[greater-than-the-sword]

If you’re leaning toward supporting socialized health care, please listen to this.

The scary thing about socialized health care is not the idea of “free health care for all”, which is of course quite a nice idea on the surface. The scary thing, the thing that should absolutely terrify you, is not being able to buy health care.

This is a nightmare that millions of people in countries with socialized health care have to deal with today.

Of course, if you are healthy and you do not need to buy health care, it is not so bad. But the socialized health care system such as in the UK intrinsically is such that you cannot buy health care.

You may be thinking “well, why should health care be treated as a commodity? It’s not fair to distribute it based merely on who has money.”

That would be true in a situation where resources are truly capped and limited and owned by a central distributor. However, health care in real life is not zero sum. If a rich person buys health care they are not directly taking away from a poor person’s health care.

Example under socialism:

Hospital: we only ordered 500 bandaids but we have 600 people injured. Time to do a triage and see who needs the bandaids most. The other 100 people will have to go without.

Example under capitalism:

Manufacturer: oh gee we have 600 bandaid orders but have only produced 500. Better make another 100 band-aids.

If a rich person pays millions for a medical procedure, it does not directly take away doctors from the poor- it’s an incentive for more people to become doctors.

Here’s an example of some things that you can’t buy under the socialist triage system:

bone broke and healed wrong? It can’t be reset sorry. Need unusual potentially life-saving expensive care? That money could be split to serve two other people. What, you have your own money? We don’t accept that. How dare you treat health care as a commodity. Need slightly nonstandard care that the system doesn’t offer? Forget about it. Want a hip replacement? Why spend money on your quality of life when we have people who might die? (Although you can also be killed for poor quality of life, because the money to keep you alive might be better spent on someone who could have a good quality of life.) And you can forget about risky investment in new medical procedures.

Most importantly though, in a socialized health care system, people are a net drag on the system. The more people in it, the more that is taken away from it. It’s financially advantageous for a socialized health care system to ignore people’s illness in order to conserve its limited resources. The fundamental difference is that in socialism resources are seen as limited whereas in capitalism resources are seen as potentially unlimited.

[slytherin-and-stardust]

As someone living in the UK and currently dealing with a chronic health condition CAUSED by this triage system, I can completely agree. 

When I was thirteen years old, I stated getting horrendous stomach pains. My period got heavier and within a year, I wad bleeding for six months with no breaks. 

I first went to the doctor when I was thirteen, and without even toughing my stomach they told me that it was just IBS and sent me away with a diet suggestion and orders to come back in a month. When we went back to my clinic, there was a different doctor. 

Five doctors later and I was very, very sick. Barely able to get out of bed and with several “diagnoses” that nobody was willing to confirm because my issues were seemingly related to my reproductive system and the NHS gynaecologists wouldn’t treat someone under sixteen, we ended up still going to a private healthcare specialist. 

At the beginning of 2020, I had an operation that revealed that, at thirteen, I’d had appendicitis -- which, if they’s touched me, my GP at the time would have felt. The infection went down, but not before it had moved all of my organs out of place. My periods got heavier because my bladder was crushing my uterus, and one of my ovaries had become twisted around my intestine and the fallopian tube on that side had been destroyed. 

This will change many thing for me over the course of my life. Its unlikely that I will have my own children, and there are many foods I cannot eat and exercises I cannot do. 

Under a capitalist system, this may not have happened. All I know is that under our socialised healthcare system here, I was one young person in an overcrowded waiting room, and the rules and regulations of our healthcare system have cost me for the rest of my life. 

I wasn’t a teenage girl, I was a statistic. 

[ms-demeanor]

My mom was a fourth grade teacher, which meant that she did multi-subject education. And she used to do what she called the NFL Project. The NFL Project was when students were randomly assigned NFL teams.

They had to write a letter to the NFL team they were assigned to, they had to do a research project to find out where the teams practiced, they had to write a letter to the mayor of the city the teams practiced in, they had to keep track of their team's statistics, they had to do research about the state history of the team they'd been assigned to, and they had to do a presentation.

