Commenter Archive

Well that made my comment completely redundant.

I think the issue might be a conflation of two separate problems. The first problem (which I think is the main thrust of the OP) is that Gypsy's sentence is unjust given the circumstances. Our system does have a mechanism for dealing with that and it's the power of pardon in the governor's office. That we've developed a cultural/political aversion to that lever is regrettable, but it does exist.

The second is the systemic issue- i.e. could we design a system that would catch a bad actor of this nature in time to prevent the murder and fallout from it. I think there's a lot of reason to be pessimistic about that.

@north do you have any links? I'd be interested in reading about that hypothesis.

I still don't think that situation is comparable. Part of the reason there weren't many prosecutions is that the revelation of the abuse came out so long after the fact that prosecution was impracticable in a lot of places. Quite a few of the perpetrators were already dead but beyond that evidence is lost, memories fade, witnesses become unreachable.

That doesn't vindicate the people who commited the acts or their enablers but it's a practical reality that the longer the crime stays hidden the harder it is to try and render justice in the courts. Either way I don't think the lack of prosecutions tells the whole story on how people feel about it. Look at the empty pews in the first world, particularly places like Ireland.

I think those scandals say a lot more about the internal cultural problems of the Catholic Church, or maybe even the nature of all big organizations than they do about attitudes towards child abuse. Any institution is capable of deciding to cover up the bad actions of its agents to protect its image. This seems more like a lot of unrelated people and organizations being deferential to a child's parent about medical decisions. The Church intended to hide what happened to its victims. I don't see any evidence of that here and I think that's an important difference.

That we are more willing to let 1,000 children be horrifically abused than allow a single false accusation. Under the law there are certain constitutional principles that still sometimes restrict our ability to punish as viciously as people demand. However, in terms of public opinion, I think Americans are quite willing to hunt down the abusers of children and punish them, even when the abusers are figments of their imagination. The daycare abuse cases in the 80s and 90s (and ensuing mass hysteria and changes to the law) come to mind.

This is a pretty gross overstatement. I've seen the claim (or at least an allusion to the notion) that there are large numbers of children suffering horrific abuse who the system is unable or unwilling to help. What I don't see is any evidence to substantiate that.

This incident is tragic and what a just outcome for all involved would look like escapes me. However, until evidence shows otherwise, it's a huge outlier. Setting policy is a hard balancing act and there is another side of this issue, where well meaning social services take kids from situations that aren't ideal and put them into far worse places or act as an auxiliary to law enforcement to punish poor people for not having the same resources to care for their children as the middle class.

We should try to learn what we can from this situation and make improvements where possible but nothing will ever be perfect, especially when there is some (probably very tiny) number of people out there intentionally abusing the system for their own sick purposes. What we should know, however, after decades of bad laws named after victims, mass incarceration, and aggressive law enforcement tactics is that characterizing these debates in emotional terms pitting good against evil has not created good policy.

Only knowing the facts as printed in the link I don't think he is in nearly as sympathetic of a position. The right course of action for him was to alert the authorities and get Gypsy out of there, not commit a murder on her behalf.

My frustration stems from my perception (which is anecdotal) that legitimate criticisms of Clinton are being treated as the same as conspiracy theories about Vince Foster. I know everyone in blue America (of which I am reluctantly a part, at least in terms of demographics) is supposed to be uniting against Trump but I still hate all the tribalism and blind loyalty. It reminds me of the Bush (whose foreign policy we are most likely about to return to office) years in the worst ways

What an insightful meme. The best way to determine the validity of an opinion is the race/religion/sex of the person stating it. Not sure why no one else ever thought of that.

What about people who instead of tax policy see continued military intervention in the middle east as a deal breaker? I am not voting Trump but Iraq, Libya, and HRC's general hawkishness completely disqualifies her from the presidency in my opinion. Now I suppose it's possible Trump could be worse on this issue (I think it's impossible to say) but people need to stop acting like there aren't principled reasons to oppose Clinton or that there is some sort of clearly greater sense in embracing the race to the bottom view of voting that Jaybird articulated.

