Twitter C/D

like for the same amount of money we could have everyone covered? fucking go for it

― mh, Wednesday, May 24, 2017 4:49 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's what he's saying

maybe "deal with it" means something different in Canada

why?

― flopson, Wednesday, May 24, 2017 4:38 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

- arguing against an unnamed foe that no ones ever seen before the "healthcare is cheap" guy
- it ignores the fact that healthcare is in fact much cheaper in countries where its nationalized
- pretends like cost reform isnt part of proposed plans like were just gonna take our current system and nationalize it
- throwing around "additional government spending" like its not money thats already spent on healthcare
- "nobody serious is going to buy it" awful serious people pundit evocation
- faux-naive fake economist being provocative tone
- fake pointless math
- terrible "deal with it" headline when all were dealing with is this bad blog post!

its actually an accomplishment to have a piece that short be so terrible, there shd be an award

like I feel he's doing the "we do this not because it is cheap, but because it is essential" argument but either you're preaching to the choir who agrees it's necessary, or you're trying to convince people it's essential, and he's doing neither. if you're going to make a factual post that seems to make an argument, you need to... make the argument

there are so many things wrong with the us health care system

pick any part of it

but one of the main problems is how much doctors get paid compared to other developed countries

this isn't even about public vs private (though this has its own set of problems)

everything in the us is an excuse to receive more money, keep your own money and pay as little as you can for a service (i guess a lot of americans don't realize how contradictory all these things are)

seriously, my US family doctor is a fucking moron and i know quite a few people that also think their doctor's job involves straightforward procedures (a mix of psychobabble + exams that can be measured usually done by their helpers). he should be getting paid a lot less for the job he does

2012 article https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-12-12/to-cut-health-care-costs-pay-doctors-less

but you can find a lot more on the web

it's a post for economists and stats wonks to nod along to, and shake their heads about people who express shock at numbers

like I feel he's doing the "we do this not because it is cheap, but because it is essential" argument but either you're preaching to the choir who agrees it's necessary, or you're trying to convince people it's essential, and he's doing neither. if you're going to make a factual post that seems to make an argument, you need to... make the argument

― mh, Wednesday, May 24, 2017 4:56 PM (two seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah its very much from the "what who me i was just making an obvious simple point" school of pundit fuckery

california calculated the cost of their health care system and its a lot! im a very serious person you can tell by how i have taken a number from column a and put it in column b

this is to be expected, don't you understand how things work, plebes?

like for the same amount of money we could have everyone covered? fucking go for it

― mh, Wednesday, May 24, 2017 4:49 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's what he's saying

― flopson, Wednesday, May 24, 2017 4:51 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he doesnt say that you inferred it, what he does say is "additional required spending"

if you take all the weird passive aggression out theres actually nothing there except california calculating how much they spend on healthcare lol

which is "a lot"... deal with it

"If we're lucky, a good single-payer system would slow the growth of health care costs over the long term, but it's vanishingly unlikely to actually cut current costs."

based on...what? and slowing the growth of costs wld be good, also obamacare a very bad national healthcare plan has slowed the growth of costs

the war cry of the status quo "Short of some kind of legislative miracle, there's really no way around this. "

"Nothing to be done unless we win elections, garner popular support, and pass laws"

when I was younger I used to be a huge fan of just hanging out at the newsstand part of bookstores, living somewhere where real newsstands aren't a thing, and whiling away some time browsing magazines and maybe buying a couple. there were more then (late 90s to very early 00s) and Mother Jones was one of the few that was institutional but still very much defiant. like The New Republic existed and had some left-leaning stuff but was pretty much in line with what could be attempted, legislatively, and was center-left

Mother Jones had the dual pipeline of research pieces into fucked-up government infrastructure like prisons, exposes on local govs and courts siding with corporations over local interest when it came to the environment or imminent domain, and the regular articles that made blog-like points but did a decent job of doing so from a further-left, common man perspective. This "don't you understand numbers!" crap is a departure from what I appreciated.

