Universal
Healthcare Is Not One Of Them
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Video
clip of Piers Morgan interviewing Michele Bachmann on car insurance.
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Dear J,
To frame the purchase of a car as "optional" (thus making car insurance "optional") is like arguing that "public instruction" is optional.
Sure, public instruction is optional... if one opts for barbarism over civilization.
To many modern conservative, civilization is increasingly optional.
Soon - and suddenly - American conservatives will morph from adamant opposition of "death panels" to advocating healthcare only for those who can "pay cash on the barrel head."
Soon - and suddenly - American conservatives will morph from adamant opposition of "death panels" to advocating healthcare only for those who can "pay cash on the barrel head."
It is rightly noted that "taxes are the price we pay for civilization."
By this measure many American conservatives have already expressed preference for the dismantlement of civilization. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irx_QXsJiao
Back in the 1950s and '60s the word "specious" was in common usage.
Although speciousness is ever more common in American culture, I cannot recall when I last heard the word. (It disappeared at the same time "The Common Good" dropped from radar.)
Contemporary "conservatives" are too addlepated to acknowledge the self-centered milieu they've constructed, which is to say they are so ideologically-obsessed as to deny any reality outside preconceived mental constructs.
Modern conservatives' zealous promotion of specious argument is only rivaled by their passion for creating New Rules based on exceptions-to-rules. (See Global Warming.)
This passion for principles predicated on "exceptions" is like using Joseph of Cupertino's frequent levitation to overturn The Law of Gravity. http://en.wikipedia.
The quest for Absolute Purity is the surest, swiftest way to transform theoretical "goodness" into practical evil.
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.” Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton - http://en.wikipedia.org/
Another common saying from the fifties urged the wise "to give the devil his due."
By failing to accommodate the human "shadow," we risk the paradoxical transformation of "Godliness" into "Diabolism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)
Total denial of any human impulse guarantees blowback whose downstream devastation is only matched by its unpredictability.
Pax on both houses
Alan
PS As a companion piece to Ms. Bachmann's synaptic short-circuitry, I recommend "North Carolina lawmakers reject sea level rise predictions." http://
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