Commenter Archive

I figured all this out at the end of health care reform, when somehow the public option just vanished.

Guys, we have a textbook 'center-right, sane Republican' as president. Of course, instead of having to negotiate to the left, he's having to negotiate to the right.

Anyone who conflates the health of the economy with the debt is just utterly insane. There is no correlation there at all.

We _know_ what caused this economic situation, and it was nothing at all to do with the debt, and if the debt magically vanished tomorrow, it wouldn't fix a thing.

Um, while I'm in agreement about the idiotic effects of things like Megan's Law...what exactly is the problem with Amber Alerts?

Admittedly, I'd like to see a more general 'notification' system, I think it's absurd that in this day and age we can't have government-issued geographical alerts. Every cell phone tower should send them out free of charge, there should be computer programs people could install and put in their location, and people should be able to sign up email or get rss feeds or whatever.

There should be a way for the government to get information to us, whether it's 'tornado sighted' or 'someone missing' or 'escaped prisoner'. The days of using the Emergency Broadcast System are way behind us...the average person is within sight or hearing of an network-enabled electronic device _at all times_, and it's inane to not use them.

The fact that my county uses giant sirens instead of having the cell company send a text message to every phone on the tower is idiotic. Remember, text messages are sent in the communication overhead of towers, and hence are 'free' for all practical purposes. (And people should be able to block the display of such messages in their cell phone, if they wish.)

So I wish the alerts were more general. I'd actually like a specific government agency dedicated to that, working closely with state agencies.

But I'm failing to see any sort of _harm_ that Amber Alerts cause. Some people assert that they continue to mislead people about the almost nonexistent danger of strangers kidnapping children, but, frankly, that's much more the media that the alerts themselves, which don't make any such claims at all.

Oh, and with regard to 'access'...that's a total red herring. We will have as many doctors and hospitals under the new system, and can treat exactly as many people. The exact same amount of medical care would exist. If we have shortages then, it would only be because we have shortages _now_.

So unless the problem is that access won't 'rationed' correctly (Aka, access is no longer controlled based on how much money someone has.), there's no 'access' issue at all. Frankly, it's _this_ system that has 'access' problems...I would much rather have doctors rationing care based on doctory things, or the government rationing it based on standardized rules, than have insurance companies rationing it based on how much money patients give them.

But on another level, I’d really prefer to see the healthcare industry opened up to actual market forces because there’s always the risk that we’ll run into cost and access issues (not to mention quality issues) if we just pile a single-payer system on top of the system we have.

Yes, but the situation is so bad at this point that there's nearly no conceivable way that single-payer can make things worse in the short term. Especially as single-payer would immediately knock something like 30% of the costs out of the system solely due to paperwork reduction and insurance company profit.

Even if costs then start climbing faster, it will take years before we even reach the point we are currently with costs, and even longer until we reach the point we would have been at had we done nothing. I have to randomly guess 'five years' until then.

So we might as well go there now, and _then_ worry about controlling costs. It only makes sense to worry about future costs of single payer if we're operating under the assumption that we can only do one thing, ever, and that whatever system we set up can't be tweaked once we see how it's working.

It's _usually_ a valid assumption of actual people. When normal people promote a policy, it is reasonable to assume that they, in fact, have some honest goal for it, or at least think they do.

This doesn't mean that their position is reasonable...just honest.

This assumption, however, doesn't work _at all_ for politicians.

Are you saying that _bad_ students should end up being by themselves at broken schools?

What I am perhaps saying is that we _shouldn't have broken schools_, and the insane idea that charter or private schools will 'fix' the problem is insane when those school are not forced to take everyone, and hence, by definition, cannot 'replace' public schools.

And we certainly shouldn't reduce funding because a school is 'bad'.

Indeed. My question is when someone says we shouldn't regulate corporations, I like to play dumb and say, "Wow, that's a pretty huge change. It's going to take quite some time to dismantle all corporations all like that."

And they start sputtering and asking what I'm talking about, and I point out that corporations _are_ regulations. You can't 'not regulate' _legal fictions_. It's like claiming that a writer should be forced to 'set free' characters in a novel he wrote. People, those things don't actually exist, we're just pretending they do. They can't be 'free'.

If someone wants to make a claim that human beings have some sort of inherent right to commerce, fine. If someone takes some land, and grows some food on it, and sell it to another person, fine. Heck, I'm a fairly liberal guy, but I'll even get behind the libertarians on that, as a moral stance. _Human beings_ should be able to conduct any sort of consensual activity with other human beings, be it business or pleasure or whatever.

