, especially the U.S.
I would argue that it is this insular and protectionist mindset that has produced a Trump presidency that will end U.S. dominance as a global power.
The best way to think about this is to remember Clinton’s words: “The world is more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”
Playing at being the toughest on the block in a childish King of the Hill game is an invitation to be knocked off one’s throne — and that’s precisely what Putin will leave behind as his legacy when he gets “retired” by one of his insiders.
Since the U.S. wants to be viewed as worthy of leadership, it faces the daunting task of making up for severely grievous misjudgments. Electing Trump for a second term is merely the final straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
The U.S. still needs to put Bush and Cheney in front of an international tribunal to face war crimes.
That’s how far off the mark this question is.
You are in for seriously rough times ahead, and it would be easy to write you off to face your self-fulfilling prophecies alone. Still, you’re going to disrupt the entire world’s economy during your downfall, and that truly sucks big time.
The consequences of being a global leader mean having to live up to being a leader, and you’ve just proven to the world that was utter horseshit… utterly dangerous horseshit.
Your days as a global power are numbered. You’re going to become the United Kingdom for the next century. You may as well start practicing your “sorries” now.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why is the label “socialism” often viewed negatively when discussing progressive policies? Is there a significant difference between socialism and liberalism?”
Socialism and liberalism are distinct ideologies with no practical connection between them.
Liberalism is built on three fundamental societal values: Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. These values inspire and guide liberal minds in supporting greater degrees of social justice in a broadly unjust world.
Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. Socialism essentially strips plutocrats of their wealth and forces an entitled class of people to live alongside as equals to the people they prefer to benefit from their exploitation.
These two disparate concepts are often conflated as part of a centuries-long class war waged by society’s plutocrats against the proletariat (the working class) while employing the bourgeoisie (capitalists) as their armies of oppression.
Every movement toward social justice is met by resistance to the entitled classes in society who possess the leverage of despair against the working class to enrich themselves while impoverishing the weakest among us.
Every movement toward social justice is a strip of power taken from the entitled classes to enable the weakest among us to survive and prosper without suffering a dehumanizing indignity imposed upon them by the wealthy classes.
For the working class to fight for and win weekends off from labour is a cost to the wealthy class that they deeply resent and respond to with strategies to strip further dignities from the working class.
Their deep resentment toward increasing social justice and decreasing power over the working class has been deeply embedded into their psyches due to historical events like the Russian Revolution of 1917. A monarchy was violently abolished through two successive revolutions and a civil war, which spread a sentiment of hatred for the ruling class in society across the globe to inspire a similar German Revolution of 1918.
The nightmare of breadlines persists to this day and has been used as a weapon of ideas against another uprising by the working class.
The plutocrats of today have learned to do whatever they can to insulate themselves from another violent uprising that would result in them losing their wealth and power to angry mobs of desperate working-class citizens.
They have invested billions over the decades to have people automatically associate socialism and communism with extreme poverty and extreme oppression. Their efforts have been supremely successful to the degree that the poorest in society today will fight to protect plutocrat wealth at the expense of their well-being.
Here’s an example of a random right-wing website, their fearmongering messaging and how successful the plutocrats have been in conditioning the working class to defend what they view as the saviours of humanity they refer to as “job creators.”
(Please do take a moment to “bask” in the sheer hatred they have cultivated within their loyal lemmings toward any form of social justice for society. These are the slugs in society who beg for a salt bath… and are deeply committed to taking all the rest of us with them on a trip to human oblivion.)
We can see the cancerous attitude as a caricature of humanity within the American political system as a corrupt plutocrat who has become a convicted felon can still campaign for president. In contrast, every other convicted felon is stripped of their right to vote while they rot in prison.
The plutocrats in society have been quietly waging their class warfare for centuries; before, they were plutocrats and considered a monarchy that assumed power over the little people through physical warfare.
They have persisted for over 100 years in a steady and patient strategy of protecting their wealth and power through every influential channel they can.
Look through this resource to see how the plutocrat class influences legislation creation through a group called the “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC). This association has been responsible for literally writing the laws that are implemented verbatim to benefit themselves at the expense of the public good… and this is only the tip of the iceberg for their machinations:
Most hide their money behind organizations like Blackstone Inc., which bills itself as an “alternative investment management firm” and dumps millions into SuperPAC to fund the campaigns of politicians who will support their wealth acquisition strategies at the expense of the working class and the constituents who vote for them.
These are highly paid grifters whose job is to scam hundreds of millions of people out of the value of their labours, and they have succeeded to the tune of over $50 trillion from the middle class in the last few decades alone.
They have successfully converted a system of empowering the most vulnerable among us into a system of oppressing the most vulnerable among us.
They have invested billions in their war while reducing the costs of waging it to a small tax.
Their coup de grâce has been the outright purchase of the highest court in the land, seeking to convert the world into a facsimile of a medieval state with a two-class system of rulers and serfs.
Ironically, they have succeeded so well in entrenching their power to repeat the historic levels of income inequality threatening global stability one hundred years ago that we are on the verge of repeating the same tragedies.
