Gah. The wealthy whitey syndrome! It burns!
Is there any way in which libertarianism is different from what used to be called "social darwinism"? Any way at all?
This makes me morose. And I was having so much fun over in the Triscuits and cute shoes thread, too.
I don't understand why people expect their employers to buy them health insurance., meet I'm intelligent (IQ tested at 145 when I was a child, which is 3 standard deviations above the mean -- higher than 99.85% of the population. Even if I've gotten dumber as I've aged I'm probably still at least a 130, which is higher than 97.5% of the population.)
Social darwinists didn't have websites.
Is being one of the three highest-IQ people out of every 100 really that statistically significant? If I was guilted into listening to every dumb health insurance idea that was had by the 12 million Americans who fit that description, I think it would get pretty boring. Whatever happened to specialized knowledge?
Honestly, people, if you have health problems, it probably *is* your own fault. You choose to live, you should be willing to accept the consequences.
Sour grapes, AWB? Tickle.com turn ya down?
8: Like dying in an ambulance bay if you can't pony up for the hospital in an emergency. If the ambulance will even pick you up, that is. Fair is fair, losers.
10: Would you have preferred to read a comment about my own IQ? Mine's really high, as are a lot of people's, but that doesn't mean everyone in the world has to listen to me harangue them about how all the experts on various topics are just misguided. IQ is meaningless, and even someone like JMPP should know it's not a replacement for learning.
10: That's why I carry several hundred dollars in cash on me at all times.
Sorry, 11 to 9, of course. Obviously, I don't even know how to read.
If somebody put R/F/Jason in the hospital, would that count as an unexpected illness or a consequence of unhealthy or dangerous behaviors?
YES, I KNOW...
I BELONGS MENSA
You had the last laugh, AWB. After I googled tickle to see if that was indeed the spam-o-matic IQ site, I ended up getting through 31 IQ test questions before I realized that I had no idea how long the test was or whether it would give me my answers for free.
How bad of a person am I if I kinda wish she'd get a chronic debilitating disease and then dropped from her insurance?
Being smart is a really dumb thing to do.
13: For a second, I thought you were mad at me, AWB. For a single, horrifying second.
19: What a friend I have in Jesus, all my sins and griefs to bear.
Oh, neat. I just clicked over the AWB's joint and looked at the auxiliary verbs link for the first time, and now I a) know why she has a weird name and b) will move Tristram Shandy back to my nightstand for another go.
23: With today's lone success under my belt, I go to bed. Enjoy, and goodnight.
Wait, you didn't check your email!
27: Thanks for the heads-up! Replied.
The LOLcky Horror Picture Show is amusing.
23: Look in her archives for the Tristram Shandy reading notes, which helped me to get further along through the book than I had got on any previous attempt at reading it.
Aw yeah! My insurance company will charge people money, but we will not pay for anything! Especially if you had a stupid accident because you're stupid! It will be called, Quality Insurance! We will not spend the quality money of quality people on your stupid disease. Fatso.
She, Passey, must be running some kind of elaborate joke. Her site can't be anything other than satire, can it?
33: I would have though libertarians were common enough in Britain you'd have run into people dead serious about this. If not, if nobody much expresses these views there, it's interesting to speculate
about why.
They aren't that common here. They exist, and I've met some,* but it's not as widespread as in the US or, more accurately, it doesn't seem as widespread as my impression of how widespread it is in the US.
Passey is like a bad caricature of the worst kind of 'sophomore' libertarian though.
* and like many/most US/internet libertarians they are indeed generally wankers ...
7: Statistically significant for who? From her perspective, she doesn't have to correct for multiple tests. 0.03 looks pretty good, when you've only rolled the dice once. From your perspective, on the other hand...
Also, not to deny that J3P is crazy, but haven't I read Sausegly making at least a similar point at some time? "There's no logical reason why insurance should be tied to your job," etc etc.
Damn me for not being able to find a link right now. Maybe I'm misremembering what he wrote.
