of health and gubmint
I’m depressed by the health care ‘debate’ taking place in the US.
Last night’s speech by Obama (which I didn’t watch, but of which I read a transcript and a handful of impressions) was largely what I expected from the US prez. Single-payer health care nixed, to the surprise of voters who obviously haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to what’s been coming out of the White House for the last few months. A proposed system of basically-what-we’ve-got-but-sorta-better that still relies on a private (if now more highly regulated and partially subsidized) insurance model. A lot of braying and shrieking from the idiot wing of an opposition party that apparently is still coming to terms with its growing obsolescence. Etc.
The plan seems to suck. That’s part of what’s causing me a bit of grief. Call it wild-eyed socialism (of the sort that’s… y’know, the baseline in pretty much every other major economy in the world), but medicine and the profit motive do not mix. I don’t intend to spend a lot of words explaining why, because this shit has been repeated ad nauseam, with examples from this country and that.
That, in fact, is what’s causing me some issues. I hate the Pocket Canadian brought out by shills to lie about how things work in my country. I hate that people, for however brief an instant, took Stephen Hawking’s hypothetical non-treatment as an example of why an NHS-style ‘socialist’ system such as that of the UK is bound to murder America’s best and brightest (Hawking is, of course, a Briton, and as far as I’m aware, wasn’t ever sent off to the glue factory). I hate hearing otherwise sane people jabber on about Socialism and Capitalism and the There-Can-Be-Only-One battle between them, without having the first damn clue about what Socialism or Capitalism entails.
I hate, in short, watching what I’ve come to see as the core of America’s crisis of democracy: lies, shouts, bluster and more lies. My dad likes to point out that American media looks a great deal like the pre-Glasnost escapades of the Communist media in the Poland we left behind, and it’s true. How on earth can our southern neighbours make intelligent political decisions when they’re pelted with untruths at such pace that even politically sophisticated readers have trouble keeping up?
My best wishes. I do hope something good comes of all this, and if the current health care plan is less than stellar (and it is), may it at least be an improvement over the appalling mess of a system that allows something like 60% of personal bankruptcies to be the result of medical costs.
news cycles amuse me
And lo, a few weeks later, Iran has fallen out of the common consciousness. Yesterday’s news has given way to weightier matters such as the death of Michael Jackson (an event that has no significance to me whatsoever, apart from a fuzzy and generalized sense of gee-it’s-sad-when-people-die) and the more recent revelation that Sarah Palin – she of the gosh-golly-gee – has stepped down from her gubernatorial post mid-way through for… some reason or another.
People are calling it likely scandal, as… y’know, generally people don’t just up and quit political appointments mid-term for no particular reason. I confess to a certain amount of salivation. Palin, terrifying though she’d be in the halls of power, is really very funny for those of us with the good fortune not to be directly impacted by a (however implausible) ascension to higher political office.
But of Iran – still in turmoil – nary a word. How flighty we of the MTV generation can be. Perhaps the greens need a Thriller homage of their own.
epic propaganda war is epic
Excuse the tired internet meme. The first title that came to mind was the equally tired lolwar, and that feels… more than a little inappropriate.
From my perch in front of my computer, I am watching an internet propaganda war unfold in real time. I alluded, in an earlier post, to Twitter coverage of the revolt in Iran. The authorities – such as they are – not to be outdone, have launched a heavy-handed internet counter-offensive. DOS (Denial-of-service) attacks have been flying around from government and Green hackers. Satellite signals and mobile phone coverage have been jammed or otherwise doohickeyed into not working (I am, for all my accomplishments, not a Scientist!). False Twitter feeds have been competing with real for both our e-ears and those of protestors – established Tweeters (I’m told this is the noun for users of Twitter) warn the Greens to distrust any new source for fear of being lulled into a Basij trap.
Even the rest of the world is getting in on the act. DOS attacks springing from the nimble fingers of Iranian expats have ranged from as far off as Europe and the US, and a hundred non-Iranian Twitter feeds have rejiggered their settings to be displayed in Iranian time so as to create as much noise as possible to confuse the government crackdown.
Who’s winning the propaganda war? Not this guy:
Technology’s a hell of a thing.
shots fired
As I write this, students are being shot in Tehran for the crime of protesting an election that was in all likelihood stolen. I find myself compulsively refreshing certain sites, certain Twitter pages, to get a picture of what’s happening… and the picture that emerges is at once hopeful and deeply distressing.
Tehran cannot sleep. Men crowd the rooftops at night, shouting praise to Allah. By day, they crowd the streets – silently, because protest is forbidden. The scale and the nature of all of this is being likened to ’79. Obvious, really, that the press and everybody else would take that tack. And yet, could they be right?
I don’t want to see a revolution (inasmuch as I, a Canadian, would see it – through heavily filtered news and/or electronic Babel), and I do. And I feel vaguely selfish to be putting forth an opinion in any event, as the fight isn’t mine. I want the Iranian youth to succeed, and I want them to build up a country they can be proud of. I don’t want them bleeding out into the streets. These two desires seem to be mutually exclusive.
I want the same thing as most of Iran’s young population – the current government torn down and replaced by a representative, moderate one. And a lasting one. Iranian moderates have an unfortunate history, a tendency to get oh-so-close to the halls of power before one brash idiot or another – Iranian or otherwise – says or does something stupid enough to reverse all the progress.
I’m not a religious sort, so I can’t with any honesty say that my prayers are with them. I almost don’t dare to hope that this will turn out for the best. May it at least turn out for the better, and with as little blood spilled as possible.
