Why do Americans accept public education as is but universal healthcare is deemed socialist?

Hackspace dental surgery? 3d printed crowns?

fuck rail guns, this is what we really need.

8 Likes

The only way I see us getting there in our lifetime is if Bernie Sanders wins the White House and the grassroots movements that get him there follow our plan to unseat obstructionists afterwards.

There’s no room for failure, both scenarios must transpire. The insurance lobby is one of the largest, most pervasive and corrupt lobbying groups in the nation.

That said, we’ve taken on groups like this before and won. I personally will fight these evil fuckers until the day I die in hopes that at least future generations of Americans will finally have single payer.

6 Likes

What do you make of this?

The article is crap. He writes:

“The GOP, by contrast, has basically two perfectly plausible plans for moving its agenda forward. One is to basically change nothing and just hope for slightly better luck from the economic fundamentals or in terms of Democratic Party scandals. The other is to shift left on immigration and gain some Latino votes while retaining the core of the party’s commitments. Neither of these plans is exactly brilliant, innovative, or foolproof. But neither one is crazy.”

Then in the very next paragraph, writes:

“Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition.”

Which is talking out of both sides of the mouth and is total utter drivel. Two non-brilliant, non-innovative plans are more ideologically coherent than the Democrats who are united around at least the issue of civil rights and maybe more? The author has not been paying attention to Donald Trump’s tribulations with the rest of the party and the clown car that is busy driving around terrorizing the country.

There is one way I know Bernie is doing things right: he makes their blood boil and causes them to diverge into irrationality with regularity and alacrity. He’s the anti-Coulter. It’s a beautiful thing.

6 Likes

Thanks for sharing that. More people need to know about this. When we have decent insurance, we just don’t even think about it, and when we don’t we’re too busy otherwise.

1 Like

I agree with quite a lot of it, especially the point that statewide elections, etc. are vital. However, I think Matthew Yglesias radically underestimates the grassroots movements surrounding Sanders. We’re vastly more powerful, widespread and strategic-minded than the establishment media knows (and/or wants to research/report) and we’re only getting more powerful/dynamic over time.

The plan to unseat obstructionists (local and statewide) beyond electing Bernie is common knowledge among most supporters. Go to any rally or meeting and ask around – it’s the plan.

Bernie repeats it like a mantra and it’s taken to heart by most supporters.

LINK

Planning voter outreach/drives was one of the most important components of the historic, nationwide July 29th meeting.

https://cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/optimized/3X/7/9/79b17b579b7e5711c4c8374c9c490f7f94403ccb_1_690x276.jpg

3 Likes

The public school system is in a shambles. We pay the second most per student and are low on the list of developed countries in academic achievement. Many people are against the current system and want to return education to the local level, not the federal level. Do not believe that the public generally accepts the current top down educational system, and would live to reform it. What we do not want is another part of our lives controlled by a large bureaucracy and delivering little in performance.

Since fire departments are local responses to local problems you are illustrating why there is opposition to iess control. Local communities are the response, not an overarching federal system.

You totally missed the point of my suppositional analogy. “If we had no…” Please go back and read it again.

2 Likes

The simplest answer to the opening questing is, “Habit.” I am reminded of a pair of passages from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, in which he argues that ideology requires rote obedience to the letter of the law rather than belief in it:

we must go down on our knees, pray with our lips, etc. [. . . .] For we must make
no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind. As a result,
demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us. [. . . .] Proofs only
convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most
believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along
with it.

In an earlier passage, he writes,

Custom is the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted. This is the mystic basis of its authority. Anyone who tries to bring it back to its first principle destroys it. [. . . .] The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.