It’s been easy to blame the motivations for all their socially destructive activities on simple greed, but the sheer irrationality of their behaviours transcends greed. It is a self-destructive behaviour that has abandoned rationality.
All of which is intended to prohibit these kinds of social justice goals for the working class:
The minimal costs of a social safety net don’t justify the extremes of greed they’ve been displaying. The only explanation for their extreme behaviour, which resembles the trajectory of an addict, is that they have been deeply scarred by history.
The revolutions of the little people throughout history have scarred them deeply, and that explains why they have invested so much into the optics of language to cause the public to viscerally reject a concept like socialism without bothering to consider aspects of the concept that can and are beneficial to society.
No one blinks about socialism when it involves public money spent on the military because security is more important to many, particularly among those who loudly and repeatedly profess their love of freedom the most.
The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that, as captains of industry and leaders in society, one would hope they would be astute enough to avoid making manifest that which they fear so much… yet, this is the state of affairs today:
Pushing people to extremes of desperation makes it seem like they’re begging for the pikes and guillotines to come out and repeat history.
They can see the escalations occurring throughout the globe. Instead of taking action to avert catastrophe, they invest in secure bunkers to save their asses from the conflagration while hoping their billions will be worth something when the entire world’s economy collapses.
For a group of people who are generally viewed as more intelligent than the masses, they seem to wallow in more profound stupidity than the under-educated people they love to manipulate while convincing themselves of their superiority.
The environmental nightmare they are inviting into our world is rapidly approaching a tipping point in which there will be no return to stability without a dramatic shifting of power throughout the globe. Yet, no inkling of this impending catastrophe seems to grace their awareness. It’s as if they’re watching a massive iceberg drifting toward them, and they’re more fascinated by its structure than what it will do when it strikes.
Why does morality exist independently of human opinion?
This post is a response to the question posted on Quora as written above.
Morality IS “human opinion.”
Many differences exist between opinions on morality and on practically everything else people have opinions on — which makes opinions on morality somewhat unique in how they are perceived.
People generally do not equate a moral opinion on murder, for example, with an opinion on a fashion accessory.
Part of the problem is that it is the cultivated opinions of religious folk to believe morality is an objectively established standard of conduct determined by an invisible authority. If the claim of objective jurisdiction to develop and institute a moral framework existed, morality would essentially be identical and unchanging over time. That’s not the case for anyone who has made even a tiny effort to understand people or human history.
The most significant problem with establishing a universal acceptance of a moral opinion is that no one ever receives direct confirmation from an unassailable authority governing judgment over any specific behaviour. Complicating matters further are the subjectively supported morals of believers who do not share a consistent moral framework — even though religious institutions do their best to homogenize morality among their flocks.
Institutions that once endorsed slavery and have moved on to repudiating it cannot, without justified criticisms, claim to receive their moral framework from an omniscient entity.
This and all the many other changes made to institutional policies regarding morality throughout the centuries have eroded religious claims of authority in moral matters. Making things worse for them has been allowing their credibility to be assaulted by many heinous scandals, such as the institutional endorsements for victimizing countless children through sexual predation and murder and the subsequent protections of institutional leaders guilty of immoral actions.
We, as a species and as a collection of diverse societies, all governed to some degree by the notion of morality, have undergone a tremendous number of and severity of degree in the assaults on our definitions for what constitutes morality that we are struggling to unify a fractured vision of the concept.
We can no longer trust our authorities, be they religious, political, industrial, or familial, which puts us in a quandary for resolving our moral differences as a species.
The upside is that we are turning inward to identify our internal sources of moral development.
Morality is most simply defined as an extension of empathy, but the issues it encompasses make that an oversimplification. At best, empathy is merely a compass guiding actions that many hope serve to achieve moral outcomes. Some will define morality within a self-serving context, while others consider self-sacrifice an embodiment of morality. Neither is necessary to achieve some form of widely acceptable definition of morality.
We can grasp a history of morality from academia, giving us context and perspective on what we have learned about morality. That approach leads us down deep and convoluted rabbit holes of (arguable) “subclassifications” like ethics, conscience, integrity, standards, and principles. At the same time, simple definitions escape a universal simplicity promised by our examples of failing leadership because morality is itself nuanced, multifaceted, and contextual.
We may never transcend subjectivity within the context of our interpretation of morality, but that’s a feature, not a bug.
Morality as an opinion forces us to share the diversity in our views, and that’s a superior form of morality to any authoritatively imposed dogma because we must each learn to develop our apprehensions of morality to learn how to better succeed in living together under a shared social contract to achieve a peaceful and prosperous co-existence.
We’ve seen enough artificially imposed forms of morality claiming objectivity as an unassailable standard for uniting people to know it’s a fraudulent approach to morality that invariably fails us as much as we fail to adhere to universally defined, generic, and external imperatives.
To accept morality as human opinion puts us in a position to define human character along a spectrum of universally acceptable, unacceptable, and inspiring behaviours that can adapt to an ever-changing landscape.
Morality may be more messy to manage as an opinion. Still, like the principle of a democracy, it’s the only form that can maintain coherence within the context of longevity.
thotbag 