34: American libertarians all think they're Kit Carson or Davey Crocket, and fancy themselves as rugged individuals. They believe that if you dropped them in the desert with a box of matches and a sharp stone, they could build a car and a road to drive it out on. It's the frontier spirit!
We also have the left-wing kind of libertarians.
36: There is no logical reason why insurance should be tied to your job, but I doubt if the alternative Yglesias suggested was leaving all the shortsighted, whiny sick people by the side of the road for the privately funded dead carts to pick up.
re: 38
Yes, I'd probably class my own views as vaguely in that area. In that vague libertarian/left/mutualist sort of spectrum anyway. I tend to be wary about describing that viewpoint as 'libertarian' though, just to avoid confusion with the other lot.
re: 37 and the delusional pioneer spirit ...
Yeah, I've never come across one that wouldn't collapse into a snivelling idiot if left to fend for themselves in the circumstances endured daily by the people they decry regularly for not lifting themselves up by their bootstraps.
As much as I disapprove of say anything nice about anyone ever, I have to say comment #8 is pretty fucking funny.
There is no logical reason why [health] insurance should be tied to your job
Indeed. It should be tied to your humanity.
24: It's unseemly for ladies to say "under my belt".
Also, why the fixation with "insurance"? Someone once remarked that insurance is certain to insure one thing - the insurer. Insurance means bureaucracy and administrative cost. What about national health care?
43: Can't you just be happy that she had a success down there, John?
37: But, I sort of am that guy, a kind of super boy scout, constantly making and fixing stuff, enchanted with the romance of survival and diy, yet I've never translated that into any kind of social vision that what I can do everybody ought to be made to do. I wonder whether ttaM's wanker/libertarian affinity holds generally, (as some sort of compensation?) or whether there aren't also plenty of dilusional survivalists too, who are not wankers, who can really do stuff and have general competence, but no sense of social contingency.
Sure, Jackie's ideas about healthcare may not be all that great, but does your name rhyme and scan? I think not.
I had a dream involving Emerson last night. Very un-blog-related. The highlight was his cleverly dodging a succession of miniature, pastel-colored lions who sprang out into the road to waylay our car.
39 -- no no, I understand that M.Y.'s not a complete moron. I'm just sayin'...
Alaska is full of those DIY Libertarians. They really can fix their own cars and hunt bears and build cabins and shit, but they're also major parasites on Uncle Sam. The whole state is like an expensive frontier libertarian petting zoo.
33: There is a frightening proliferation of these hoaxsters.
libertarian petting zoo
Great name for a(n) [album/band/blog].
There is no logical reason why [health] insurance should be tied to your job
This is exactly right: it's the main thing wrong with the U.S. health care system. Of course JPMP draws the wrong conclusion. She is the personification of the Durkheimian problem of how the organic solidarity required by an advanced division of labor creates a cult of the individual. As well as being a nimrod, I mean.
Not all survivalists are libertarians, certainly...many of them look forward to living in communes.
They really can fix their own cars and hunt bears and build cabins and shit
They are especially good at the fourth activity.
(Or is it an achievement, or accomplishment? My Dowty is in disrepair.)
I don't understand why people expect their employers to buy them health insurance.
Because, as a direct and purposeful consequence of the US tax code, it's cheaper for them to buy it for you then for you to buy it for yourself? And because most companies that don't provide health insurance also don't provide the commensurately higher wages that would enable one to purchase it on the free market?
46: I can do all that stuff too. However, the conviction that everyone can or should be able to do the same had vanished by my early thirties, there's too much evidence to the contrary out there.
Yes, I'd probably class my own views as vaguely in that area. In that vague libertarian/left/mutualist sort of spectrum anyway.
Probably not a bad description for many of my inclinations. I'm along the lines of "Universal health care, but keep those fucking helmet laws to yourself."