That is nothing like the system we have set up, with limited liability and joint ownership of imaginary thing. Corporations are _not_ human beings. They do _not_ have that right. They have absolutely no rights at all, no matter what has managed to get through the supreme court.

People _choose_ to make one of those. And we as society will make and subject that created entity to *whatever* damn rules we want. Any rules, at all, period. Those things have a _gigantic_ amount of power compared to human beings, and are _voluntary_ to be in.

It's like walking vs. driving. One is just...you. The other is someone in control of a very dangerous thing, and we regulate it. Except, there the analogy falls apart, because we've got people driving battlecruisers up and down the road, and we've made it legal for them to run over pedestrians. (After all, the pedestrians should have paid more attention to the small print.)

There's another issue that no one mentions, besides the 'take money from schools' thing: Public schools all have specific goals to get funding. Standardized testing goals.

If you let people freely leave and enter a private school, even _without_ any sort of voucher at all...guess what sort of students the private schools will accept? That's right, the best ones. Leaving all the bad students behind, resulting in plummeting test scores and lower funding.

This happens with charter schools, too. If one school is required to take everyone, and one school is not, then the school that is will, statistically, do much worse...and we, for some unimaginable reason, have decided to base education funding on how well a school is doing.

Vouchers just mean that now _poor_ smart people can leave, making the system even more broken.

I'm imagining how this would work in medicine. 'We're sorry, too many people are dying while on Medicare, we're going to have to reduce your funding.'

Of course, you could go the other route, and make it look like health insurance currently looks...where poor performers would be 'uneducatable', like the uninsurable, and not get any schooling at all.

Oversimplification will always happen.

But what the people who are doing the debating could do is agree to, at the very least, not to use 'positional notation', and invent new terms to replace 'economically liberal' and whatnot, and use them as much as possible.

Or, even better, figure out if there are obvious places to break 'economically liberal' apart, like 'Keynesian' or 'protectionist'.

Of course, if I could control what people doing the debating are saying, we'd have _very_ different political discussion to start with.

Well, the most important change would be to stop describing things in _relation_ to other things.

And the second most important change would be to stop trying to map everything into 'left' vs. 'right'. Which, yes, I know is the pet peeve of libertarians...but you people don't seem to noticing that saying 'economically conservative', 'socially liberal' is still doing that. There is no such thing as 'economically conservative'. Or, at least, that's not even slightly a useful term. If you mean 'doesn't like to spend money', _say_ that.

I know people have to use the terms other people recognize, so this is a pointless battle, but I think we'd get along a lot better if we'd stop yammer about 'conservative' this and 'liberal' that, and said things like:

'I'm safety-net supporter. I think we should have single-payer health care.'

'Well, I'm safety-net supporter, too, but I think that we should instead regulate insurance companies and force them to take everyone.'

'I disagree, I do not think we need a safety-net for health insurance.'

Each issue has positions, and some issues seem to be somewhat grouped together, so could perhaps have sorta 'shorthand' positions. Like the noxiously named 'family values' position.

This makes sense, but quite a long time ago we invented 'left' and 'right' and 'liberal' and 'conservative' and started using those as shorthand for _everything_. When you have to add modifies and explain your shorthand, perhaps it's time, you know, to start using most specific terms to start with.

This is, incidentally, what has screwed up 'libertarian'. It has become shorthand for the positions of 'letting people do whatever they want' on the right, and 'letting corporations do whatever they want' on the left.

Likewise, I'm 'pro-choice', and I can't tell you how many 'pro-life' people I run into that, inexplicably, don't think abortion should be illegal per se. At which point I just stare at them, baffled. I can't figure out what _they_ think 'pro-life' means.

I'll make a plead to everyone: Stop using vague positional terms that are over 100 years old to describe things.

Look, you guys have an name that the super-rich have, for decades, used informed brainwashed dullards into unwitting pawns who think they shouldn't have to pay taxes or have food safety, and in return 'the government leaves them alone'. (While the super-rich rape them.)

Meanwhile, conservatives who aren't even the slightest bit libertarian use that label to hide behind.

Don't be surprised when slightly less stupid end up believing 'libertarian' is also this, but, being slightly less stupid, take objection at this completely insane concept.

You're just lucky the conservatives like to keep it as their backup label, or it would be roughly where 'liberal' is today.