Not saying voting 3rd party (which I will do) isn't without plenty of flaws but the its Clinton or eternal damnation argument that progressives and the MSM are pushing is itself flawed and quite self serving.

I think it's a challenging issue. On the one hand social mores are always evolving and some things that were once considered appropriate but no longer are don't seem to raise a lot of controversy. That said, I think there are reasons to be concerned about all art being subject to the whims of the most easily offended and/or arbitrarily sensitive. Art needs to be able to be subversive or weird or just plain dumb. In particular I think about the kimono incident at the Boston Gallery of Fine Arts a year or so ago. When something that strikes me as a pretty bland, NPR-style celebration of a foreign culture can trigger protests of the type it did I worry about our ability to run a diverse, multicultural society.

Of course the biggest sin with any changes to an old piece is doing it poorly. It sounds like they did this well which makes it hard to fault too much.

I wonder if there isn't some kind of happy medium. The comments that were related to starting World War 3 I can see coming off as pretty nuts to someone without any experience with that poster. Six months is a long time but a little lurking mightve tipped her off that there was no obligation to engage with that. Not sure if the outcome would've changed and I saw north trying to explain but the damage was done.

I see where youre coming from and dont think its a meritless position. There's a past me (circa, say 2002-2006) that would say the Khan speech is perfect and just what someone needed to say/do. There's another past me (circa, say 2006-2010) that would've said, 'kinda cynical at this point, but I'll take it.' Somewhere after that my own cynicism overwhelmed me.

I'd also be lying if I said that the candidate this is coming from doesn't color my feelings on it (i.e. probably the most important Democrat to support the disastrous and pointless war where Khan was killed). I accept any hits to my own credibility on the topic that comes with that admission, and fully cop to being a very bad, and unreliable anti-Trump person.

I can see how I probably wasn't clear previously on the issue of pushing back. I meant that, in other circumstances if someone were to push back on the use of soldiers or their families as political props in a presidential campaign I would find it very refreshing. I find a lot to agree with in the OP on this issue.

Trump's response did not do what I would like to see happen, nor do I find the demagoguery Trump engages in about American Muslims more generally, to which Clinton's actions were no doubt a response, to be anything other than detestable.

See also my comment just above to Morat.

Fair enough and maybe I am missing something in my frustration with militarism I've been stewing on the last 15 years (for awhile I was seriously waiting for loyalty oaths to be required to buy a hot dog at a baseball game).

My more recent frustration that there is even a need to refute the types of claims Trump is making about American Muslims and numerous others may also contribute.

All you're doing is reaffirming mine, and what I interpret the author's point to be, which is that soldiers (the deader the better) in our political culture have become the most useful political props to the big parties. I don't have to like or agree with Trump to recognize that and I find the tactic concerning even when it's employed against politicians I don't like.

Also being in the military in itself or even dying in the line of duty doesn't demonstrate anything about an individual's politics (though by all accounts I've seen Kareem Khan served honorably). Just ask Nidal Hassan.

I don't entirely disagree, but there's a reason the Clinton campaign chose the family of a soldier. Why wasn't it a physician or a teacher or engineer or successful business owner? That would've made the same point about assimilation.

The criticism I'm making here isn't specific to Clinton (the Republicans were shameless about it during the Bush years).

Point number 3 is both important and is maybe being missed in the discussion of Khangate or whatever we're calling it. There was an article in the Atlantic a few years ago that argued that a number of factors have moved most Americans too far away from its military to really understand it, and one of the results has been blind hero worship of anyone involved in the institution and even of the institution itself.