It was a big project. She provided all the materials, she made sure there were copies of the newspaper sports section in her classroom so the kids could stay on top of stats. The students got this project in their first week at school and it wrapped up right around winter break, so it wasn't like it was an all-day "today we are doing statistics" thing or "today we do research, today we write a letter, today we make a presentation" one-week project, it was five to ten minutes a day in various subjects that got organized into a presentation at the end of the semester. The kids could work together, they could work independently, they could ask my mom or the librarian or their parents or their older siblings for help. They just had to end the semester with a report on the team's history, the stats for the season organized into a chart, copies of the letters they'd sent (and copies of any of the responses they'd gotten), a two-page social studies report on the state where the team played, and a presentation to the class about their favorite thing they had learned while doing the NFL project.

The kids fucking loved it. And for years I spent my winter break going to the classroom and organizing the bulletin board with a huge map of the US and materials from each student's report, showing the work that the students had done that semester. It was a way of getting kids engaged with classwork, because who cares about statistics at 10, probably nobody, but if you get a set of pencils from the Jets NOW you want to learn about the team. The Jaguars sent one kid a jersey one year. The city in Minnesota where the Vikings practice sent postcards for every student. Part of this was happening when Schwarzenegger was governor in California so one kid got the Terminator's autograph for part of his project.

I think maybe the thing that I admire the most about it in retrospect was the way that it taught actual project management to young students. I don't actually know of that many schools that have projects more than a month long for 10-year-olds, and I think it's a great concept. I didn't get something like that until I was a senior in college, and it would have been a great skill to learn younger.

Anyway, in 2006 my mom had to stop doing the NFL project because the district wanted to focus on raising their test scores. She was specifically told that if she kept doing the NFL project she would not be rehired at her school.

She even wrote up what standards each part of the project worked toward - the kids had to make graphs because "organizing information into a bar graph" was a specific standard for students that age. "Writing multiple paragraphs on the same subject" was a standard, which is why the letters to the cities and states were multi-paragraph. The project WAS standards based.

But the administrators wanted to make sure that the students had more practice with reading the kinds of questions that would be on the tests because most of the student body spoke Spanish at home.

My mom taught at that school for another ten years; the school's test scores never showed any marked improvement with test-based lesson plans.

My mom's project wasn't the only thing like that that got cancelled. There was another teacher who had a craft-based thing that was similar, and a 7th-grade teacher who did a kind of history/social studies Magic Schoolbus LARP thing who was told not to do that anymore. Eventually my mom was told to stop having her students write journals for ten minutes a day because it wasn't being taught from the textbook and wasn't being taught to the test.

People joke (haha, it's funny, it's a joke, right?) about American education being used to prepare students to be good employees instead of to be critical thinkers or independent people, but legitimately it seems like NCLB directly incentivized "students sit quietly in a box filling out bubble sheets and have no unsupervised or creative work time."

[arizonaconservativegal]

Did...did you seriously not see all evidence, including on live TV, that the Cali recall was rigged before it even got started?? I know you have chosen to ignore the mountains of evidence of foul play during the 2020 election but c'mon, the election engineering that just went on in Cali was even more blatant than the Biden & co. coup. It takes some serious delusion to continue to ignore what's right in front of you and insist that 'we'll just vote 'em out next time gaiz, it'll work I swear!'. You're not going to vote these people out because the elections are being rigged in extremely obvious ways, but I guess you can continue to mislead people with false hope and naivety. Just don't be surprised when you continue to lose elections to insane sociopaths hellbent on destroying the country. At least you played fair, I guess. 🤷‍♀️

Oh yeah, sure, a Democrat won in a state that is D+14. Clearly the only explanation is that they cheated.

[collegeconservatarian]

this whole ""fraud"" scam drives me crazy because it's clearly a narrative designed to deflect responsibility for losing away from the unpopularity of candidates and their poor messaging towards a nebulous non-falsifiable claim that only serves to discourage conservative voter turnout

the gop could win a lot more elections if they focused on the more popular parts of their platform and stopped demanding complete agreement with trump

[westindianheaux]

ppl will defend this nihilistic and depressive world view to the ends of the earth but some of yall need to check yourself before all this negativity worsens your clinical depression. there’s too much hopelessness on the internet and all of those messages are really toxic. especially fixating on things that you cannot change in the immediate moment. take a break… sniff a flower… tell your friend she looks beautiful… not everything is about the end of the world or how hopeless our survival is as a species.