Frankly, at this point, if I had a single wish from a genie, I'd wish that everyone became forever unable to use or remember any previous political label (Including 'right' and 'left'.). A nation-wide permanent amnesia, and aphasia if we went and looked them up from reference material.

Then everyone had to invent new ones that actually mapped to actual policy positions, or at least didn't map to decades of nonsense.

Yes, but it's only 'wrong' because Caplan swapped in the word 'libertarian' for 'conservative'. Krugman was talking about the _conservatives_, as he repeatedly said.

If you're allowed to change what was actually said, you can prove any statement wrong. If we were to swap out 'Socialist' for 'liberal', it would make just as little sense in the other direction.

Yeah, I knew there was something wrong with his idea, with replacing 'conservative' with 'libertarian', and couldn't quite pin it down. I tried to explain with 'studying', but that wasn't really it. But you nailed it exactly: People can fake a mainstream positions much better non-mainstream ones. Mainstream positions are in the collective subconcious of society.

I am not a baseball fan. I think it's a boring game. But I've been to a few games, and seen more on TV, and people talk about it around me. There's a lot of tiny details like players and stuff, but give me time to study, maybe some rules I'm not away of, and I can fake it. Hell, I can tell you right now I'm against the designated hitter rule!

I am also not a lacrosse fan. I have literally never seen an actual game, and I've never heard anyone talk about it. I've seen a few depictions on TV, so I know it's somewhat like soccer, you're trying to get a ball in the net past a goalie guy, and you manipulate the ball with sticks with baskets on the end. That's all I know.

The fact that I could fake being a baseball fan better than a lacrosse fan does not prove that is a more intellectually demanding game. Neither does the fact that, statistically, lacrosse fans could fake being a baseball fan than vis versa.

That just means _lacrosse isn't very popular_.

This is an interesting idea, but it's worth pointing out that computers are 'trained' (i.e, programmed) to simulate people...picking random liberals, even very smart liberals, and asking them to pretend to be right wing is about as inane as trying to discuss philosophy with Microsoft Excel.

And I think Krugman is almost right. The _political rhetoric_ that comes from the right about 'the left' is nearly incomprehensible to those of us actually on the left. And while I probably have a biased view, I don't see anything of that sheer insanity coming from the left.

I'm not, however, certain that rhetoric has anything to do with what the actual intelligent people on the right think.

And remember that Taft-Hartley was what? 1947? The right was *always* against unions, from the begining.

It's probably worth mentioning that 'rich vs poor' has been the norm so far back in American history that it's English history. It's not that the right was 'against' unions so much as the left was unions. Basically, the second we got rid of official 'class' in this country, it just turned into 'money'.

It's also why the Democrats were the racist party for so long. Black people 'took the jobs'. Only the rich could afford to be egalitarian.

Until that strange and beautiful point in American history where the somehow the poor on the left stopped that, and decided to try to help all poor...

...and that strange and ugly point a little later in American history where the rich on the right figured out that centuries of racism didn't disappear overnight, and those people still voted.

At least the left's racism was 'honest'. When some factory owner hires 50 black men as scabs to union bust, well, I get it. When workers refuse en mass to work next to black people, thus lowering the pool of possible workers and drive up wages, I get it. It's morally wrong, and an idiotic plan to start with (Much better to work together, like they eventually did.), but it's honest.

Racism from the top, however, is just manipulate dishonesty. 'Hey, you poor people! At least you're not black.'

Where I live, the left is absolutely arguing for those things, while not actually delivering any of them. At some point, the argument that we’d love to do those things for you, but they won’t let us, just doesn’t fly.

Erm, I have no idea what's going on 'where you, but perhaps you should actually look at the voting records. Perhaps they are lying, or perhaps the right is, in fact, stopping them. I have no idea. It is entirely possible they are lying, or your 'left' is more 'center right'.

But the fact is that at the Federal level, we have people on the right who attempting to cut those things, and people on the left attempting to stop them.

Or do they stand behind something only in the sense that they’re okay with their taxes going there?

I have no idea what you mean by 'only'. The 'left' is a political position. Hence, it attempts to do things via 'the government'. Which, as we know, actually means via taxes.

The 'left' is not some group of people that actually exist in some objective sense. If you're asking why they don't all give up their jobs and, I dunno, follow poor women around and hand them condoms, um, that's why they're funding Planned Parenthood. Most of whom the staff, are, of course, members of the left.

'The left' cannot show up and help. Plenty of people on the left volunteer or donate or whatever, though. (As do plenty of people on the right.)