This isn't to say we shouldn't have respect for individuals who have made sacrifces, or that Trump isnt guilty of his usual idiocy and tasteless in response to Khan's speech. However, and maybe this was what @aaron-david was saying above, I do think that Khan was used here as a partisan prop, the same way the military and their families have been for decades, and particularly extensively since 9/11. In other circumstances I'd almost be impressed that a major party presidential nominee was willing to aggressively push back in the face of the tactic. Of course it's Trump so instead of the eloquent criticism I'd love to see its the usual wild eyed egotistical and racially charged bluser

This is pretty close to my view on the subject. Not saying I'd be against any proposed regime of voter ID laws but the unique history of the United States combined with the unreliable and at times tough to access agencies that would administer the rules make them inherently suspect to me.

I've also never seen convincing evidence that we have a voter fraud problem, which again, raises questions to me about the true intentions.

As though my post wasn't long enough as it was in support of such an unremarkable point. :)

I think this is a fantasy. Significant portions of the population will never be able to pay for routine health maintenance services without being subsidized. Relying on that takes us back to the uninsured problems pre-ACA where people went untreated until the problem was catastrophic and thus much more costly for whoever ended up footing the bill.

I agree that the employer model is outdated but there is a role in my opinion for private insurers and that is cost control. It's what Medicare Part C and Medicaid Managed Care are (very imperfectly) experimenting with. I could see a world where risk adjusted private insurers working with ACOs or similar provider organizations get us to full coverage and save money, which as much as it sucks to say, is important.

Of course we aren't anywhere close to that yet but it's that reason that I'm not sure a switch to fee for service single payor is really what we should be aiming for.

@stillwater I'm talking about the system as a whole. We've got Medicare covering individuals over 65 but it's really split into 3ish systems. Parts A and B are at heart fully socialized systems where claims go directly to the federal government for payment.

Parts C and D are programs administered by private entities. Part C will be your traditional insurers who get money from the federal government through the risk adjustment process and Part D is the prescription drug program. These entities are for profit, private entities but are also heavily regulated and depended on by the government for Medicare to work.

Next you have your for profit plans, traditionally provided by employers, versions of which are now commercially available for individuals via the exchanges. These plans are regulated primarily at the state level. They cover everyone under 65 or who don't qualify for Medicaid.

Lastly you have Medicaid (including CHIP, etc.) for people with sufficiently low income which is funded by the federal government but administered by the states. Like Medicare, some Medicaid benefits are paid by claims straight to the state agency but there are also Medicaid Managed Care plans administered by private insurance companies that look a lot like Medicare Part C.

All of these systems have their own interested parties, their pros and their cons. What we don't have is a fundamental coherence and it can be extremely challenging to understand how they all work together, including the gaps, perverse incentives, and cost hiding that goes on between them. These gaps and perverse incentives was how we ended up with the large number of uninsured (who were putting pressure on emergency providers which operate in regulatory ecosystems of their own) that the ACA was supposed to address. The problem with the ACA is that it looks to correct the problem of the uninsured which is really just a symptom of the fact that we've got all of these overlapping payors (public and private) with their own incentives and prerogatives, and subject to a variety of different regulations at every level of government. The uninsured were people who fell through the cracks under the old system but by insuring them we've created other unintended consequences.

My point is just that no one would create a system like this from scratch. However it's hard to fix at the margins because of the overlap and different levels of government involved and of course scrapping it and starting over probably isn't possible politically. Also for clarity my point isn't that we don't need regulation just that we need a system that covers everyone and isn't in perpetual conflict with itself.

The better question is why do we deliver healthcare through this insurance structure. Even if it was fully public it would probably still be an insurance type system where people are paying into it and someone is determining what's covered and what isn't. That's how single payor (and old school Medicare parts A and B) work, it's just financed through taxes of current or future beneficiaries, as applicable.

The fundamental flaw isn't so much that aspect of it, it's that in this country we've built an incoherent hybrid public-private system with its own entrenched interests and fiefdoms. Our system of government makes comprehensive reform (which I agree is what we would do in a perfect world) really hard to get to.