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Or put your efforts to creating a system that’s not broken that people can choose to join, wouldn’t that be better?
To be fair, there are so many ‘obvious ones’ it kind of gets difficult to know when to stop!
Well, you can either be part of the solution, part of the problem, or part of the group that points and laughs.
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Actually, I’ve been hanging around these parts for quite some time (mid-2000s, maybe?), and I find the generally discourse to be of good quality. Sure there is the occasional flame-baiting troll, or ideological purist here and there, but for the most part the glorious moderators do a great job of weeding that stuff out, and we tend to have good conversations about stuff, even if things get heated at times.
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Mindysan, I have absolutely no problem with social commentary. The problem here is that the author tries to claim there’s some actual science proving that the situation exists. The two are separate things.
As to people not being cared for - well, those people are not provably all white women of a certain age group. It’s larger than that. Males face the very same disqualifiers. If you want to discuss that whole issue, then I’m fine with it. But let’s don’t confuse this article with either the subject of the discussion OR anything resembling science!
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Yeah, I know we can back up socioeconomic status in general.
I’m less sure about gender in general, it was definitely a better driver than race (which was seriously awful as far as my medicaid/medicare population populations were concerned, only a few specific diseases cared), but I’m remembering some pretty solid variances. We had some major sample disparities across the genders because you have to factor in the mode of entry into the system, which throws everything all out of whack.
I’d say this is a more pervasive problem that’s just suddenly being reflected in white women because they were such a huge part of our spike, there may also be a stress related factor . . . I can’t say that, but I could at least see how ‘being a hmong immigrant’ or ‘being a tribal member’ or ‘being from a poor family’ would at least be somewhat different from ‘being from a stable family and suddenly poor yourself’. We start running into data-collection issues that make any ‘pristine’ population extremely suspect as a sample, as the existence of data is a component of the problem in itself.
We should probably start with everybody having consistent, good healthcare. That would be awesome, and then we’d also have more useful data to analyze!
Exactly so! The same people who got all this trend data jammed up live in strange world where ‘discovery’ of a social problem - especially when that involves health implications, means you get a A) A public health campaign; and B) potentially piles of big funding at the public expense. The incentive is ALWAYS to find/create problems and then to PROMOTE/milk those same problems.
It’s not that there are no honest or altruistic people - it’s that people keep expecting any such goals to NOT fail when they are couched in and depend on a system that is fully, 100% capitalist. (If you need a good example, see ‘Pink Ribbons’. It’s on Netflix. They covered that one very well.)
This particular claim made in the article claim isn’t that tough or expensive - you 'd only need 1 independent statistician to dismantle and evaluate it at a fixed fee. Is the data clean? Is the math right? (I’ll just about guarantee neither is, but an indie - just to make sure.) The greater likelihood is you get the CDC’s Women’s Health people gunning for a new funding issue - and that won’t solve anything at all. I’ve even met the guy who invented the ‘obesity epidemic’. - told me straight to my face he did it purely for the career advancement he hoped to achieve. And you see what has gone on since. (I think I lost weight just listening to that guy. Still nauseating!)
Each of us has the choice whether to find such things more offensive, discouraging, or motivating some better thinking and actions on our own parts. I honestly don’t know how to fix it. All I know to do is not be a part of it any more myself, and say what’s true whenever the subject comes up so others don’t get fooled.
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Yup, I think you nailed a big key right there.
How do we EXPECT good results inside a system that gives the worst and most selfish of us all the advantages.
We should be amazed there’s enough good ones to get in their way despite the massive competitive disadvantage, shouldn’t we?
That should give us hope that we can do something better and need to create it rather than playing the game to lose. It’s like we’re all Aquaman and refusing to go near the water because we’d kick too much ass when we did, and just forgot it was just a big game.
“How do we EXPECT good results inside a system that gives the worst and most selfish of us all the advantages.”
That IS the most major part of it. But the worst of it comes from government ‘partnering with industry’. Industry doesn’t need government to be successful, and government fails horribly when its only goal is industry.
I saw a great example of what the Founders originally envisioned. It was some letters George Washington wrote after he had left the presidency. (And published by the Guttenberg Foundation, just so we could read them.) Companies wanted to pay Washington to help promote the development of interior waterways and make him an investor in their companies, since that was key to making business thrive as people moved inland. Not a bad goal at all - and since accomplished at great profit.But Washington was deeply offended at the idea that he would take money to help! He considered it a major conflict of interest, even though he had left office. And he saw it as no better than what the British government had been doing, in applying taxes and and restricting imports to support its own business interests prior to the American Revolution. And old George wasn’t having it! So, he opted out, with attitude. I found it…instructive. And enlightening. The ideal he had fought for didn’t fail - but people did!
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You’ve given me a something good to learn, I thank you!
I bet they actually had a vision in mind that would at least have worked better, we just followed a slightly different path. The two party thing evolving probably gave a few of the founders fits, didn’t it?
Egads, do NOT get me started threre! I’m sure you can guess how far my ‘but you can just do this in like. . a hundredth the time, and free up people for useful work’ proposals went, can’t you? So what if it’s freeing up people to SAVE LIVES! Billable hour contracts are a freaking bane on humanity.