The right has political position hypocrisy, in that they demand, as policy, no abortions, but then demand, as policy, that no poor pregnant women get any help.

The left, OTOH, demands, as policy, both those things, which is not hypocritical.

If you want to call out individuals on either side for being hypocrites in their political position vs. their own action, fine, but that's not an issue of 'the left'.

But, clearly, that’s the fault of the right. I mean, let’s ask this: if tomorrow the government stops funding Planned Parenthood altogether (not so hypothetical), does the entire left step up and pitch in, send money, and volunteer?

Planned Parenthood is already funded by donations. About quarter of its funding is donations! We're talking 250 million dollars donated. It has 700,000 active donors.

I have no idea how much of that is from 'the left', but I suspect at least 9/10ths of it is from pro-choice people.

How hard could it be to have the child and give it up for adoption?

It's ten thousand dollars worth of hard, that's how 'hard' it is.

Um, duh.

Couples in this country are having to turn to other countries to adopt.

That has almost nothing to do with the amount of babies, and everything to do with idiotic rules about adoption in this country.

All of which suggests that they really didn’t have much in the way of “choices”. And, given that a large percentage of the women who had abortions, when asked, said they did so because they “couldn’t afford” a child, we’re clearly talking about a pro-choice movement that is struggling to secure options, but not choices.

Yes, let's pretend that thing you described has the slightest relationship to the left, which hasn't constantly argued for day care, maternity leave, contraceptive access, adoption services, aid for poor women and their children, head start, etc, etc.

If your economic situation forces you to abort when you would have rather carried the child to term, you didn’t make a choice.

I forget, which political party is it that supports WIC? Free prenatal care? Welfare? Maternity leave?

It’s not that the pro-choice movement doesn’t know this, but that they’re focused on the last resort option, instead of improving the lot of women on the whole so that they have actual choices in their lives. This would be if the left, as such, still gave a fish about the poor, aside from making sure they have the option to abort.

Yes, the entire left is lined up to make sure that people can get abortions, and only abortions. Why, look at Planned Parenthood, well over 90% of their activity is dedicated to abortion. (Statement not intended to be a factual statement.) They don't provide any sort of contraceptives or anything.

Seriously. Someone please point to any help the right has given poor pregnant women at all. A single dime of money sent their way as some sort of policy of the right, to encourage them to not have an abortion.

The only thing anyone could possibly point to is Catholic charities that help with adoption. Which I have to point out is not really the 'right'.

Wow, no one got my sarcasm.

There is such an organization, people.

It's called 'Planned Parenthood'.

Actually arresting people for outright criminal behavior and conspiracy would be a good start.

There's a _reason_ abortion is the only medical service hard to find. It's because abortion providers get driven out of business by constant attacks.

Of course, all this is moot when, as the article said, the government adds _waiting periods_ on top of that, again, the only medical service with government mandated waiting periods. The waiting periods are explicitly to make it inaccessible to poor people. (Although, to be fair, they're trying to make it inaccessible to everyone. But moderately wealthy people can take two days off work and stay in a hotel.)

> More’s the pity because, if they just decided to agree on, say, improving the situation and options of poor women, they’d probably be able to reduce the number of abortions and, you know, improve the lot of poor women, which would seemingly give both sides some common ground.

Yes, if only some organization would go around providing health care services to poor women, giving them medical aid and screenings, providing information about contraceptives to help stop unwanted pregnancies, and then, sometimes, abortions. If only such an organization existed to help poor women.

Yes, but there's been a lot of better studies, done in better, freer eras. I wasn't trying to criticize Kinsey, I suspect he did the best he could.

But if I ever read it, it would be as 'the groundbreaking paper that actually allowed people to talk about these things', then, you know, 'actual true facts'. (And as I'm not studying 'the history of sociology', I am unlikely to do that.)

I suspect 10% is wrong for 'homosexual' in the sense of 'men not attracted to women at all'.

However, I'm pretty certain that's not what Kinsey's said. His definition of 'homosexual' was 'a man who is more attracted to other men than women', aka, a lot of bisexuals were included, so 10% seems somewhat too low in my head. I haven't ever read Kinsey, though, because it _is_ crap.

Seriously, at this point we should probably accept that sexuality is a lot like 'race'...there might be some biological distinction somewhere way deep down, and a lot of testing can reveal you're 25% this, 50% this, etc. But at least 75% of the stuff we _think_ is objective about sexuality is just society making up groups and people self-identifying. (Which is where all the bisexuals have vanished to.)