[pro-birth]

Amazing New Science Finds Thousands Of Tiny Preemies Can Survive

The U.S. treatment protocol for 22- and 23-week newborns must be grounded in the latest science and in clinical judgment for each unique cir

Awesome news! I’ve been seeing more cases of 22-23 seekers surviving and it’s a blessing to see why.

[apenitentialprayer]

How can you seem so smart and then say things that are so stupid?

It’s my special talent. :)

[oracleoutlook]

Honestly, if this is about the electoral college thing, then you haven’t said anything stupid at all.  The electoral college debate is much more complicated than anyone is willing to admit. 

America is actually pretty evenly divided between Urban, Suburban, Exurban, and Rural.  Each bracket has about 25% of the population.  40-50% of Americans live in low population density areas.  California has one of the largest rural populations with about 3 million Californians living in rural areas.  These people’s voices would be pretty much ignored if it were not for the rural states getting disproportionate representation.

Of course, the representation they are getting is more analogous than direct.  The needs of a Californian farmer are probably different than the needs of an Iowan farmer.  So it’s still not a good system, but it’s not quite as bad as some people think. 

Another thing to consider is that, as someone who lives in an urban area, I would really like the people who grow my food, manufacture my clothes, etc, to have their voices heard.  I do not want them to have to struggle over water rights and face difficulties with getting their basic needs met.  I want them to feel like they are valued by the country.  Even if there are fewer of them.  Even if on paper the things they produce are not as valuable as self-driving cars or Amazon Web Services.  Even if their opinions are different than mine.  I value what they bring to the table more than the raw math figures.

There needs to be a lot more subsidiarity and problems that can be addressed at the local level need to be addressed at the local level, not by the federal government. There also needs to be better representation.  If every state adopted the method Maine is using this year, we’d all be better off.  Each congressional district elects their own elector through ranked choice, and then the extra two electors go to the candidate with the most votes state wide. 

The United States federal government was set up to be conservative, generally speaking.  It was supposed to be very hard to make laws that affect everyone in every state without near-unanimous agreement.  Whether this system is effective in the modern day is beside the point.  Our gridlock is an intended feature, not a bug. 

[women-choose-life]

I’ve just reached a slightly bothersome conclusion, but it does have a hopeful solution. One point that I have made against abortion is that women are told this is the “solution” to finding themselves pregnant when they are too poor to afford raising a child. The response to this is that the woman is still poor after the abortion, and instead of ignoring the actual problem which is not the baby but the lack of resources, we should try to solve the problem by helping the woman to become financially stable. One question related to this that I have struggled with is at what point another person can tell a woman that she is unfit to raise her own child (whether because of wealth or maybe a drug problem; obviously, a child should be removed from a situation if they are being abused, but other than that, I think the solution is to help the mother, not take away the chid.) Which brings me to my realization. Notice that not only am I saying abortion is not a solution but neither is taking the child from the mother by any means. Which means that this point of the child not being the problem, therefore abortion not being the solution, also applies in SOME cases to adoption. While abortion should certainly never be used as a “solution”, I think that adoption should always be a last resort. I see foster care as different from adoption (and it is, do your research), because it only puts the child in temporary care until the real problem (whatever is preventing the mother from caring for her child) is solved.

As someone who is pro-life, rather than pushing this adoption agenda over and over as the best or first alternative to abortion, we should be straight up helping these women directly to be able to care for their own children.

[prolifeproliberty]

I think a lot of pro-lifers tend to assume that women have abortions because they don’t want their baby. That may be true in some cases, but the vast majority do so because of financial problems or pressure from family, friends, or the father of the baby.

In those cases, adoption is not the answer. Building that woman a support network is.

Now, there are certainly cases where women become pregnant and decide they want to choose adoption, and we should absolutely support them in that decision. But we should never push it as the default alternative to abortion.

It’s a mindset shift for pro-life people. We need to get out of our own heads and really listen to abortion-minded women and understand what is driving them to that abortion facility. It’s usually not whether they want a baby; it’s about whether they believe they can raise this baby right now.

Also I think part of it is that we are so saddened by abortion that we look for the quickest and most direct way to save that child, and many have concluded that offering to adopt the child is the answer. You’ll see people outside abortion facilities with signs saying things like “We’ll adopt your baby!”