It’s one of the biggest magnitude losses in life expectancy ever recorded, and nobody knows what’s causing it. At the American Prospect, Monica Potts reports on scientists efforts to untangle the knot of correlations at the heart of this public health mystery and tells the story of one woman, Crystal Wilson, whose life and death mirrors the statistics.
Well, if everyone was willing to live as principled a life, we wouldn’t actually need any laws at all. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like that. And no amount of governmental coercion or persuasion by any government in history has ever managed to change that fact. Almost by definition, any branch or agency of any government which makes such claims is merely…‘marketing’ itself. In this case, it’s just a journalist, Monika Potts, who went to Biola, a private Christian college. Might not hurt to remind her that even Jesus didn’t try to cure the lepers. (This government did attempt to segregate and discipline them.) An actual cure only came around later - via actual science. By somebody working on bugs - not somebody proposing they were superior enough to know how to fix actual humans.
Pffft! If we were going to do anything at all, then even by the author’s own social remonstrations, sending everyone who wanted to go off to a good college would be a better move than anything else. I think Bucky Fuller called it right.
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He did that a lot, didn’t he?
Hush how, reading up on Washington 
I’m lucky I was already nicely immersed in Mr. Fuller’s genius or you’d have begun to decimate my reading list!
Yeah, I’m kind of surprised the founding fathers thought ‘democracy that people aren’t choosing to be part of based on compatible natures’ was a solid bet. I’m wondering if this is going to come up in my Washington research?
It would be nice if we could let the principled ones get away from the tantrum-throwers, though. At least they could self-govern effectively, and they’re the ones who do all the useful work! They even make most of the weapons.
Wow, that’s like. . epic sad.
Fair enough. However, generally speaking, I’d argue science is never separate from the social context.
I agree it’s not just white women. If you’re poor, no matter your gender or color, you’re generally screwed. But I think that women of any color are more likely to be the sole bread winner of a family, not just their children, but of their parents too. I think maybe we are just abandoning entire swaths of people. I don’t think we need a rigorous scientific study to see that. We just need to look at reality.
What do you mean by a “principled life”? Who gets to set the terms for that? Is that based on religious standards? Secular? Yours? Mine? These things are not self-evident, I don’t think.
Jesus did not “cure” the lepers, but he did care for them and made them part of the community again… right?
I’m not sure everyone needs to go off the college. That has proven to have it’s own problems. But the college problem is a whole different ball of issues. As long as we all live by selling our labor, we need good jobs that pay a living wage. I think that’s pretty simple and straight forward solution. Not everyone needs to have a million degrees, but they need to know that the work they do is important, respected, and useful to society. Since we live in a capitalist society, the way to do that is to pay people a living wage. A social safety net would help, but that’s being dismantled thread by thread.
Well, according to you, who is the privileged principled few? Who gets to live in your walled city and who gets left out with the corporate wolves?
And of course, at the time of the nations founding there were entire groups of people who were not part of the democracy they imagined–it was only landed gentry who could vote–no women, people of color, men without land could vote. It always confounds me that people want the founders to be these great democrats and frankly, they weren’t. They were operating in part out of self-interest, and in part because they felt they were the most well-equipped to guide a republic and control the rabble.
I don’t remember saying ‘invite only’ anywhere. 
I’m talking about a collective mind hack, or more accurately NOT having only the one amazingly mean-spirited collective mind-hack to choose from.
I’m more about solutions then hoping everybody will experience a moment of magical enlightenment.
Basically, I think people should be choosing what system of government they’re subjected to, and I think we’re capable of creating that now.
I see a lot of improvements and clearly a lot of failings. Obviously women couldn’t vote and slavery was okay, so it’s not like they started form PERFECT, and looking around, clearly the experiment isn’t working.
It’s time for a new variant, I agree. . . standing on the shoulders of all we learned.
If people could choose to live in whatever ‘ism’ they preferred instead of being glued to the one they’re born in, we’d have some ways out of this mess other than … mess.
And our governmental and economic systems are huge parts of the problem
Well, maybe I’m making assumptions, but it seems to me you are talking about people who share your mindset. That does indeed mean that people who aren’t like minded are excluded, no? What is a “collective mind hack”? It seems like a buzzword to me (and I’ll admit to using words as a short hand for other things… so I get what you are trying to do here). What sort of system should we choose and who gets to decide what that is? You? Me? Obama? Putin? The king of Saudi Arabia? Who? Because none of us, even we agree on somethings, have the same mind set. I think we all have our own views of how to fix all this. Just look at the divisions between the Occupiers and Tea Partiers. They are actually focused on some of the same things, but they could not agree on the root cause of our problems. Same with say a Marxist and classical economist. Give them the same set of data, and they will come up with vastly different solutions to a problem. Yet they are both looking at the material conditions of life.
The system was set in place to be as much as a bulwark against democracy as it was against monarchy. The fact that we have what we have now is the result of ages and ages of hard work–which I think you agree with me about. People fought and died for a certain level of basic civil rights, we all are aware of this. But it is a constantly struggle and lately it’s become retrograde.
And you’re right, that I don’t have solutions. Honestly, we (not me and you specifically, but people in general) can’t even agree on what the problem is. If we can’t describe the problem accurately and all agree on that, we sure as hell can’t come up with some sort of workable solution. Throwing around big ideas is fine, but it tends to fall down the same hole as theory–it often isn’t based on material reality, how people actually live their daily lives and experience the world, then you’re going to lack for actually solutions.