Following Pascal, Slavoj Žižek argues in The Sublime Object of Ideology that belief, “far from being an ‘intimate,’ purely mental state, is always materialized in our effective social activity." Hence, “What we call ‘social reality’ is in the last resort an ethical construction; it is supported by a certain as if (we act as if we believe in the almightiness of bureaucracy, as if the President incarnates the Will of the People, as if the Party expresses the objective interest of the working class.” Quoting the above passage from Pascal, he concludes, “It follows, from this constitutively senseless character of the Law, that we must obey it not because it is just, good or even beneficial, but simply because it is the law–this tautology articulates the vicious circle of its authority, the fact that the last foundation of the Law’s authority lies in its process of enunciation.”

While this brief analysis of the “senseless” character of ideology doesn’t answer the material, historical reasons for the United States’ unique position in the developed world as one of the only countries without a public, universal healthcare system, it goes a long way toward explaining the difficulty of dislodging the status quo. What Pascal and Žižek show us is that the answer to the opening post’s question is that we must look toward ideology’s material practice (its “process of enunciation”), and not its many rhetorical twists and turns, in order to understand why its material consequence (the lack of universal healthcare) persists. Perhaps we can best explain the absence of U.S. universal healthcare in the face of public education by pointing to the material effects of both current systems: one system promotes, through physical coercion and repetition, the national ideology and an obedient workforce (as one of Louis Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses”), while the other ensures the perpetual impoverishment of the working class and the physiological guarantee of the working class’s supposed “inferiority” to its wealthier counterparts. If we also weigh this complementary pair against the dominance of white supremacy within the white U.S. mindset, and more broadly within its national character (which has never escaped the legacy of genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, and the de facto “New Jim Crow” that persists today), then it is easy to see how all three systems–that is, public education, the current state of healthcare, and white supremacy–reinforce one another.

3 Likes

A friend of mine here needed dental work, which she eventually found a decent price for, but the initial dentist she saw gave her a price high enough that it would have been cheaper for her to fly home to France and get the work done there.

11 Likes

It’s not unusual for Brits to fly to Poland for dental work.

(and apparently, and unsurprisingly, from the US to Mexico)

1 Like

Perhaps America could have a sliding scale - free healthcare during childhood and a diminishing state contribution as people get older, tapering off to zero at around age 25-30. There’s an economic rationale to protect the young, since we don’t know how much a young person will later raise in tax revenues via their labor, and the young don’t have an opportunity to earn money to pay for medical treatment that they might need. The ‘created equal’ concept means that children should have an equal chance at the outset - provision of free basic education for all children, should go in tandem with free healthcare for all children, at least until they’re old enough to start working.

1 Like

The local component of public education in the U.S. is WHY our quality is so low in comparison to other industrialized countries. It’s the ones that hold everyone to an equally high standard that do well, like France or Germany or South Korea. Whereas in the U.S., in some locations teachers are not allowed to teach science, history, even some math that isn’t considered biblical enough.

7 Likes

But why should health care be related to working at all? And why limit it so?

Is it rational to believe that a receptionist who answers the phone, greets people, and hands them papers for $20 an hour deserves to live if she gets hit by a car, but if she had instead gotten a job as a waitress who answers the phone, greets people, and hands them menus for $2 an hour – well, we should just let her die. What morals or ethics are behind that manner of thinking?

We have both the technology to provide medical care and the economic power to do so, at least as well as any other developed country. So it’s not an issue of ‘who do we give it to?’, it’s an issue of ‘who do we withhold it from?’ and more importantly, why.

14 Likes

I reread what you said, Yes the Local control is better and people able to vote with their feet. Find a community that both agrees with you and can support itself. For some it is easy and others, since they want everyone else to pick up the tab will find themselves in a real mess.

The main reason is what we are used to. If “socialist” is a bad word, then obviously it doesn’t apply to what we’ve been doing all our lives. Nothing is more socialistic than military life, but it doesn’t count.

Change is scary. And saying that our values we’ve had all our lives is accusatory, and we fight back.

I never heard this argument before, care to elaborate?

Besides being funded by the state, the military takes care of its members more fully than elsewhere, not only for medical care, but even making sure everybody has food and religion.

2 Likes

I see were you come from, but this is a very hand-waiving definition of socialism.