So when people are saying "this is what passes as our mainstream left pub" it's out of an exasperation for the diminishing of an institution and I cosign

mh i'm sorry your favourite mag is now a neoliberal content farm, i just think it's mean to intentionally misread someone in the way that was done in the tweet i c/p'd, and that the example felt emblematic of the over-zealous angry mob aspect of twitter, a main thing i dislike about it

it was never my fave, just something that was nice to see there on the newsstand

also I think we dissected why the blog post was bad but ydy

the mob mentality can def be over the top and harmful and dumb, but sometimes its good to have vigilantes going after intellectually bankrupt pundits imo, as to whether that example represents a misreading of the piece idk, its def hyperbolic, but when youre being that glib and sloppy abt such a morally vital issue you kinda deserve to have yr values questioned

fwiw glib and sloppy is being pretty charitable for what he did there imo

the fact that the magazine is called mother jones is the perfect symbol for our current situation lol

i appreciate your + joe's dissections, and you're right that I personally don't care as much about the who's-who-sociology/media criticism aspect of it that is what gets ppl riled up. blogging is too often just the act of finding the One Specific Way Someone Was Wrong Today and smugly refuting it, and the short-sightedness and lack of context that often engenders is bad

just don't think it deserves to be intentionally misrepresented by "Kevin Drum doesn't give a shit if you die" (iirc KD supports single payer but has been less than sanguine about its electoral odds, which is imo not an un-useful perspective). even if the post is 'bad', i still think one should represent it honestly

he said the pub, not kevin drum because editorial worth shit would check tone

the worst of the twitter mob scene is when they find some terrible rando and get all riled up owning them for an afternoon then immediately forget about them

by worst i mean funniest

by funniest i mean lol this fallen world

this is about MJ publishing tone-deaf shit

https://mobile.twitter.com/ClaraJeffery/status/867480585710653441

there was a tweet the other day where someone found an old chait article from obamas first term being all dont pick on joe leiberman and put it next to a brand new piece of his saying leiberman wld be a trump patsy as fbi director lol, these centrist pundits are being dragged left kicking and screaming

clara jeffery the god dang editor of the magazine has some truly horrific tweets in her archives my god

xps- also more generally, *on a personal note* (lol), i've been feeling down on twitter lately, and am trying to root out some of the cynicism and meanness and laziness it's poisoned in me and re-capture the earnest disposition i have trace memories of from my youth

twitter is def a cesspool that drives ppl insane not sure how anyone cld argue otherwise

tho the other day i successfully convinced someone w 'libertarian opinion columnist from Georgia' in his bio that an anti-immigration right wing economist did hack work, so it ain't all bad

I get the impression that lots of people use twitter in a very different way than I do

Steven Dennis‏
@StevenTDennis
BIG winner under AHCA 3.1 in CBO score: Healthy 21-year-old making $68K in moderate waiver state: Premium cut >75% to $1250 a year.

lol

always argued for this and i'll say it again, best thing is to close your twitter account and never look back

am trying to root out some of the cynicism and meanness and laziness it's poisoned in me

losing game

i deleted it off my phone last week (as documented upthread) but then i started going on mobile.twitter.com thru the browser app D:

damn steven dennis wins the bad twete award

similar to when i downloaded StayFocusd (free version of Freedom) on my work computer after getting in trouble for slacking/browsing online but then just started using incognito to get around to my block sites :'(

baby steps my man

if only we cld delete our bad habits.......

Nuzzel is a good way to get some of the value out of Twitter w/o having to sit on it all the time.

http://nuzzel.com

Don’t install it right now, though, something’s fucking shit up. lol

if only we cld delete our bad habits.......

― lag∞n, Wednesday, May 24, 2017 6:04 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya can someone get on this

silicon valley is

but u hav to upload yr brain to the kloud

Freedom blocks in incognito mode.

It's still glitchy though -- sometimes it just doesn't start up on my phone unless I actively open the app.

I keep deleting smoking and drinking but the notifications are still showing up