However, annoyingly, at some reason it became political important that sexuality be 'genetic'. (By which misinformed people actually mean 'hormonal', as genetics doesn't even really determine your gender...men have like one extra gene to switch on testosterone, and that's it, the hormones do the rest.)

Because if people can't 'choose', that makes it like 'racism'. So suggesting 'A lot of sexuality is a social construct' doesn't go over well, even when that's not an attempt to say 'And thus should not be allowed'.

In my universe, people shouldn't be discriminated against because they belong to any group, or people think they do, be it homosexuals, blacks, women, or Baptists, and it really doesn't matter how much of membership in that group is some objective measure and how much of that group is just a term we invented to poorly categorizes things that exist in spectrum. (And, as any religious scholar will tell you, religious groups exist in a spectrum. And once in a while, so does gender.)

Well, yeah, the 'switches' were an over-simplification, obviously. I was just making the point that for some reason people seem to think there's a 'men' or 'women' switch, whereas, in reality, it is _at least_ two switches. (Along with other, much less toggled switches, like attraction to animals or whatever.)

And if it are two switches that default to one position, and get flipped randomly, then almost _automatically_ there should be more people that have one switch flipped (and hence are bisexual or asexual) than people who have both major switches flipped and are strictly homosexual. Unless the switch flipping is from the same source.

As for the fact it's not a 'switch', yeah, that poses a strange statistical problem...there's really no way to measure it, even in some magical world where everyone is utterly uninhibited and completely honest.

And it's added to by the fact that almost all 'coming out' stories seem to have, as a constant, being unsatisfied in their 'standard relationships'...which raises the question as to how _anyone_ realizes they're bisexual, because they _aren't_ unhappy. The only possibility is having someone of the same gender happen to ask them out, and them not automatically rejecting it.

And if they do manage to realize they're bi, why even _bother_ with dating the same gender...it's harder to find people, the social protocols are still somewhat weird, and society is not entirely happy with it.

It also raises the question of what we're _trying_ to measure, and why? Are we suddenly running a dating service? Do we need to figure out how many marriage forms to print with 'bride and groom' spaces, vs 'bride and bride' and 'groom and groom'? (Obviously that has a simpler solution, but you know what I mean.) What, exactly, is the point of all this?

At some point, this is sorta like measuring 'race'....we're not measuring any actual thing, but what people identify as. (Which is partially based on what others identify them as.) With race, sure, we could do actual genetic sampling, or melanin levels, and with sexuality we could probably do the same, or test hormones or run MRIs while showing pictures...but, why do we really care?

Anyway, the point is that this is a _really_ bad question to see 'How well do people do at guessing percentages?', because the 'real' _percentage_ is just a guess anyway.

And as for the questions, the amount of 'gay' people isn't a good question, as that's under rather a lot of debate. While only 3% of American are _out_ as gay, the actual percentage of homosexuality is much harder to calculate. The standard estimate is 10%, although that varies both by gender, and by what you mean by 'gay'. And it pretends no one is bi, which is stupid.

I suspect that it's probably somewhere in the middle, call it 7% of humans who would only be happy with a partner of the same gender, and some unknowable amount of who would be happy with either. Unknowable because a large amount of them will either never figure it (Unhappiness with straight relationships seems to be the big clue for people that they are gay. If people aren't frustrated with their lack of attraction for the opposite gender, they'll never even bother looking at the same one.), or will never step outside heterosexuality even if they do become away, as straight relationships are much easier in current society.

In fact, I think logically that the number of bisexuals should outnumber homosexuals. This is because I assume that 'attraction to men' and 'attraction to women' are, in fact, _separate_ switches inside people, which would logically mean the number of, say, men, who have their 'attraction to men' switch randomly flipped on (aka, bi) should outnumber the men who have that switch on and the 'attraction to women' switch also randomly flipped off (aka, gay). If we assume that each switch has a 1/4 chance of being flipped from 'default', we get 18.75% bi, plus 6.25% gay.

Along with 6.25% asexual who have both switches off, and the rest straight. Not that there's any reason that both switches, or the same switches in different genders, should have the same chance of flipping.

The point is, if they are independent of each other, we should be seeing a lot more of 'half flipped switches' people, aka, bisexuals. Which would argue against them being independent, except that, like I said, I suspect the amount of bisexuality in the population is _epicly_ underreported, and will continue to be so until same-sex relationships are utterly unremarkable.