However, the conviction that everyone can or should be able to do the same had vanished by my early thirties, there's too much evidence to the contrary out there
Oh, everyone should. But they shouldn't imagine it makes them special. I have somewhere a recording of the Specials playing live, and on one of the songs they do a chorus that sounds like "Nobody Is Special!"
It always strikes me as excellent advice.
"Universal health care, but keep those fucking helmet laws to yourself."
You know, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the JPPPPP(?) view when it comes to this particular issue. Of course you don't have to wear a helmet, as long as I don't have to pay for your feeding tube.
Well that is the rub, isn't it? As soon as a general social obligation to provide for health care is recognised, I think society has a say what combinations and behaviors it permits without penalty.
Compromise: no helmet or seat belt required if you've signed the organ donor card.
Can't let parents sign for their kids, though. The jackbooted thugs should intervene to protect their cute little kidneys and livers.
What Emerson said. Good times.
Next up, legalized weed.
Bollocks, we've got to get the citizen's basic income working before we get on to drug legalisation!
Employers buy health insurance because the employment group is not health selected. Most workplaces have a mix of healthy and unhealthy people, so you can spread risk. If it were completely up to the individual to buy it, then sick people would tend to get insurance and healthy people would not share in the cost.
Also, JPP is not rich, she grew up poor and still is not rich. Her somewhat callow perspective probably results from being young and healthy, not wealthy. Though one could say that youth is the greatest wealth of all.
Paisley-P wouldn't have been auctioning off her butt so energetically if she had her own money. She'd just screw random guys and have her bodyguard explain when she grew tired of them.
Alex the Citizens' Basic Income is never gonna work. It's the flat tax of the left.
Emerson, I don't think there's any reason to assert that JMPP's interest in dating is based on anything but her desire for a partner. Instead, of "auctioning her butt off so energetically", I would say "using her blog so that men she might like knows she exists", and I can't exactly condemn that practice when I do the exact same thing. I think her ideology is whack, but I think she is as consistent about living it as you can be about such an unforgiving doctrine and completely up front about the times when she doesn't live it. Tying her interest in dating to a desire for (his) money is unfair to her.
I got better GMAT results than her, apparently.
63: Seatbelts disagree. Unbelted people are a danger to others in a crash. See http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008845.html. Helmets, I dunno - head injury cases use up a lot of neurosurgery / intensive care resources while they decide if you're fixable or not.
Emir -- OK, we could deputize first responders to remove kidneys, livers, and corneas from all unseatbelted, unhelmeted accident victims right there on the spot while they're fresh.
she is as consistent about living it as you can be about such an unforgiving doctrine
Wait, I don't get this part. Unforgiving? That would make it all the easier for JPPP to practice, right?
she is as consistent about living it as you can be about such an unforgiving doctrine and completely up front about the times when she doesn't live it.
So does she put a quarter in the "accepted help from the government" jar every time she drives on an actual road?
Eliminating helmet laws would probably help with our shortage of donatable organs, though.
Whenever I think of libertarians, I recall a fellow wearing a libertarian T-shirt who was in Central Park during the runup to war. He was wearing some kind of "hey, I'm a libertarian t-shirt" and he was, I swear to god, giving a park cop a hard time because there were no water fountains on the great lawn, and she couldn't tell him where they were.
He was literally screaming at her about how ridiculous it was that there were no water fountains around.
I lost it. Seriously, I've never met a libertarian who wasn't rich and spoiled.
"hey, I'm a libertarian t-shirt"
Pleased ta meetcha. I'm a pair of post-structuralist sweatpants.
77: That's so precious. The cop should have pointed him to the Hudson river, where he could have whipped out his water purification kit and made himself a delicious glass of drinking water, without any help from the state.
If anyone could design the ultimate "hey, I'm a libertarian t-shirt," you could, m.
Maybe an urban survivalist t-shirt.
"You can't make me ride your bus!"
Oh dear lord. I didn't know she had a blog. She was in a political science class of mine several years ago, and it awful/tragic/maddening/fascinating.
If you're going to be presidential about it you can surely do better than that. Dish, already!