The problem there is that it isn’t really offering her anything different from what the abortion facility offers. Both the abortion industry and the pro-life movement are telling her she can’t raise her baby, so no matter what she does she’s going to lose that child (at least, that’s what she perceives). In her mind, the choice is now carry the child for several more months, give birth, and then lose her baby, or have the abortion now and get it over with.

We as pro-lifers need to do three things:

1. Highlight our resources for moms who want to raise their babies - healthcare, food support, housing support, childcare, etc.

2. Highlight the stories of moms who courageously chose parenting in difficult circumstances and received support from their community.

3. Better educate the public on the different types of adoption, including open adoption, so that moms who are considering adoption know it doesn’t necessarily mean losing their baby. They especially need to know their rights as birthmothers.

[smol-catholic-bean]

Oh… This is… This is good… Damn. Both of you made some really good points here. Everyone in the pro life movement should read this.

[twitblr]

Helping others is strongly discouraged

[urbanfantasyinspiration]

Fucking bureaucrats

[prolifeproliberty]

Government is not your friend.

[prolifeproliberty]

4th of July PSA

Independence Day is not about celebrating the government, nor is it about ignoring the serious problems in our country. It’s about celebrating a country built on the idea that it can be made better when the people step up and advocate for themselves, take personal responsibility, and value freedom over convenience or the appearance of safety. 

So like I’ve done the last few years, I have posts queued every hour for the full 24 hours of Independence Day. These posts are about celebrating what America can be, even if it’s got a long way to go. 

[bellygangstaboo]

Reblog if you agree.

[birbman-sasori]

I agree

[dashaibo]

Sure, but also

[ad-hominem-sappies-deactivated2]

Ahhhh beauty.

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

water is a human right. water should be free, at all times, no conditions. all cities should provide public access to free and clean drinking water, toilets, showers, sinks, and soap.

[fonchi262]

We did this in Venezuela.

Now the water tastes like mud and rust, and comes once a month for a few hours, at least in Maracaibo, where we were forced to buy water tankers to fill our water tanks that can only be paid in American dollars.

Water IS essential to life, but the money you pay is to keep up the infrastructure needed to treat and distribute it. 

[fonchi262]

Same with electricity, we made it free too, and that’s why country-wide blackouts are common, when it rains transformes start to explode left and right, they also randomly explode because there’s zero maintenance to them, and once they do, the neighborhood has to join up and pony up the cash so the state-run electric company can come and fix it/change it under the rug, as otherwise the waiting times for “emergency repairs” can take up to six months.

[ilearnedtoblossom]

The gun epidemic in America is really, really, really scaring me. So in honor of pride month, I suggest that the LGBTQIA community start rubbing our gay little hands all over gun culture. If we ‘ruined marriage’ for them, maybe we could ruin guns for them too??? Like after gun nuts accepted that even children dying wouldn’t make them change, Idk what else could possibly ever.

[your-raifu-is-shit]

Ask me how I know you’ve never interacted with a single gun owner in your entire life.

[goulashnikov-concern]

[thegodofneon]

[tontonmichel-deactivated2022021]

[whitepeopletwitter]

[mojave-pete]

George Floyd had ‘violent criminal history’: Minneapolis police union chief

The head of the Minneapolis police union says George Floyd’s “violent criminal history” needs to be remembered and that the protests over his death are the work of a “terror…

Floyd had landed five years behind bars in 2009 for an assault and robbery two years earlier, and before that, had been convicted of charges ranging from theft with a firearm to drugs ….

[hanksartin-72]

Well what do ya know?

[real-octoroon-hours]

so…. capital punishment without trial because he had a prior record?

[mr-downer]

And the bastard who killed him had numerous complaints filed against over 13 years of being a cop including official letters of reprimand.

But no Floyd did a bad thing a decade ago and despite cleaning his life up after it he must be demonized by the media to justify his death. Fuckin bootlickers man.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[sirobvious]

This violates the 1st Amendment

[prolifeproliberty]

Governments do this right before flagrant abuses of human rights.

It’s a “nothing to see here, move along.”

Demand transparency.

[history-and-stuff-and-things]

Happy 30th anniversary of when nothing happened